The Pricking Cradle

Whenever I think those words it's always Bill Bailey's deranged evil genius character that says them, grinning maniacally and rolling his eyes - and his Rs - whilst relishing the sheer perversity that such a Kafkaesque apparatus should exist.

I promised I'd tell you how to bind books - just in case you haven't searched YouTube and found out for yourself - so, here's a snippet.

You need a fair amount of kit to bind a book, most of it fairly simple, but there are one or two jigs and contraptions necessary for various processes. One of these is the above mentioned pricking cradle.

There are several ways to make the holes in the spines of the signatures so you can stitch them together into a block. Whoa, hold up there Awa Rich. Them's jargoon words. 'Splain the meaning of them if you please. 

 If you look carefully at the top or bottom end of a book, you'll see that it's made from lots of smaller booklets, called signatures, which are sewn together to form a block. The spine is where the pages are attached to one another. This is much easier to see if you have an old book that's falling apart.

I don't know if this is standard practice as I'm picking this up as I go along, but the signatures I've made have 4 sheets of paper folded in half to make 8 leaves or 16 sides or pages. The folded sheets are placed one inside another to create the signature and holes are poked along the fold - with a pointy thing - so the signatures can be stitched together. I'll show you how to do that later.

The pricking cradle is just a convenient way to hold the pages together when poking the holes in the fold. I used to do this by holding the signature, open in the middle, against a cork sanding block, then pushing a bodkin through the folded paper into the cork block. This worked fine but it's not very accurate and sometime the holes would go awry and would not always line up with other signatures. It still worked, as this isn't precision engineering, but it's useful to have a way to maintain consistency. 

The pricking cradle holding a signature

You can't see it in this photograph but the two boards don't quite meet at the bottom of the V. There's a narrow gap so the point of the bodkin can pierce the paper.

The whole thing was made from MDF and bits of timber I scavenged in the street or bins. I bought the steel and plastic brackets that hold it together from a DIY store, conveniently situated at the end of the street where I live.

I would have liked to do a better job but I left all my woodworking tools up north when I fled to London. I have a saw, a screwdriver, an X-Acto knife and a Dremel (it's not actually a Dremel but a no name thing I bought in 1980 for drilling printed circuit boards, but Dremel has become like Hoover - so you know what I mean if I say Dremel. I don't have to explain You just did Awa Rich) - oh, and a Leatherman. That's my toolkit.