BOOKS AND BOOKBINDING 



831 



BOOKS AND BOOKBINDING 



EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK 

 Egyptian hieroglyphics. 4. 



Picture writing. 



prospered, for the American printers, instead 

 of importing the books they wished to sell, 

 would simply reprint as many copies as they 

 wished. As for paying the foreign author or 

 publisher, no one dreamed of such a thing. 

 After the War of Secession, although there 

 was still no copyright law, there was so much 

 rivalry among the American publishers as to 

 who should get out some new book that had 

 been published in England, that they began 

 offering large sums of money for advance 

 sheets. Boston, New York and Philadelphia 

 became and have remained the leading pub- 

 lishing centers of the United States, but Chi- 

 cago has gained on them of late years. 

 Some Statistics. Between the years 1825 



and 1840, about 1,115 books were published in 

 the United States. In 1880, with a population 

 of 50,000,000 people, not more than 2,000 books 

 were published. In 1910 there were published 

 about 13,360 books; in 1915, about 11,250. 

 More books of fiction were published than any 

 other kind. The production of school books 

 during the entire nineteenth century and since 

 the beginning of the twentieth has been re- 

 markable. Webster's speller sold at the rate 

 of more than a million copies a year for many 

 successive years. School books, prayer books, 

 Bibles and hymn books have sold in enormous 

 numbers. In 1910 the total number of copies 

 of books and pamphlets published in the United 

 States was more than 161,000,000. 



Bookbinding 



This name is applied to the process of put- 

 ting the printed pages of a book between 

 covers. Once an art, or more properly, a handi- 

 craft, it has grown into a mammoth industry. 

 Instead of the old-time patient workman who 

 spent days on a single book, we have to-day 

 machines which turn out 10,000 bound books 

 in a day. Books are still bound, and beauti- 

 fully bound, by hand, but the real triumph 

 of our age is to be able to print and bind books 

 not by the dozen or hundred, but by the 

 thousand or hundred thousand, so that by 

 increasing output and decreasing cost they may 

 come within the reach of every one. America 

 leads the world in the invention and use of 

 machinery for binding books. In an up-to-date 

 bindery nearly all the work is done by ma- 

 chines of American invention, and some of 

 the machines do not even require an operator. 

 Bookbinding includes the entire process of 



putting the book between covers folding, gath- 

 ering and stitching the sheets, making and 

 decorating the cover, and fastening it to the 

 book. 



Folding. The book pages come from the 

 printers in great sheets, sometimes as many 

 as sixty-four pages to the sheet, and so arranged 

 that when the sheet is folded and cut, the pages 

 will appear in the proper order. The first step 

 is to fold these sheets, and cut them into signa- 

 tures, which usually contain sixteen pages. 

 This is done by an ingenious machine which 

 requires no operator. All that human hands 

 do is to place on a sort of shelf at one side 

 of the machine a great pile of the printed 

 sheets, to turn on the electricity, and to remove 

 the piles of folded sheets, or "signatures," which 

 are dropped into a rack at the other end. 



Gathering. If there are to be inserts of any 

 sort in the book they are now put in by hand. 



