Question about why nobody talks about grain direction on the spine board

I was at the Central Library bindery here in Kansas City last Saturday and watched a visiting conservator cringe as a student glued a spine board with the grain running sideways, saying it will warp within 3 seasons regardless of how nice the covering looks.

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ninah101d ago

The real mystery is why the student got to touch a spine board at all before somebody taught them the one rule that matters. That conservator cringing is every experienced binder watching a newbie make a mistake that takes 3 seasons to show up, and by then the book is back on the shelf and nobody knows why it's potato chipping. Grain on a spine board has to run parallel to the spine, head to tail, same as you'd want on the text block boards. Run it sideways and the board fights the covering every time the humidity changes, so the whole spine bows out like a banana. It takes a few years but it always shows, and the worst part is you can't fix it without tearing the whole binding apart.

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