Lying Press and Plough

No, this isn’t a posting about deceitful farm reporting. It’s about cutting paper, baby! Not the most exciting topic I know, but it is often a problem with the home bookbinders. You’ve laid out your interior pages, the cover is a work of art, the book is bound and now…

Now you have to trim the pages. So what to do? You can take a stack of your books to your local printer or Office Depot and ask them to cut it for you, typically for $1 or $2 dollars per lift. Often as not, their blade is dull or nicked and the results make you want to throttle the apathetic clerk who has done the hatchet job on your beautiful work. I speak from experience.

So then you go on Ebay and buy some Chinese knock-off paper cutter which works okay for a few weeks, then the cheap blade dulls and the mediocre table slips out of alignment. Throw that piece of junk away. Again, I speak from experience.

Finally, after many wasted hours (and dollars), I broke down and bought an expensive cutter that does a very nice job (a Triumph 3905). I lucked out and found a used one locally for what was still quite a bit of money. But I know a lot of you don’t want to drop that kind of cash for something you may not use all that often. (I bind a lot of books, so it made sense for me).

Enter the Lying Press and Plough. Bookbinders used these before there were any fancy stack cutters. It is basically a clamp to hold the pages in place (the lying press), while the plough with its exposed blade is run back and forth along the surface of the press, cutting the pages after a number of passes. A good press and plough can cost as much as a quality paper cutter, and the replacement blades can run into the hundreds of dollars. So this isn’t really a cost-saving option either.

That’s where I hope to change the game. I am working on a press and plough that uses readily available blades that cost about ten bucks apiece. I have some specialized tools on order so I can build a few versions of these and test them out. The configuration I have in mind will allow you to cut a book an inch thick. This is a compromise to allow for the use of the cheaper blade. The super-duper expensive ones will cut books substantially thicker than this. For most people, though, an inch will probably suffice. And, as always, I hope to do this at a price far more reasonable than anything currently available. Big talk, I know. Let’s see if I can actually pull it off.

I will keep you all posted.