Camille Fayseler — Hand bookbinding and | camillefayseler.com
Which greyboard, which cloth weight and how much spine allowance — worked from the sewn block you measured, not the pile you folded.
Every case measurement starts at the sewn spine. Sewing adds 3–5% to the closed width of the block — ten sheets of 100 gsm paper measure about 3.5 mm folded and about 3.6 mm sewn — so the first rule is to measure after the last kettle stitch, with the tapes in place.
Boards come next. Case boards for hardcovers are 2.0–3.2 mm greyboard; heavier blocks and larger formats take the thicker end, small notebooks the thinner. The board thickness is not just a feel choice — it feeds directly into the spine allowance.
The case-in allowance on the spine equals the cloth thickness plus three times the board thickness. With a 2.4 mm board and cloth of about 0.7 mm, that is roughly 7 mm of board-derived turn-in plus the cloth — about 7.7 mm in all. Skimp it and the case grips the spine; overdo it and the hinge goes slack.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Cloth runs 0.6–1.0 mm thick and is adhered with PVA at roughly 300 g/m² — enough to wet the weave without soaking the board. Once the cloth is down, the case rests 20–40 minutes under weight; only then are the tapes trimmed and the book nipped.
Decide early between tight back and hollow back. In the hollow-back construction the block is set 8–12 mm in from the head and tail board edges, leaving the spine hollow so that opening strains the case, not the sewing.
The finishing materials follow the same discipline: endpapers of 120–160 gsm book-weight paper, glue lines held at pH 7.5–9.5 — inside the 4.5–9.5 safe zone for paper — and a headband on a 2–3 mm core whose seam sits 6–8 mm inside the trimmed cover edge. Casing the block takes 5–8 minutes once all of this is measured and cut; the sewing walkthrough on this site gets the block ready for it.
Further reading