Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

My 2nd Chaos book *Lost and the Damned* fell apart years ago and I put in plastic sleeves and a 3 rind binder.
That made the book huge... Is there any way or product out there to put it back to almost book format??

For other books that fell apart (old GW were good about that) I would just 3 hold punch and mount them in
side mounted report covers.. but there is no space at the edge of the page without cutting into the words.

Any ideas? suggestions? and don't want to invest in a book binding machine..

You could take it to a copy shop and have them rebind it as a spiralbound book.

You could get them bound in hard cover, not sure about the US, but here in Australia, costs from $30 - $50 per books for plain buckram with gold lettering on the spine.

 Stormonu wrote:
You could take it to a copy shop and have them rebind it as a spiralbound book.

This is what I do with any non-hard cover rulebook that's going to see heavy use and/or is crappily made.
Battlefront gave away their 3rd edition rules for free by showing shop owners a copy of 2nd edition that you owned.
The real price was about $7 to get the book's spine chopped off, the pages punched and coil-bound, and a plastic cover put on front and back.

You can do it yourself with wood glue. Line up all the pages neatly. Smear the spine edge with a thin layer of wood glue. Smear the inside of the cover spine edge. Join the two surfaces and clamp the book together until the glue is set. (This is basically how cheap bookbinding is done and it's why the GW stuff tends to fall apart.)

This is a bit rough and ready, so if you value the book very highly you might do better to have it professionally bound in some way.

Joyboozer wrote:
You could get them bound in hard cover, not sure about the US, but here in Australia, costs from $30 - $50 per books for plain buckram with gold lettering on the spine.

GW books are hard to rebind because they end to be perfect bound with individual sheets instead of signatures built into a proper oldschool binding. Some amount of data loss would be expected in any such job, I believe.

 Agamemnon2 wrote:

Joyboozer wrote:
You could get them bound in hard cover, not sure about the US, but here in Australia, costs from $30 - $50 per books for plain buckram with gold lettering on the spine.

GW books are hard to rebind because they end to be perfect bound with individual sheets instead of signatures built into a proper oldschool binding. Some amount of data loss would be expected in any such job, I believe.

Naw, any professional bookbinder can do it just fine with no more loss than the original (and far better glue.)
The only time you'll actually see the sort of loss you're thinking of is when they're binding work that was originally stapled together (or poorly sewn) and with a perfect binding they literally just scrape the old glue off and add new glue so there's no noticeable difference.

There's a professional book-binder in every university town - all those Masters and PhD theses are bound. Generally it's done with a plain card soft cover for the examiners to tear to pieces, then with a swanky hard cover with, as @Joyboozer says, gold lettering on the front and spine, that is submitted to the university library. So there's a range of options and they'll happily do ANY thickness of book.

Spiral or comb-bound books are cheaper - you can get a copy shop to do it, or buy the binding machine to make the books at home. Buying is recommended if you do a lot of printing of PDFs or recovery of old books, you'll soon make back the cost. Punch your holes with care - do a few sheets at a time, as you can make a real mess of stacks of paper that slip or don't punch all the way through. Fine for printouts, not fine for a published book. Work may also have the machines and stuff kicking around, and you can buy the combs/spirals and covers cheaply enough yourself if you feel guilty about using their office supplies.

Ring binder and/or plastic wallets is cheapest and works fine - you'll spend a happy hour or two with a craft knife and ruler trimming off the glued edges and making sure everything fits.

Never tried Killkrazy's suggestion of doing the binding yourself, but I'm sure there are guides online.

To be clear, I've used my method successfully with cheapo paperbacks, when then after a while often fell apart again. The thing is that some of GW's books tend to fall apart because they are cheapo paperbacks.