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Figured out my signatures were crooked for 2 years and a library sale tipped me off
I bind journals as a side thing, mostly coptic and case bindings, and I always thought my signatures looked fine. Last month I sold a stack of 6 at a library sale here in Boise and a woman flipped through one, then asked me why the pages fanned out like a deck of cards when she held it open. I checked the spine and the sections were all shifted maybe 2mm off from each other. Turns out I was lining up the punch holes by eye against my punching cradle instead of squaring the signature against the jig wall first. Two years of books with that lean and nobody said a word until her. Now I square each section with a small machinist square before I punch, takes an extra second per signature. Anyone else catch a basic mistake way too late like this?
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cooper.taylor27d ago
That 2mm shift is exactly how these things go, right? You stare at something every day, your eye just stops seeing it. Like people whose crooked pictures hang for years and only a guest notices. Or the way you never hear your own accent until someone points it out. The thing that gets me is the woman at the sale caught it in maybe 10 seconds while you had two years of close-up work. Fresh eyes beat trained ones sometimes. Good on you for fixing it instead of getting mad at her though.
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