DIY Bookbinding

FINISH UP 27

Finish Up

Your book should now look like a book. The last remaining step is to cover the unsightly

interior of the front and back cover. In addition to finishing off the book and making it look

more attractive, pasting endsheets also increases the strength of your book, acting as a

final reinforcement to draw the cover to the spine. If you were making a blank book, using

the first and last pages of the book as your endsheets (and perhaps then covering them

with a nice decorative paper to finish them off) would add the most additional strength,

because those pages are actually stitched and glued to the spine.

But since your first and last pages contain content

(including the important TOC on the first page), you’ll want

to use paper specific to this task. I decided to use MAKE’s

original wraparound cover as my endsheet for the front

cover board. Its thick stock works well for extra support

and looks quite nice. I simply trimmed it to fit (leaving the

same distance to each edge of the book) and pasted the

back of the wraparound cover to the front cover board.

Allow glue to run into the spine of the wraparound cover,

because you’ll want to use that area to cover the point

where the cover meets the spine and extend into the front

page by about ¼". This grips the endsheet to the book

block and adds reinforcement to the spine.

You’ll need to cover the back cover board in