Crisscross binding and a not-so-secret Belgian book artist

Here are a few more of the handmade journals I'll have available during LoLa, Sep. 18–19. Last week I showed you my casebound journals, now here's a different type of binding.

One of my favorite forms of book binding for journals is the secret Belgian binding, or, more properly, the crisscross binding (shown above at left; the X-binding at right is a different matter). I learned this one a few years ago at Articulture, a local art education center. I like it because it offers the convenience and decorative stitching of a Coptic or chainstitch binding (here's an example of that)—that is, it will lay flat when open, making it user-friendly for left-handers as well as right-handers, and it has a decorative exposed stitch across the spine and on the covers. 

At the same time, unlike Coptic binding, it has a board covering the spine, which protects the pages and interior stitching, and gives you a place to write the date range or other information where you can easily see it when it's on the bookshelf. I find it to be a good choice when I want to repurpose an old book cover into a journal, especially if I want to use the spine from the original book—which I trim and then glue onto a strip of cardboard to make the new spine.

You make the cover and spine boards first, then stitch them together, which is kind of fun and reminds me of the sewing cards I played with as a kid. Then you sew the signatures to the ladder of crisscrossing threads on the inside of the spine. I made a slight adaptation of the way the signatures are sewn in because it felt a little more stable to me than the method I was taught. But this is not a technical blog, so I'm not going to go into that here. 

I was kind of attracted to the name, too: My sister was living in Belgium at the time, and my paternal grandparents had a fondness for the country because that was where Grandpa Parker served in WWI; after WWII, they signed up to send CARE packages to a Belgian family and maintained a lifelong correspondence. 

Inside the back cover of the "Microbes" journal

And who can resist the allure of something that's secret? I wondered about the name, though, and my teacher didn't know why it was called that, so I did a little research just now. It's not so secretive, after all, but its origin was a mystery to the American book artist who learned the technique in Europe and introduced it here.

The book arts underwent something of a revival in the late 20th century, and in the 1980s, a Belgian book binder named Anne Goy wanted to make a book with the decorative appearance of Japanese stab binding, but that would open flat, so she invented this technique, which she called crisscross binding. Later, American book artist Hedi Kyle learned it without knowing who invented it, only that it came from Belgium; hence, she called it the secret Belgian binding—because, to her, the origin was a secret! Sounds much more poetic than the IDK Belgian binding, doesn't it?

So, the secret isn't in the binding itself, but the seeming mystery of its origins. It's so easy to find these things out via the Internet nowadays, but when Hedi Kyle in the 1990s wanted to know about this mysterious new bookbinding method, she couldn't just google it. (Google was founded in 1998.)

(The "secret" to finding accurate information on the Internet is to examine multiple sources and check them against one another.  Although I link to just two sources about secret Belgian binding, I consulted several more to confirm the accuracy of the information in those two. Never trust a single source! And be very suspicious if they use identical phrases—that's a clue that they probably all just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Not that Wikipedia is bad, as long as you check its sources and look to independently verify its factual statements.)