Still annoyed about people using the wrong grain direction on book boards

I was at a local guild meetup last Tuesday and saw three different people showing off their bindings where the grain on the boards ran perpendicular to the spine hinge. Within six months those covers are gonna warp bad, especially if theyre storing books upright. How do you gently tell a new binder they're setting themselves up for failure without sounding like a know-it-all?

2 comments

2 Comments

faith_thomas25d ago

Three years ago I glued up a whole batch of journals with the grain running the wrong way and every single one warped within two months. That mistake taught me more than any tutorial ever could.

knight.xena24d ago

Hold on, are we really acting like a little grain direction is gonna destroy journals that fast? I've jammed together notebooks with mismatched grain by accident before and they sat on my shelf for a year without doing anything weird. Seems like maybe the glue or the paper quality was the real issue there, not just the grain flip. Warping in two months sounds more like humidity problems or using too much water in the paste. I think people blame grain for everything when really they just messed up the drying process.