Sound confusing? I'm talking about signatures that have nothing to do with signing artwork. It’s all about books!  When I was in France, I worked  for a while au pair in a girl’s boarding school. Besides my reception duties, I had the tedious, but innovative job of opening new books that arrived periodically for the library.  This American girl, an avid reader, who loved the feel of an elegantly bound hard cover book, had never given a thought to how books were made, so what was my surprise to find these new books with every other page, or every four pages, a fold instead of an edge.  While waiting for phone calls, I would whittle down a stack of newly-arrived books, carefully slicing open each fold with a knife, until the books were page-turning-worthy and ready to read. The folded pages, I learned, were called “signatures.” 

A single page folded in half gives the printer two printed pages on one sheet of paper, or folded in half twice, four smaller pages; folded in half again, eight pages; and so on up to as many as 32 pages from one sheet of paper. These are the signatures from which books are printed. The printer uses large sheets of paper and  trims the edge-folds off all at once with a machine. That makes for a “neat” book, but I like to think that the dozens of books whose pages I trimmed by hand, one by one, in a boarding school in Paris, left my mark in the world in a rather unique way.  How many students through the years will have  enjoyed some great reading that they discovered because I opened the pages for them!  Some years later, I learned how to make home-made books for gifts, using the same folding process, and sewing the signatures together at the spine with carpet thread, then pasting them into hand-made covers.  I taught some of my language students how to do this, and  I loved seeing their delight at learning how to make books just like the printer.  OK, now round up some "signatures," and lets see some cool books from you.

To sew the signatures of my hand-made books together, I used long-stitch binding. For some cool reading on the subject , check out  this Wikipedia link: long-stitch book-binding