I need to print several large documents, each well over 100 pages. I could put them in a loose-left binder or clip them together with a huge binder clip, but neither of those options works well when placed in a backpack. They take up a lot of room, the papers quickly get battered and bent, or they fail easily.

A style of Japanese bookbinding that dates back to the 16th century involves stitching together individual pages. It's commonly referred to as Japanese stab binding. I've read about this in a few books on bookbinding that I've read recently. So, I decided to give it a shot. This little project is also a great way to practice more bookbinding techniques while I work on my custom journal project.

Fortunately, the technique is pretty straightforward. I'm sure some nuances miss me, but creating a functional binding wasn't too hard. The best resource I found is Japanese Bookbinding: Instructions From A Master Craftsman. It gets into a lot of detail - maybe more than is needed. For instance, this book talks about a carefully wrapped and glued cover. I just used some heavy paper, akin to what a manilla folder would be made out of.

I also grabbed a small bookbinding kit with some projects from Amazon some time ago. One of the three projects was a stab binding project. I made an error on the stab binding project in the kit. I punched one too many holes in the paper. This is where the beginner-friendly nature of stab binding really showed itself. The project still came out terrific. I'm not entirely sure how.

This came out great. I bound the Massachusetts Select Board Handbook and the official soccer rules published by the International Football Association Board. As a quick aside, people talk about soccer being simple because it only has 17 rules. Ironically, that document is 230 pages long.

Below are a couple of photos of the finished binding. The first binding took a while—maybe a couple of hours. The second binding, which was also the bigger of the two, took less than an hour. With a little practice, this type of binding is extremely quick to accomplish.

If you want to do this yourself, then go for it. It is forgiving and very beginner-friendly. You need to poke holes through each of the pages. I grabbed a stack of about five and punched them all together. I used a paper template to ensure I poked them all in the same place. You'll want the holes you poke to be slightly larger than you might think they need to be. Between slight misalignments and several strands of thread, quite a lot must fit through those holes. I bent a needle, trying to force it through.

The other tip is to print the document you want to bind with a little extra room on the left-hand side (assuming you read from left to right). The binding swallows up much of the page, so the additional space is handy. I did this by creating a new paper size of 8.5 x 11 inches but with a 1.5-inch margin on the left-hand side. These were PDF documents, and Adobe didn't just let me adjust the margins without creating a new paper size. Depending on what you are printing, your experience might be more straightforward.