Adam Savage Learns How Old Books Were Made!

hey everybody Adam Savage in the collection part of my cave this time because that's germane to the subject of this video among the objects I collect movie props and pieces of computer history and medical history and other strange tools and things I also pay attention to books this is I think the oldest book in my whole Library collection this is an 1881 Treatise on Billiards that is in French I picked this up I pick this up my dad ended up buying this for me back when I was 19 and playing pools three or four hours a day we were at a rare Bookseller and he showed me this and I I drooled over it not on it but my my dad ended up buying this for me for my birthday I also have in my maker Library a couple of excellent volumes one into a practical carpentry this was published in 1912 I became aware of these incredible books by visiting the White House wood shop back in 2015 books are among the things that I collect and I I am not alone there throughout history weirdos like me have collected stuff and eventually put their collections on display it's called a museum I hope one day to turn this collection into an interactive Museum because I love sharing these things with other people and talking about their tales and every major city and even many minor cities have some wonderful museums devoted to highly esoteric subject matter lovingly described by its curators and its docents and San Francisco is no exception and I recently got to visit the wonderful and beautiful Museum of book binding and learn all about the machines and the iterative process of the Industrial Revolution learning how to print books at scale it was a fascinating journey and I can't wait to show it to you Madeline tell me where we are tell me this is this is how book binding used to work is that right um basically the the big noise in book binding comes around 400 a common era when they start sewing what are called signatures these gathers together and they have to sew them through the fold in order okay no no and so people don't I don't know if people realize that all books are built this way right with with folded leaves that are joined in this is collection a signature and it's a sheet of paper that can have up to 64 pages of course you have to machine fold that because it's insanely thick right uh but for in most cases this is a an octavo it is sort of the standard building block of a book so you have this folded thing and you want to sew it to the other folded things and keep them in order this pre the whole point of a book is protect the information that's inside it right so what you would do is these supports are there to unify the package and give strength to it so you go into the whole edit the far end come out the next hole which is here and usually they would do it in sort of an orientation like this and you could go sometimes around several times depending on how large the book was going to be and how much support you wanted to give it so the more support the more times you would go yeah and then back into that same hole pull it snugly and then and you always go to the outside of where you're sewing you go to the front yeah and then come back to where are you and so these were individually tied every time you were making a book and they're teaching by these guys yep and at the end you sew back through when somebody had to do this as a job how many signatures do you know what their numbers they were trying to hit were um well if you were doing this for a job you just used up all the signatures in the book right um a client would come to a book binder with a big stack of paper which he had bought from a printer or a book seller and say bind my book and every book was bespoke so you would not only say bind my book but I want it covered in this kind of leather oh wow I want an edge treatment or I don't want an edge treatment an edge treatment is there to keep dust and bugs and things like that out of the paper because paper is vulnerable um how are they used to metallicize the edge of paper gilding is really good because one you can slide the dust off it or the tweenie or whoever is doing the dusting can do that you're looking at a war where they're burning things all the time to cook and delight and to heat so there's dust there's Ash there's Schmutz so you could wipe it off but also it's difficult if water falls on it it will beat up before it soaks in and bookworms are not adorable children bookworms are actually very destructive so you want to keep those out so and then at the end I just do a little Kettle Stitch here come through and I'm ready to add and then you go back the other way and then you cut them off and you use these uh to tie on the cover oh wait and so these would be those ridges exactly oh okay those are not a feature those are those are not a bug those are a feature you want them there aside from anything else because they advertise the strength and durability that it has been hand hand sewn and that it's a sturdy book with lots of attachments I had no idea well they don't you know most people look at a book and it's like looking at an apple it's just it's a thing well also your definition right at the front really rocked me I had not thought of a book as a machine for protecting the information inside yep it's a jar it's a jar okay so this is is this is like the oldest uh industrialized book binding um this starts around mostly and and this is all European but okay right there are other techniques in other countries uh but this starts around four or five hundred uh that early yeah um wax