I've been doing a lot more bookbinding lately. I've done a lot of it throughout the years and recently decided to dive a bit deeper.

As part of this dive I've tried looking a bit deeper into the adhesives I use. I use Bookplast 22 most of the time. It's sold on my local bookbinding supply store, dries quickly and flexible. It is based of Methylisothiazolinone, which I've never heard of before. I think PVA is probably more commonly used though.

I've ruined a couple of notebooks because the glue I use dries too quickly. The common solution I've seen referenced is to use paste, which I am not a fan of. I've also started experimenting with methylcellulose, which seems like a common paste replacement. It's easy to make at home and unlike paste doesn't go bad (I haven't had any go bad yet anyways). It is extremely weak though, and sadly it only seems to work really well between papers.

Finally, the better alternative seems to be a mixture between the glue and methylcellulose. A 60 / 40 mixture is what's usually recommended, it gives you the strength of glue with the longer cure time.

I did a quick test where I pasted paper, bookbinding cloth and cardstock to greyboard, bookbinding cloth and cardstock to see how each behaved. I ripped it off after about 2 hours of cure time.

Here are the results:

Conclusion

I think mix is the way to go when I need to be precise, it dries basically just as strongly as glue while still giving me some freedom to move the pieces around if I don't get them perfectly straight. For everything else, there's glue. I want to try my hand at restoration and I think methylcellulose will have a place in my toolkit then.

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