Noticed the shift in book cloth quality over the last 15 years

I was sorting through my supplies last week and pulled out a roll of book cloth I bought in 2008. The cloth from back then had a woven texture that felt solid and took glue without puckering. Compare that to the stuff I got from a craft store in 2023, which is basically paper backed with a thin layer of fabric. I think the change happened around 2015 when more companies started cutting costs to compete with online suppliers. Has anyone else had trouble finding good quality book cloth locally?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_henry3d ago

Yeah the timing you mention lines up with something I noticed. I was talking to an old binder last year and he pointed out that a lot of the mills that used to make proper cloth for bookbinding shifted over to making stuff for the fast fashion industry around 2014 or 2015. That fabric backing you're talking about, it's basically just fashion cloth with a different coating. The real woven book cloth had a specific starch fill that kept it stiff and stable for gluing. Once those mills closed or changed their lines, the new stuff never quite matched up. I've had to buy some from specialty places online that import from Italy and it still holds up okay, but the price is way more than it used to be.

casey9433d ago

The "shifted to fast fashion" thing really stuck with me. I just read an article about how most industrial textile production has been retooled for cheap clothing the last decade. It makes total sense that book cloth got caught in that, the mills just stopped making the good stuff.