Bookbinding terminology

Sue Dunlap <sdunlap [at] acs__wooster__edu> writes

>My acquisitions manager asked me what the term "otabind" means.

Re: Alien Bindings

The millennial bindings are appearing unnoticed, everywhere. A
confusion of names adds to the surprise; "Otabind", "lay-flat",
"RepKover", "sewn board", "transfer tape binding", "Lap-Back". Yet
all these are "Millennial". They are distinct; neither cased binding
or the uncased binding of conventional paperbacks with covers
produced from the text lining stock.

My impression is that the first person to use millennial binding,
following the Gnostics, Nestorians and other north African desert
sectarians, was Ellen McCrady. She used a paper tube wrapping around
onto the page plane to attach card covers to off-prints and single
sheet publications. Jeff Rigby applied the same tube to a Mexican
imprint one day in the mid-seventies at the Newberry Library. I
suggested a tubeless, sewn boards library binding at the LBS
conference in 1987. BookLab completed the first limited edition run
of the sewn boards binding for a Perishable Press publication of
1992.

Mechanized millennial binding, Otabind, was developed in Finland in
1980 by Otava Publishing, but was only introduced to North America
at the end of 1988. The two million dollar Otabind line is most
efficient with runs over 4000. Werner Rebsamen developed a short run
option with the RepKover, a pre-assembled cover with cambric tape
reinforcement that converges with a cold emulsion binder and then
bonds cover to the text using a normal hotmelt binder. There are now
dozens of long run Otabind installations in the United States.
Meanwhile Planax North America has produced a RepKover machine and
cold glue perfect binder to extend the Otabind structure to the
on-demand and copy shop markets.

Gary Frost

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 10:35
                 Distributed: Saturday, October 5, 1996
                       Message Id: cdl-10-35-006
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