That shop guy who said to always use PVA for case bindings was off base

I was at a guild meeting in Portland last Tuesday and heard a well-known binder say you should never use starch paste for case bindings because it's not strong enough. In my experience, a 50/50 mix of PVA and wheat starch paste has held up better on my last 12 books than pure PVA ever did. The paste gives you that extra working time and the glue-down feels more forgiving on the boards. Has anyone else found that pure PVA actually leads to more warping on larger folios?

2 comments

2 Comments

claire9926d ago

Exactly, the warping issue is real with pure PVA. I had a customer bring back a 10x13 folio I did with just PVA and the boards were bowing inward after three months in a dry room. The 50/50 mix gives the paper time to move and settle before the glue sets, so the boards stay flat. Plus the paste lets you slide the spine cloth around a bit to line up the grain, which pure PVA locks too fast to fix. My last batch of nine 12x16 albums all got the 50/50 treatment and not one has shown any distortion yet.

the_miles6d ago

Honestly, claire992 just described my entire bookbinding origin story. I still have a notebook from my first year that looks like a taco because I used pure PVA and thought I was being clever. The spine cloth sliding thing is what gets me - I've had more close calls where I slapped it down, realized it was a quarter inch off, and just had to live with my shame. The 50/50 mix is basically forgiveness in a jar, which is good because my hands don't do "perfect alignment" on the first try.