Make a Hard Cover for Your Handmade Book

In this tutorial I’m going to show you a couple of methods for making a hard book cover with a spine. This type of cover is suitable for many different styles of book. The first example is a hard cover with a soft, flexible spine, and the second example has a hard spine.

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Links to related projects:

Fold an accordion book: https://youtu.be/ttZu9FabUQw

Expand your folded books: https://youtu.be/25GzYWkgisM

Sew your own pamphlet stitch sketchbook: https://youtu.be/25GzYWkgisM

Make a book from a single sheet of paper: https://youtu.be/25GzYWkgisM

Book block

Book cloth (you can also use decorative paper)

Bone folder

Ruler

Cutting mat

Utility knife

PVA glue

Glue brush

Scrap paper

Waxed paper

Weight or book press

Along with a book to bind, you’ll need some pieces of stiff cardboard for your cover. An important step is to check the direction that the grain runs in your cardboard. To do this, you just bend the cardboard lightly in both directions. One direction will have a little more give than the other, and your grain runs along that bend. I draw an arrow on my board in the grain direction.

I measure my book board to size using the book block I'm binding, cutting the boards slightly bigger than the book block. Once the first covering board is cut, measure and cut the second one against it so that they're exactly the same size. If you're making a book with a hard spine, use your book block to measure the width you need.

Cut your cardboard carefully with a steel ruler and a sharp utility knife, making lots of small passes with your knife instead of trying to cut through the entire thickness of the cardboard at once, as you're less likely to slip with your knife this way and the edge will be neater.

You can cover your book with decorative paper or book cloth. Book cloth is fabric that has a papery backing on it that stops any glue from seeping through.

Measure the book cloth against your pieces of cardboard and roughly cut it down to size, then place the pieces of cardboard down on the reverse side exactly where you want them to go, leaving adequate space between them for your soft spine. Trace the outline of the cardboard with a pencil. My ruler is about 3cm wide, which I find is a good width to trim the book cloth to, so I use it to cut the edges nice and neatly to the same width all the way around. If you don’t have a sharp utility knife, you can totally use a pair of scissors for this step. I like the knife and ruler method because it’s a bit quicker and neater.

When you’ve cut your cloth neatly down to size, it’s time to cut the corners so that you don’t have a lot of bulk in the way when you stick the edges down. There are a few different ways to do this, and I’m going to show you two slightly different methods in this tutorial. In this first example, I folded up the cloth all the way around the lines I marked at the edges of the cardboard, then I cut away just outside the squares at the corners that the fold lines made. It’s important not to cut all the way up to the line right in the corner. You need to leave at least a few millimetres of breathing space in the cloth so that it properly covers the edge of the cardboard at the corner.

With this method for cutting away the corners, there will be quite a bit of overlap with the cloth in the corners. This is fine if you’re using quite thick paper in your book, but if you’re using thinner paper you might want to use the method with less overlap that I’ll be showing you on the next cover.

When you’re ready to stick your boards down, cover both pieces of cardboard with a generous amount of PVA glue. When you stick the cardboard in place, the grain should run in the same direction as the spine, from the top to the bottom of the book. It’s important to keep the grain consistent like this so that your book cover won’t warp or bend in opposition to the spine. This is why I like to write on the board which direction the grain runs, and I glue up the other side of the cardboard so I can still read it.

The main difference between making a cover with a soft spine and a hard spine is that you need to leave adequate room for the extra piece of cardboard, leaving space to fold the front and back cover at a 90º angle.

To estimate how much space you need to leave, use the covers as spacers when you're laying out the book and mark everything in place with a pencil. When it comes time to glue the covers down, stick them in place against your drawn out guide, then close the covers and check that you’ve left enough room. While the glue is still wet, it’s pretty easy to shuffle the covers along if you need to make extra room. You’ll see me doing this in the video a little bit when I stick the covers down.

I chose to cut away the corners for this cover after I'd stuck down the boards. The method I used for this second book has less bulk at the corners when everything has been glued up. To construct your cover this way, make a couple of light folds at right angles at one corner of the book, then use these folds as a guide to make a 45º angle across the corner. Cut away just inside the edge of the triangle, again making sure to leave a few millimetres of book cloth at the corner so that there is just enough cloth to cover the edge of the book. Use the little triangle of book cloth that you cut away as a template to cut the three remaining corners.

When it’s time to paste up the edges, start with the longer sides. Put some scrap paper under the edges as you go so that you don’t get glue all over your workspace. Apply a very generous amount of glue to one edge then fold it over using a bone folder to keep everything as crisp and sharp as possible. You’ll probably get some glue bleeding out when you stick down the edges. This is totally fine, just keep a clean cloth handy to wipe any glue off your hands and bone folder so that it doesn’t get on the outside of the book.

The next step is to glue up the sides. To finish the corners properly, you just tuck in the tiny bit of cloth at each corner with the pointy end of your bone folder before folding up and sticking down the short edges.

To make a soft spine, use a piece of decorative paper to reinforce the spine on the inside of the book. Trimmed it so that it overhangs the spine gap by at least a couple of centimetres on each side, and so that it’s just a little bit shorter than the height of the book, then stick it in place with pva glue and bone folder.

When you’re done sticking everything down, flip the cover over and run over the front with the edge of your bone folder to make sure everything is flat and stuck down well.

To cover the inside of the spine in the second book, I used a second piece of book cloth in a contrasting colour. It’s unlikely that this will be super visible when the book is finished, but it helps reinforce and add strength to the spine.

When you’re ready, wrap your book covers in some waxed paper to stop any excess glue getting where you don’t want it to, and place your covers under some books and weights, or in a book press, to dry overnight. When you take them out the next day they’ll be dry and flat, and you can bind your book blocks inside.

When you're book covers are dry, you can use them to bind any type of book block. In the examples pictured, I've shown how to stick an accordion book into place, and what the hard cover spine book will look like with a more traditional book block.

And that’s it, that’s how you make a hard cover with a spine for your bookbinding project!