My friend Derek asked me to bind together the issues of Alan Moore's 1963 into a collected hardcover book. He asked that it include the Shadowhawk crossover and the A Touch of Silver story, as well as a gallery of unused art he had collected.
I'm not a good enough binder that I like to do jobs for others, but I had some new tools and techniques I wanted to try, and so agreed.
I started by sewing the comics together. The straps that go through the loops get glued down to the folded endpapers, like so:
The endpapers are glued to your first page by a thin strip of glue near the spine. Sewing isn't strong enough to keep your book together, so you apply a lot of glue along the spine. I got a new bookpress to push the comics together, making a really tight binding, which came out well.
I wanted to trim the comics and extras just a little so they didn't feel too uneven.
With the book block ready, I then made the book cover with some buff colored buckram I had lying around.
Then I glued the cover onto the book block.
I'm not very good at decorating buckram. I have never had much luck with embossing or anything like that, so I cover up this simple cover with a nice dust jacket. Alex Ross had done a nice piece of art for 1963, so that became the front cover.
I found this ad for the 1963 series and loved its style and how it listed all the creators and thought it'd be a lot cooler than anything I could design for the back cover.
Here's what the inside looks like with the contents page and the gallery of art:
