t has been the dream of writers like myself to have our work encased between two hard covers. Although we’re told not to judge books that way, there is something about the heft of a hardcover binding that makes a book real, puts it on the same shelf as the leather-bound classics, hints at importance and immortality in a way that periodicals, e-books, and even paperbacks simply can’t. My first book came out this past spring. I’ve been thinking about hardbacks and what binds them ever since.

SCROLL DOWN From the very beginning, the written word has been protected for both artistic and practical reasons. Babylonians protected their clay tablets inside clay jars. Early Egyptians saved their rolls of papyrus in wooden cases, which were sometimes plain and sometimes carved into elaborate statues of the pharaoh. And both ancient Greeks and Romans did their writing on papyrus scrolls.

Individual scrolls varied, but a typical roll measured 10 inches or so across and 20 or 30 feet in length. Homer’s Iliad consisted of approximately a dozen volumes—some 300 continuous feet of papyrus. (The text on those scrolls, unlike that on the public proclamations we normally associate with scrolls, was written in lines parallel to the long edge of the scroll, and arranged in columns that more or less correspond with the dimensions of the modern magazine or book-text blocks. A reader unrolled the scrolls and scanned the text left to right, rolling up the already-read text in the left hand while unrolling the yet-to-be-read text from the right.)

For storage, most scrolls were rolled up and tied with string or straps. But especially valuable scrolls were slipped into cloth sleeves, or rolled tightly and packed upright into stiff cases that resembled tall hat boxes.

During the early centuries of the Christian Era, a flat, hinged tablet or a bound manuscript called a “codex” gradually replaced the scroll. The codex was made by folding flat sheets of papyrus or parchment, sewing these pages together along one edge, and covering the whole with stiffened paper or wood.

Sometimes wrapped in rough, untooled, white leather, the codex emerged as the forerunner to what we now regard as the modern book. Libraries, whose collections had previously been rolled up, would never be the same.

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PRESSED INTO SERVICE With Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press in the mid-15th century, the issue of binding pages became more complex. Binding still had to be done by hand—a labor-intensive, expensive part of the process—and it was too big an investment for publishers to bind all of the copies they printed. Most printed copies were instead sold in cheap covers made of vellum (animal skin) or paper. Customers were then free to have their copies re-bound in whatever style and material they could afford.

Stationer-booksellers often kept a separate workshop for binding the manuscripts they sold. Those simple “trade” bindings, as they came to be known, were typically made of leather panels stretched, folded, and glued over stiff cardboard. Eventually, tanned, brown leather replaced white leather as the cover of choice, in part because the darker material could be decorated and tooled with gilt. Master bookbinders set up their own shops and offered specialized service for wealthier buyers. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European collectors counted bookbinders among their stable of tradesmen, in the way we might have a favorite plumber or doctor or accountant today. It was common for a book buyer to have an entire collection bound in the same material and style by one bookbinder, which gave uniformity and grace to a home library.

Though hand-tooled leather bindings were the most popular, the range of binding style and materials was astonishing: silver and gold encrusted with jewels; damask, velvet, bright cotton, and calicoes; and floral and marbled papers embossed with precious metals. Restrained, dignified leather casings became known as “English” bindings. More elaborate, flashier bindings—called “French bindings,” no matter their country of origin—could be amazingly complex, bearing intricate designs of interlaced fleurs-de-lis, scrolls, bands, and ribbons, often gold-tooled and inlaid with different shades of leather. The binding of a book was considered a distinct part of the book arts. In many cases a book’s binding was more expensive and valuable than the contents it protected.

COVERED UP Traditionally, books have been bound in two stages. The first involves gathering together the separate leaves of pages in something printers call “signatures.” A signature represents a large sheet of printed paper that has been folded four times. The folded sheets, trimmed on two or three sides, have historically been sewn together on the folded spine edge, with cotton or linen thread. (The fore-edges of early books remained untrimmed—a letter opener or knife was used after binding to slit each fold by hand, creating the distinctive rough edge that some publishers today specify as a special design element.)

By punching two small holes in the fold of the gathered pages and looping the thread from one set of gathered pages to the next, several signatures can be stitched together to form a book block.