tablets um courtesies which are like this but it was one oh and he just got one um okay this is this is a really early book and what they did was take Papyrus or Vellum or something and Tack it down the center those are just switched through sewn through with leather yep leather and the nice thing about this leather is then you can protect it but the problem with this is that if you have an 800 page book that's it's gonna be like ah it's gonna be like your wallet when you have too much stuff in it and this is how books were before people came up with yes so book binding is a thousand year long process of trial and error and Improvement incrementally and each time they come up with something that's like oh hey this is cool let's do it this way but because it's a guild trade kind of every guilt in every country comes to the same conclusions but they don't share you don't want them to know what you do it because then they'll know and they might take your business and that would be bad so what is the progression from this process what is the next natural oh in terms of the book itself the next thing you got to do is you have to round the back because it's actually thicker here with all the thread running through this oh right all the folds and there this is not a great example because it's such a small piece so what you would do is put it they love their hammers there and what you want is that kind of mushroom shaped that's sort of that yeah that business going on and then and again that's a feature that's part of the process that holds it nice and tight and you also want to push the last signature on each end out to make a resting place for the back of your cover that's called rounding and backing right and what you want is something like that which is which is my understanding of how books are right that's like that's exactly what they should feel like exactly it's that sort of mushroom-shaped thing all everything in a book has a real reason it's so cool once you've done that then you want to take off all those Folds oh right so where it's been folded at the top and bottom it needs to if you want to get in there gotcha there was a sort of period I think it's mostly Victorian where people were actually cutting their own their own because nobody had ever seen the insides of their beautiful virgin pages but that if you do that you can't Guild the tops right uh there are other things that you can't do so it in most cases the binder would trim this is a plow oh my God that's beautiful Wicked shark I can see oh my gosh I I have learned this not this particular one but one cell when I was moving it and I made the mistake of trying to cut it and it returned the favor oh yeah so it's a plane for the edge it's basically and they originally used draw knives but um this works a lot better and you would only cut off one or two or three pages at a time any more than that and you risk tearing the book and you don't want to do that because it's not your book so you would be advancing the blade with just past just a little bit too much faster that's like 15 000 yes it's very small and if you're doing all three edges which you probably are you go through your 15 pages of 15 000 pages and then you flip it and you keep going but at the end you have a fully open book now if you're gonna do an edge treatment you're going to use something like this this is a um oh that's so smooth well that's because I have demonstrated this I have scraped it down wow oh we have scraped it down a whole lot but the idea is to get this as smooth as a baby's butt as my father used to say you would have put talc or something like that between the pages beforehand then you tighten this to the point where allows them to settle yeah allows them to settle but it also means that when you open it you can maybe get the pages to because paper is fiber and water and if you really screw it together it may not come apart again and you don't want that to happen gotcha and then you would put a mild adhesive on sprinkle on some Armenian Bowl which is a red clay and you do that mostly just because the gold will look better yeah that's always the case gold always has a red underlay because on white it looks a little apologetic and thin and if you're paying for gold there should be gold so this is the advanced step for gilding these for gilding and then you put down your um Gold Leaf which is insanely thin and you basically just kind of this is it they are frequently referred to as agates even though they were not always Agate it had to be something with that kind of level of Polish and smoothness oh my goodness that's beautiful is this original um I don't know yeah what a thing that's the largest Furniture I've ever seen well you know when you're working on big yeah you know I can see and every one of these hand machines is so beefy for being able to apply the Force and and this was your livelihood so you got to be pretty fast at it you know you weren't sort of I'm kind of going slowly because it's not my livelihood and I don't want to break anything but if you were doing this for a living you needed to turn around fast so you've now got a book that's sort of like this those are the chords right and it's been around there's been some glue put on and then you would put on a covering right and in most cases this was in the early days it was leather you could cover it with Vellum you could cover it with fabric Queen Elizabeth's the first supposedly liked velvet which is why a lot of the books from her Court look like hell because all of the nap has been worned off and it just doesn't look good