cameron_hernandez69•8d agoProlific Poster

I finally figured out why my monthly log kept falling apart

I was at a coffee shop last Tuesday and overheard a guy telling his friend that he uses a phone book as a heavy press for his journal. It clicked for me that I have been putting pages together with too much tension. So I tried laying out my spreads with a 2mm gap between sections and it stopped the tearing. Has anyone else dealt with binding issues from cramming too many collections on one spread?

3 comments

3 Comments

val_shah8d ago

Yeah that phone book trick is clever. I started putting a thin strip of cardstock between my sections and it helped a lot with the tearing. The gap idea makes total sense because I think the binding can't handle that pressure when everything is mashed together. I ended up switching to a discbound system partly because I got sick of fighting with the spine.

stella227d ago

Oh man, the discbound thing is such a game changer for that exact reason. I fought with those glued spines for years and finally gave up after one too many pages ripped out trying to flatten the notebook. That cardstock strip trick works okay but it's honestly just a bandaid on a bigger problem. The real issue is those bindings are made to lay flat without any thought to how much we actually stuff into them. I tried a few different disc systems myself and found the Levenger ones hold up better than the cheaper knockoffs, but even the basic ones from Amazon work if you're just testing the waters.

simon_carr8d ago

Totally hear you on that. I tried the cardstock trick myself after seeing something similar online, but it felt too fussy for my day to day. Switched to a spiral bound notebook with a hard cover and it solved the tearing issue completely for me, though I miss being able to rearrange pages. It's funny how something as small as a binding can ruin a perfectly good notebook.