Bindery refers to a studio

Studio

A studio is an artist's or worker's workroom, or the catchall term for an artist and his or her employees who work within that studio. This can be for the purpose of architecture, painting, pottery , sculpture, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, radio or television...

, workshop

Workshop

A workshop is a room or building which provides both the area and tools that may be required for the manufacture or repair of manufactured goods...

 or factory

Factory

A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production...

 where sheets of (usually) paper are fastened together to make books, but also where gold and other decorative elements are added to the exterior of books, where boxes or slipcase

Slipcase

A slipcase is a four or five-sided box, usually made of high-quality cardboard, into which binders, books or book sets are slipped for protection. Special editions of books are often slipcased...

s for books are made and where the restoration of books is carried out.

Overview

A large traditional hand bookbinding studio or workshop may be divided into areas for different tasks such as sewing, rounding and backing the spine, attaching the boards to the book and covering the book with cloth or leather. These processes are collectively called forwarding and would be carried out in the forwarding department. This area of the bindery would typically have equipment such as sewing frames, guillotines, board choppers for cutting boards used as covers, laying presses for holding books when being worked on and nipping presses for flattening paper, board, etc.
Recently, some compact material have been developed, allowing the processing of almost all the operations.

The process of decorating or titling a book with gold or other metals, and/or different colored pieces of leather, is called finishing

Finishing (bookbinding)

In bookbinding, finishing refers to the process of decorating the outside of a book, including the lettering of the spine and covers, any additional tooling, and any inlays and onlays...

 and is carried out in the finishing room or department. In a hand bookbindery this area would house the dozens or hundreds of brass hand tools that are used to impress gold patterns and figures onto leather one at a time, as well as the finishing stoves needed to heat these tools. In a more modern or commercial bindery, many decorative elements or letters are stamped onto a book's cover or case at the same time by use of a hot press.

Modern, commercial, bookbinding outfits range in size from the local "copy shop" book binder, using techniques such as coil binding

Coil binding

Coil binding, also known as spiral binding, is a commonly used book binding style for creating documents, reports, presentations and proposals. This binding style is known by a number of names including spiral coil, color coil, colorcoil, ez-coil, plastic coil, spiral binding, plastikoil and...

, comb binding

Comb binding

Comb binding is one of many ways to bind pages together into a book. This method utilizes round plastic spines with 19 rings or 21 rings and a hole puncher that makes rectangular holes...

 and velo binding

Velo binding

VeloBind is a type of book binding often offered at copy and print shops. Velobinding involves punching several small holes along the edge of an unbound book. A strip of plastic with rigid tines is inserted into the holes from the top of the book, and a strip with corresponding holes is placed on...

 to factories producing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of volumes a day using such processes as perfect binding, saddle wire binding, and case binding. The term, bindery, especially in copy and print shops, has expanded to include other forms of paper finishing, such as paper drilling

Paper drilling

Paper drilling is a technique used in trade binderies for providing large quantities of paper with round holes. The paper can be processed as loose leafs and in brochures . The holes usually serve for storage , sometimes for decorative purposes.- Terminology :Paper drilling describes a technology...

, lamination, and foamcore

Foamcore

Foam core or Foam board is a very strong, lightweight and easily cut material used for the mounting of photographic prints, as backing in picture framing, in 3D design, and in painting. It is also in a material category referred to as "Paper-faced Foam Board"...

 mounting.

See also

• Bookbinding
  Bookbinding
  Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.-Origins of the book:...
  
  
• Alphagraphics
  AlphaGraphics
  AlphaGraphics is a franchised chain of more than 260 independently owned and operated full-service print shops.AlphaGraphics business centers are franchised by AlphaGraphics, Inc., part of the UK-based Pindar Group. AlphaGraphics was founded by entrepreneur Rodger Ford in Tucson, Arizona, in 1969,...
  
  
• FedEx Kinko's
• General Binding Corporation
  General Binding Corporation
  General Binding Corporation is an office supplies manufacturer with many highly recognized global brands for binding, lamination, and other presentation products...