leather holds up a lot better and there were all sorts of different kinds of leather that they used yes including human skin uh which is boring um unless you were the human concern so they would put glue on they would Pare down the edges really thin so that when you fold it over you wouldn't get a ridge right right and then you would put your leather on and massage it into all of those spaces and sit there with tools and and tightening it up and making sure that there was a hinge spot when they dampen the leather the glue dampen the leather ah okay so while the glue is setting you're doing your bird you're doing this at this point you're possibly used in paste instead of glue because the Paste can be undone and it doesn't set up quite as fast the glue was collagen glue was made from Bones and things like that smelled a high heaven and set up much faster so the the ability to undo like I know I watch a lot of you luthiers on YouTube and there's a real ethos to like not use white glue because it can't be undone but use rabbit skin and other glutes things like that because it allows you to get that wrinkle out of there and to fix it later if you have to be yeah actually with paste you can dampen it and take it off the board if you have to so this is one being disassembled yeah okay and it's Sky The Edge is super super really Ah that's a technical term it is yeah it's such a good word it is such a good word it's almost Automotive yes you finally got your book and if you are you know sort of the person who does not believe in ungodly show you take your nice thought book home but if you are the Duke of something you want an arming Mark or decoration and this is where book binding was a badly paid profession interesting it was at the end of the process in publishing when I worked in publishing the last people in line were always the ones who had to make up for the you know other people being dilatory and things like that but this if you were good this was where you made your money really the the embossing the the embossing and tooling because it's all hand done we will pretend that this is heated we'll pretend that that is heat if I stamp on there and it is now a heated tool and I stamp on the leather and leather is pretty soft so it will take a hand impression pretty oh wow okay so let's say that's just a blind emboss there's no color I then go through and I paint in a little bit of glare which is the adhesive I used for gilding before it's egg whites and then I put a piece of gold leaf over it I reheat my tool and I come down in exactly the same place yeah really if you have the eye hand coordination to do this properly so that's how you got foil under the same place yep and that's just as laborious as I would have thought it can't be that laboratory and it's also it's not just laborious if you are off by a millimeter it's going to look blurry and this is late in the process you don't have the luxury of screwing but you screw it up but this is all done by hand that is all done my hand all done by hand isn't that gorgeous and so in each of these they've taken a a a stamp they've impressed the leather and then used the impression to put glue and then they've come back and added the gold leaf so this is how books are made until about the 1820s okay all Jane Austen's books were made this way bespoke one at a time well by that time there were also editions but they were made each book was made by hand uh and they were very plainly covered if you were buying them you know for a library or something like that so the big shift to the Industrial Revolution comes when they break the um process into two parts there is the text block right and there is the cover so while somebody is making the text block somebody else in a whole other shop perhaps is making the covers that will go on it and that's a big advancement formerly it was all done in the same it's huge they also start using um pasteboard and cloth in preference to leather which was more expensive and to some extent more fiddly they also go to a a quicker and nominally easier and certainly cheaper form of sewing which is foreign and what they do for that is to this looks very much like the other machine it does until you know they cut with saws oh it's an actual divot okay yeah so you go in as you did with the other at the end right but now those chords won't show through the leather Cup right they won't show through and they you just go right over it and trap it oh so it's much faster it's way faster um if you look at the image above of the Harper Brothers Factory in 19 In 1855 the women who are sewing on the fourth floor are expected to do 200 Books A Day 400 stacks of signatures per day yep what and 200 books per day yeah that that and that's they were considered book binding professionals um in 10 hours that's 20 books an hour yeah that's a book every three minutes I did this as a demonstration at the Dickens Fair uh one year and I think I got up to seven in an hour in an hour that's impressive I would have starved so fast so it's the same thing the trouble is it's not as sturdy a binding uh and it's possible to pull those cords right out so like every advancement there are trade-offs yeah and the books are being made faster but they're not being made better necessarily they're just being made so so this was a huge deal and when does this when does this advancement come about not for another 60 years of the 1880s basically an Irish American immigrant named David McConnell Smite invents this this is the first commercially viable book sewing machine the Smythe number three I will see all the thread it looks like a Serger sewing machine it's it's nuts you put the page on here they're a little sharp Wicked barbs that come up and punch holes oh okay so it's an automatic hole punching yeah automatic hole punching at the same time that this thing is moving up and around here and there are needles that are fastened to those over there that oh and I see the shape of that needle is almost like the shape of the of the thread Grabber and sewing machine it comes like that yes and then another needle comes out and throw uh puts another uh Stitch through that Loop this retracts it is an insane each thing a piece of thread comes through gets grabbed another one comes through and then it's and all of this while you're adding more to this as it's turning backed up to here so you get this sheet there and the next one comes over and up and gets stitched to it to it oh wow so one of these could do I think 56 they boasted 56 books a minute yes what one of these could do 2 000 a day which would replace 10 of the women on the sewing floor really amazing this is all I mean this is all pre us all agreeing on what inches are so everything on this had to be produced in the same Factory yep every last bit it's crazy the patent drawings for these are just oh I'm just looking at mind label over here this is really lovely 1879 1887 all the different patents for it and this must have been in incredibly high demand well I imagine so I mean I don't know that I've actually read anything specifically about it but yeah once you could do this why would you want to be you know doing it by hand and all of a sudden books are available to many more people because the process has been made this whole process it's like by the 1880s the people who are making the books could afford to buy books oh until then it wasn't really yeah it was getting better and there are you know a book is not always the same kind of book you could be uh you could have a dime novel or you could have one of those elaborate sets of Dickens on the mantelpiece to show everybody how erudite you were the the amount of money that you had dictated a lot of what you could oh right but and in America particularly because you've got a growing emphasis on education and seen as the the key to bettering yourself it's a huge thing we want moral education so there's a lot of pamphlets and and books about how to be more Godly and virtuous and facts and just all this stuff that's just out there does being a we've lived through a couple of sort of media Paradigm shifts in the last 40 50 years and I'm curious if studying the origins of book binding gives you an interesting perspective on the the level of emotionality around these Paradigm shifts I mean because I would imagine that there were people complaining that there were too many books going to too many people back then oh well I mean certainly in the earliest days um books are not only to protect the information but to protect the information from it falling into the hands of the wrong people the Common People the common people who wouldn't know how to use all this right important education so the expense was a barrier to entry yeah um and all they also they locked books onto shelves to keep them from walking away oh really but they were very valuable they were exceptionally valuable but also you just again you didn't want somebody else to know what you knew because then they'd know and you can't have that so then a lot of these machines must be sort of the Apex of sequestered information from each Factory or inventor that produced it I suspect terms but I suspect so certainly within the guilds um you did not want the guy in the next Guild over to know all your Trade Secrets because that gave you a competitive advantage and yeah so um no we're standing next to this gigantic thing which looks like architectural but it's actually the operating lever of this beautiful machine oh this is the Palmer and Ray Palmer and Ray was a San Francisco company oh they were yeah so this is a Native Son uh and they did not give up on beauty oh look at that there's even a little oh my goodness the little filigree and here and on the sides the whole thing is beautiful as well as deadly you move it forward is this and that's just the clamp for holding the books yeah and and that's the blade which is it looks still pretty plenty sharp now I want you to move because I don't want to hit you in the head I did that badly but are you kidding that was amazing well usually I can just you know do it very smoothly but I started out badly but and bookbinders have always sold the scrap back to the paper mills I just I I can't get enough of how and so when was this being produced uh this is between 19 between 1884 and 1892. okay that's when Palmer and Ray was and there are lots of other Guillotines they were not the only manufacturer but I mean these castings are so surpassingly lovely like just I love all the unnecessary but beautiful detail absolutely okay so what is the next step next step we have now basically turned out a fully bound text block okay it will have our rounder backer isn't here but the back would have been rounded and backed well I think it's worth letting the audience understand too that the the the the sewing allows the book to be opened fully fully like perfect binding you've heard it crack when you open it up but this really allowed you to both read the book and all the way in yeah okay so this is so this is your text block now they have to make the case and the case is something like this it's just basically cloth covered cardboard with a hinge