The number of signatures in a single book block can be quite high—think of the thick reference or textbooks you’ve used—but the signatures themselves, depending on the weight and coating of the paper, are usually 8, 16, or 32 pages each. Less than 8 pages and the signature is too weak to hold the thread; more than 32 and the signature is too thick to sew. You can see the individual signatures by looking at the top or bottom of a book’s spine.

In The Smithsonian Book of Books, I came across a clear description of the next part of the traditional process: “If the loops are plaited together, the result is a chain stitch, which raises two welts across the book’s spine. In time, it was thought better to attach the thread-loops to separate, heavier strings or thongs running across the spine. These thongs, called bands, could then firmly anchor the book to its cover. Bookbinders traditionally have nipped the leather book covers around those bands, making distinct, squarish panels along the spine for book labels.”

So there’s some work of the seamstress involved, and the answer to a mystery: Look at any old leather-bound books, and you’ll see that those raised bands along the spines stand out. They give texture and distinction—and show the number of thongs inside holding the signatures together. The process, called Smyth sewing, was originally done entirely by hand but is now done on large, automated sewing frames.

In the modern, post-leather, hardcover era, a finished, sewn book block is rounded (creating the distinctive flair at the spine, and allowing the book to open and lie flat), glued with a hot-melt adhesive, covered by a cotton or gauze “spine lining,” and then glued into heavy kraft paper, which serves as the book’s “endpapers” or “endsheets.” Meanwhile, in a separate operation, cloth or paper is stretched and glued around thick, special cardboard sheets called “printer’s board.” Those are the book’s case, the actual hard covers.

The covering may be embossed, or embossed and stamped with foil, coated or not, printed or not, made of one or more combinations of paper and/or paper and cloth. That hard covering is then placed over the glued endsheets and pressed in place by rollers. A series of irons press into the case along the spine, creating the familiar joint or hinge that makes the book easy to open. The process of attaching the cover to the book block is called “casing in.” Starting in the early years of the 20th century, such coverings have been typically wrapped in a loose paper dustjacket that advertises the book’s author, title, publisher, and contents.

RUN OF THE MILL To get a sense of perspective and history, I spent some time talking to folks at Stinehour Press in Lunenberg, Vermont, a small printer that specializes in traditional methods and quality printing jobs such as glossy coffee-table photo books, poetry collections, and art-museum catalogues. I also talked to an account rep at the Acme Bindery outside of Boston, the third-largest library binder in the world, where an average workday involves some two thousand separate runs of one book each. Materials have changed —cotton thread has given way to a stronger, longer-lasting poly-cotton blend, for example; plastic type has replaced hot metal in letterpress printing. But in both plants, 19th-century printers and binders would recognize many of the processes still being used.

And then I looked into the printing and binding of my own book, which was done at state-of-the-art Edwards Brothers printing plant in Lillington, North Carolina. I learned that the typical trade book is not quite the same thing it once was. Like most commercial hard covers, mine wasn’t sewn, but was glued. The folded edge of the signatures was slightly milled by a trimmer. Instead of being fed intact into a sewing machine, the now-loose ends were fanned out slightly while passing over a roller loaded with a cold adhesive called PVA (polyvinyl acetate), which is more elastic than traditional animal-based hot-melt glues.

Without sewing holes to penetrate and fill, there was no need for hot glue. (A variation on the glued binding is the notched or double-notched binding, which maintains the folded edge of the signatures, but which drives glue through notches to adhere the pages together.) The pretty, red-and-black headband at the top of my book’s spine is there for purely decorative purposes—it hints at a threaded binding beneath, but actually covers the glue. Like almost all commercial hardcover bindings, my printer’s boards were covered in paper, not the traditional cloth, even though the industry still distinguishes hardcovers from paperbacks by calling them “cloth,” as in the catalogue entry The Last Best League, 269 pp., cloth.…

Not entirely romantic, not exactly bound for the ages. But the cover, beneath the dustjacket, feels strong. It has my name on it, embossed and stamped with foil. As a writer, holding it in my hands is still a thrill.