BOOKMAKING 5

Bookbinders became more and more extravagant
in their materials. In 1583, Henry III of France
was forced to decree that civilians must not use
more than four diamonds in decorating a single
volume. The nobility were prohibited from using
more than five for this purpose.
Crojjrt &• Dunlaf

Cutting Departmekt

The sheets are cut by machine and are stacked and loaded on the

truck by the workers.
The early printers were their own binders.
Later the binding of books was handed over to
stationers. William Caxton, the first English
printer, bound his books in covers of tooled
leather. His decorative patterns were usually
made up of diagonal lines, the diamond shapes
formed by the lines being filled by a dragon form.
In the sixteenth century bookbinders began to use



6 ELEMENTARY INDUSTRIAL ARTS

damask, satin, and velvet. Bindings of to-day are
of paper, cloth, and leather. The cloth binding is an
English invention which came into use about 1 832.
There are two stages in the modern process of
bookmaking. The first includes the writing of



The flat sheets are cut and folded into signatures by this machine.
the manuscript and the arrangements between
the publisher and author; the second, the overr
hauling of the manuscript by the printer's reader
and the printing of the corrected manuscript.
In books of usual size, thirty-two pages are
printed at one time on a single sheet. The types



BOOKMAKING 7

are so arranged on the press that when the sheet
is cut and folded the pages follow one another in
numerical order. The thirty-two-page sheet is
cut into two sections called signatures.
The signature gatherer is almost human; it picks up the signatures
in the order in which they are to appear in the book.
