Strawboards are largely used for cheap work. As their name implies, they are made of straw, are very smooth and compact, but are so extremely brittle as to be useless for any purpose but cloth binding, cheap Bibles, and other common work. The amateur should not use them. The covers can be set out with the compasses, and marked off with a bodkin on a sheet of millboard of suitable thickness, and cut up into boards of the proper size, either with the millboard shears or with a sharp knife and straightedge.

For the better class of leather work, the required thickness of millboards is frequently made up by pasting two boards together, the inside board being thinner than the outer one. These made boards warp a. little inwards, and this ensures a shapely cover that clings closely to the book. Single-board covers are, with the same purpose of slightly warping them, lined with paper. Lining should never be omitted. Unless the 'boards can be cut with shears or knife true and square at the edges, the boards should be cut with the plough. The amateur will probably find it cheaper at first, at any rate, to get his covers cut for him, and he should keep a pair of covers by him as a pattern. The covers of a book must be a little larger than the book itself after its edges are cut, and the squares, as these projecting portions of the cover are called, must be ascertained and allowed for by measuring w1th the compasses.

In lacing on or drawing in, a cut cover is placed in the correct position on each side of the book, and the positions of the bands are marked on it with the bodkin. Two holes slightly inclined towards each other for each band are made at the marked places, one from the outside, near the edge of the boards, and another from the inside, some­what farther in. These holes can be made with a bodkin, piercer, or awl, with or without the aid of a hammer, or with the holing machine (see p. 29). The bands, which have been previously untwisted and fluffed out, then are pasted slightly, twirled up to a point, passed through the holes in the boards (those nearest the edge being taken first), and drawn tight. The protruding ends are. then cut off tolerably close to the board and knocked down flat with the hammer and left to dry and set. The bands laced through the millboard are knocked down with the backing hammer on an iron plate (termed the knocking-down iron). The book is tapped along the sides of the back with the backing hammer in order to restore the proper curvature if it has been impaired at all during lacing in.

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