Old bookbinder in Portland showed me a trick with a bone folder I still use

I was at a shop in Portland last spring, watching this retired guy fix a 1920s novel. He told me to stop pressing so hard with the bone folder, said it's about the angle not the force. He ran it along the spine crease at like 15 degrees, and the paper folded clean without cracking. I tried it on my next batch of journals and honestly it cut my mistakes in half. Has anyone else picked up a weird habit from watching an older binder work?

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spencer_wood15d ago

That angle trick is the real deal. I picked up something similar from an old timer in Seattle, he showed me to let the folder do the work and only use about as much pressure as you'd use to smooth a piece of tape. Now I always crease twice, once soft at a steep angle to mark the line, then again flatter along the spine. Another thing he did that stuck with me was rubbing a bit of wax on the folder itself, makes it glide way smoother and keeps the paper from catching. Sounds small but it saves a ton of tear outs on thin stock.