with a hinge to the back um up to this point the way that they were this stuff is tougher than it looks um anybody who's ever tried to cut cardboard with it yep knife or cut myself doing it oh yeah so instead of that what they would do is somebody would come to the factory in the morning and set up the cuts and you would that's the holder and that's the shear and it just cuts through it like butter it's beautiful so that some guy who is operating this machine who called himself a book binder although probably he didn't have any of the other craft would sit there just lopping pieces of paper wow all day to make covers and just making just cutting cardboard to size yes now by this time by the I think the first machine to actually add to the decorative side of it was the Imperial uh Armin press which came in about 1890 1832 I am boggling my numbers it just seems like the whole 19th century was this this fever of improvement for book binding yes it's well it's that Victorian spiral of upward Improvement which shows up in all sorts of things right right but so in order to make it prettier you want some sort of decorative element right right sure and so they discovered that this stuff is way too hard to use a hand stamp on like leather is nice and soft and soft and agreeable it will do whatever you want but this fabric on the cardboard no is not interested and the fabric it took them about 10 years to get the fabric right because at first they used unsized Fabric and the glue would seep through and then it would be icky uh so it took them a while to figure out what Fabrics were worked best but this is a sized Fabric and they would use a machine like this you would put an embossing plate with the shape you wanted embossed in there yeah yeah and then put it in pull you get the emboss that's your operating that's your operating lever puts a tremendous amount of pressure and this is this is heat probably it's the a heated iron bars that they would put in there so they would sometimes it was gas sometimes it again some sort of gas flame sometimes it was heated iron bars later it became electric but you needed a source of heat wow so I love this idea right this is pre-electricity so if you want heat you just have to heat something up and bring it over here yeah what else also I mean and this is sort of a really Advanced version of the oldest kind of book press right well or that that's actually a copy press and I could do a whole oh okay diversion on that one let's not okay but this is all presses are I mean the the printing press works essentially the same way and before that there were presses that were pressing all sorts of other things Gutenberg did not invent the printing press he just invented movable type made of metal because the Chinese already had multiple type made of porcelain do you break anybody's heart about this one um Gutenberg was a smart guy I don't wanna you know downplay his love we came to the Museum of bookbind and get some dirt on goodburg oh yeah man he was also he didn't pay his bills oh which is why we know about the printing press because his backer took him to court won the press and took it all over Germany doing essentially a look what I've got Road Show and Gutenberg had wanted to keep it all for himself because then everybody else would know would come to one place yeah so so that's how the printing press spreads is basically yeah is Gutenberg parsimonious and won't pay his bills yeah well it costs a lot of money to do all this stuff yeah borrowing money it was not so timely about paying it back so this machine which is actually kind of a an outlier both printed and foiled and embossed so it could produce a cover like that in the fabric yeah is this a fabric cover yeah wow wow because it's so um it's so smooth well because it's a sizing ah right right right is this considered sort of like a garish kind of cover by this time this is these were not really garish um there was a whole spellings of women who were book Finding uh designers and this is Margaret Armstrong which you can tell because she signed all her books look at that and um if you if you are into this sort of thing there are a number of wonderful designers this is something that a woman could do who was middle class needed a little money but she was not working out of the house it was Art so that was okay I love the fact that there were artists exhibiting their their aesthetic into the covers and the the Art Nouveau you can look at we had a a show a few years ago about um our collection of Victorian Publishers bindings uh and you can watch both the technology change and the aesthetic change uh the bellapock covers are amazing and gorgeous and fiddly and could not have been done if they hadn't reached that point and technology right so there's a whole lot of stuff that sort of stands on each other's back it's such a um I I hadn't thought of I mean of course it makes sense it's such an iterative process each of these improvements allows more books to be gotten more people are are paying for them that allows the industry to grow oh yeah definitely this is really really thrilling Madeline thank you so much for walking me through this oh you're well obviously I kind of like this it is such a deep well I'm going to come back and get the the the the the Press speech oh yeah I can do the whole press

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 362,525

Keywords: tested, adam savage, adam savage tested, museum, museum tours, bookbinding, book making

Id: uauXBgeImFc

Length: 32min 3sec (1923 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023