Took me 14 books to realize I was folding my signatures backwards

So I've been binding books for about three years now, mostly just cheap practice copes I pick up at estate sales around Baltimore. Last month I'm working on this 400 page rebind for a friend, and I notice the pages feel weird when I flip through it. Like the grain is fighting me every time. I figure it's the paper, right? Cheap book, cheap paper. Then I'm watching a video from this old guy in Vermont who runs a one man shop, and he folds his signatures with the grain running parallel to the spine. I go check mine. Every single one I've ever done, I had the grain going the other way. Three years. Probably 14 finished books sitting on my shelf with pages that want to twist. I sat there at my bench just staring at this stack of folded paper feeling like a total idiot. The weird part is nobody ever mentioned it, not one tutorial, and the books still held together fine, they just never lay flat right. Now I'm second guessing every finished piece on my shelf. Has anyone else had a basic step they got wrong for way too long without knowing?

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blair_taylor1mo ago

Grain direction isn't some universal law, it's a preference that got turned into a rule because one guy wrote a book in the 70s and everyone copied him. Plenty of binders fold across the grain on purpose, especially with machine made paper where the grain can be faint anyway. Your 14 books held together and opened fine, that's the actual test. I've got rebinds from the 80s sitting on my shelf with cross grain folds that are still going strong after 40 years. The pages wanting to twist a little is annoying, sure, but it's not the same as doing it wrong.

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