The Evolution of Binding form in ancient China

The earliest book in China was a series of bamboo and wood pieces with words written on them, called "Jianci". It is very heavy and difficult to read. Later, people cut the silk with words according to the length of the text and rolled it into a volume. Some even put wooden shafts on both ends of the silk silk, and then there appeared the book with "scroll binding".

After the invention of paper, the text was written on the paper, and the book was folded to the left and right according to a certain size. The front and back pages were pasted with hard paper or thick paper as the cover and back cover. This kind of binding was originally used for Buddhist scriptures, so it is called sutra folding.

In folded books, the front page and the last page are separated. When the first and last pages of folded books are glued together, the middle pages will fly like a whirlwind when you open them and read them with flavor, hence the name whirlwind (see Figure ).

With the above two methods of binding books, browsing for a long time, broken at the fold, pages scattered. In the Song Dynasty, books began to be bound by means of pasting or threading with silk thread. As shown in Figure , bows and backpacks appeared.

From the middle of the Ming Dynasty, there began to be thread-bound books. Thread-bound books are firmly bound, aesthetically bound and easy to read.

After the Qing Dynasty, movable type printing gradually replaced woodblock printing, the output and varieties of printed matter increased, and binding technology also got corresponding development, gradually from manual operation to mechanization. In addition to the retention of our national tradition, the production of a small number of precious editions of books and antique books, using thread binding, the main binding form has paperback and hardcover. Binding methods are divided into manual binding, semi-automatic binding and the use of automatic binding motor. Common book binding process