i got some veg tan leather a bit ago to try my hand at tooling it but it didn't got as planned , so i thought about making a hard cover with it

i've never bound a book before but as a little kid, i would watch my aunt making books early in the morning when i was eating breakfast before i went to school, it was a very vivid memory and one that i cherish

anyways you can't bind a book if you dont have pages so i make those first

its just some half pieces of printer paper folded in half again, this little booklet is 20 pages long, i wanted one that was 100 pages so i made 4 more booklets

i sewed then together with a strap of leather to hold them all together and to hold the stack to the covers

i made the covers and the spine out of really thick tooling leather . i dont have a skiver so i ended up using an X-acto knife with a curved edge which is why the beveled edges are super wonky. i beveled the edges because the cover was also going to be more veg tanned leather

i glued the pieces to the piece of leather that i was gonna use as the cover and try to give stuff enough space to fold

i also carved slots for the leather straps that held only the paper, so that when i glued them to the hard backing, it would form a flatter side

i glued the pieces to the cover once i cut them to size so that all would meet at a tripoint

it was really hard to fold them correctly since the leather is so stiff, looking back i should've wetter the edges where i folded it to make it easier but maybe next time

i did wet the stitch marks when stitching it close so the that holes wouldn't crack with the pressure

i went with a baseball stitch to close it together but looking back at it, it looks macabre IMO, like some horror book cover idk

the over leather i think was too thick so next time i'll probably look for either a thinner veg leather or a smoother softer oil tanned. i think an oiled tanned leather would look nice as a book cover