Camille Fayseler — Hand bookbinding and | camillefayseler.com
When a glued paperback spine is enough, and when a sewn block in a hard case earns the extra hours it costs.
Perfect binding is the glued paperback method: the spine edge of the gathered leaves is coated with adhesive and wrapped in a cover. There is no folding into signatures, no thread and no boards, which makes it fast for documents that will be read a handful of times.
Case binding is the sewn hardcover route described across this site: sheets folded into signatures — forty sheets for 160 pages — sewn on four tapes with waxed 18/3 linen, then cased into 2.0–3.2 mm greyboard covered in cloth. The sewing itself takes 10–20 minutes and the casing 5–8, but measuring, board cutting and the 20–40 minute rest under weight stretch the job into hours.
The difference shows up in service life. A sewn block hangs from its thread: each kettle stitch locks a signature to its neighbour, and waxed linen does not depend on an adhesive film staying flexible. A perfect-bound spine is exactly that adhesive film, and when it embrittles the leaves fall.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Adhesives still matter in a sewn book — at the case, the endpapers and the spine lining — which is why archival glue lines are held at pH 7.5–9.5, inside the 4.5–9.5 zone paper tolerates. The sewn structure means the book does not die if a glue line does.
Choose perfect binding for thin, short-lived or high-volume work where an hour per copy is absurd. Choose the sewn case for anything meant to open flat, carry weight, or sit on a shelf for decades — journals, photo blocks, reference copies.
If you take the sewn route, the sewing walkthrough on this site covers the order station by station, and the board and cloth page gives the allowance figures the case depends on.
Further reading