I recently bought some archival-quality bookbinder’s glue (amazon link) and some navy blue polyester satin ribbon and started adding bookmark ribbons to some of my hardcover books that didn’t come with them. As the saying goes: it turns out that you can just do things.

It turned out to be quite easy to do. There was a slight learning curve, and I did make myself an applicator for the ribbon which is just a thin strip of cardboard (the thin kind from cereal boxes) wrapped in packing tape so glue won’t stick to it. This is useful for making sure that I only glue the ribbon to the spine of the book and not to the cover as well, so the two stay independent of each other.

The glue (from LINECO, who makes many kinds of archival-quality bookbinding supplies) is a PVA glue, like the Elmer’s glue used in kindergartens or the yellow wood glue used for woodworking. However, not all PVA glues are the same. This one is more viscous than most other PVA glues I’ve worked with. It has a much shorter working time and a much quicker holding time—a usefully fast holding time. In fact, for the ribbon on the second book I did (the larger, lighter blue one in the picture) instead of clamping it overnight I just pressed the ribbon against the spine for about thirty seconds then left it unstressed overnight and in the morning the bond was perfectly strong.

I’m currently looking at other books that I have which could use bookmark ribbons… this is really tremendous fun. For so long, only the fanciest books came with ribbons and for almost all of my books I had to use bookmarks that could fall out. No more!

On some level I know that it’s silly for me to be so excited about this, but I love physical books so much that I don’t care that it’s silly.

Now I just have to figure out how to attack ribbons to soft cover books…