Many of the members of the Western Mountains Senior College are avid readers, enrolling in classes during which they read and discuss books, poems, and essays.

Others are writers, attending creative writing classes and discovering how to put their own thoughts into words.

Now, some WMSC students are extending their appreciation of books beyond the words on the page. They are enrolled in a three-session course on bookbinding, learning to create individual hardcover books from start to finish.

Their instructor is Jim Bebko, who recently taught himself to make his own case-bound books.

Although he is a member of the WMSC creative writing class, Bebko’s background is in engineering, and his creative interests lie primarily in hands-on projects. After learning the bookbinding process himself, he agreed to teach it to others.

In the first two sessions of the class, participants learned about the terminology, materials, tools, and techniques, and created their own text block, the inner pages of the book.

They watched an on-line tutorial that demonstrated how to sew together each set of pages, called a signature, and then join the signatures together to make the text block.

After practicing the steps for hand-stitching the signatures on pre-punched sewing cards that Bebko provided, they put what they had learned into practice to stitch together their own signatures and text blocks.

They applied endpages to the finished text blocks and trimmed the edges with a utility knife to make them even.

At next week’s final session of the class, they will cut the board for their books’ covers to size, cover them with fabric or paper, and apply them to complete the books.

Each of the four class members received a book press that Bebko had made using plywood, bolts, and wing nuts. The book is placed in the press to dry after each step of the gluing process.

Participants also received a kit containing the materials needed to create a blank book, including strong thread for hand-stitching the signatures, heavy paper for the endpages, special board for making the cover, and a bottle of PVA glue.

They provided their own pages to create a blank book, or, as in the case of class member Ruth Barrett, to bind their own writing into a unique keepsake.

Barrett has been a member of the WMSC creative writing class, taught by Suzanne Taylor, for several years.

Prior to that, she took a memoir-writing class from the late Gwyneth Bohr, and has continued to work on writing her memoirs, both independently and as part of a writing group.

Before taking writing classes through WMSC, Barrett said, “I’d never really written before, although people did always say I wrote lovely letters. I still write letters, even though I do have email.”

“I had never written poetry before, and one time when I read aloud something I’d written, Suzanne told me, ‘You know, that would make a lovely poem.’ And I went home and wrote a poem.”

Now, she said, she has about 15 essays and several poems that she plans to include in a small leather-bound book she is creating during the bookbinding class. Another, larger format book will hold her memoirs.

Class member Bonnie Pooley said signing up for the bookbinding class was “a pure whim on my part.”

Like Barrett, Pooley is also a member of the memoir-writing group that began several years ago as a WMSC class and has continued independently.

Over the years, she has accumulated a store of her own writings she is eager to bind into books.

“I’ve got so much writing that I feel good about,” she said, adding that she also envisions binding books of photos or collections of quotes.

“I have always wondered how books are made. This has opened up for me a whole world of little books I’d like to make.”

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