About: I love writing, leather working, cooking, and playing board games. My short stories have been appeared in Spark, Abyss and Apex, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Stupefying Stories, Punchnel's, Silver Blade, Kids 'M…

Turn an ordinary paperback book into a leather bound masterpiece... without any fancy tools or techniques.

I've spent quite a few hours scouring bookstores, libraries, and the web for the answer to a simple question: how can I put leather on my paperback book? There are plenty of book binding Jedis out there, but I'm not interested in restoring an old manuscript, learning about the history of scrolls and codices, or building my own cutesy journal with expensive hand-made paper and fancy stitches. I just want to take a piece of leather and glue it to my paperback and have it look nice.

Well, I tried the "just glue it" method. Twice. It didn't work so well. After taking apart some old books, gleaning what I could from book-binding manuals at the library, and analyzing what went wrong, I tried a third time. This is a record of my third attempt, which was pretty successful, pretty easy, and, well, pretty cool.

UPDATE: for a slightly different method, check out Leather Binding a Paperback: A New and Improved Guide.