Old-school copyist tip: If you’re in a hurry and don’t want to alternate taping front and back, you can put baby powder on the edges to prevent them from being sticky.
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That’s a good one, I leave something like a 1mm gap which is good enough for the hinge and not much to worry about sticky. That 3M is thin with discrete fibers to give it strength apparently, so it holds up under repeated bending.
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Yeah, that’s typically what I do too. The 3/4" tape gives me a little leeway too if I’m not perfectly straight. With 1/2" I have to work a bit slower. I definitely don’t have time for the old-school method of salt and pepper shakers to hold the pages still, and then cut perfectly at the edge with a razor blade, although I had an employer that wanted that back when I was learning the trade.
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I have this one which works well: Dahle 442 Rotary Trimmer https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SX0ZY0A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
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FWIW, the caliper listed there isn’t accurate either. Caliper is not absolute in regards to weight. It all depends on the particular paper.
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Perfect, I was thinking of one of those rotary type trimmers. Says it does 30 sheets, will it do that many without problems like the guillotine which in my experience tends to spread the sheets out?
I think I’m mostly done with tape binding. It’s slow, one sided and limited to a few sheets, just better to go with comb.
I’m not sure that it can do 30 sheets, especially if the paper is on the thicker side. I normally do 5 to 10 at a time, otherwise it can rip the edges a bit. It may not be a great solution if you have a large quantity of paper to trim.
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You need a ‘proper’ guillotine, with a long blade, which also clamps the paper on the way down.
They are more expensive than the rotary ones, but you can get good deals.
While we’re on it, I also have one of these:
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Nifty, I’ll take a look. I’m finding good looking ones for the same price as the rotary.
I was thinking about that, you use it for booklet style? What type of music do you use it for? I’m not overly fond of staples because eventually they rust and wear out a pocket from use, whereas I’ve got comb binds that are old and still going strong, and you can replace the comb if it gets brittle.
Mostly Baroque choral music. 
I can do up to 80pp (i.e. 20 sheets) of 100gsm paper. Bit less with a card cover. I usually add a bit of Scotch tape over the staple, which stops it tearing. I’ve only seen rusty staples on scores that are about 30 years old.
Anything more than 80pp, and I use a Wire-O machine that drills the little holes in. I can do up to 172pp with a 16mm diameter wire.
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Cheater! You need to bind like a true Medievalist the way it was done in that video above 
It looks just like my father’s studio! Most of that is not specifically medieval, but just how traditional hand-binding is done.
Some commercial printers have machines for sewing signatures together. A well sewn book block will stay open at any page, unlike the glued spines of paperbacks, which get broken by use.
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Yep, smythe-sewn binding is the only format I’ll publish for hymnals. The difference is night and day…
Share some pictures, I’d love to see this.
Hello from Australia. Personally I don’t think A4 is close to 9x12 at all. It’s subjectively and objectively much smaller. As to what ‘metric countries’ use I cannot speak for the whole world but there is a German standard trim called Klavierformat. This is the size that piano books have used since the 19th century. It’s an excellent size, and used by Barenreiter, Breitkopf and Haertel, Henle Verlag, Edition Peters, and more. It’s 235 x 310 mm. The only problem with it here at least is that it is a custom trim and you can’t buy it in the shops. I don’t think 9 x 12 inches is near Klavierformat, that would be 228.6 x 304.8mm.
Are American piano score editions printed on 9 x 12 inches actually? Reflecting on this now I realise I don’t have a single piano score printed in America in my library!
And by the way @DanMcL that printer looks great.
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I just measured my G. Schirmer U.S. edition of Hannon Exercises, and it measures 9" x 11 3/4". Not sure what happened to the final 1/4 inch. It’s an old copy (50 years plus?), perhaps shrinking with age.
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I buy Alfred Masterworks for piano as much as possible for the accuracy, scholarship, annotations and best of all comb binding. Measuring their WTC (a must have edition) is an exact 9x12, as are the rest of the Alfreds. Spot checking other publishers it’s all basically the same. My clarinet stuff is the same size, except for various foreign editions, like a full set of Quatuor pour la fin du temps is a fair larger.
For copies the SFSO library would just hack it at legal size with a letter comb bind. I’m looking for a good paper cutter and will just manually cut down my 18x12’s.
Does Australia have it’s own music publishing industry?
Back in ye’olde days I used to go into San Francisco to the old Boosey & Hawkes building which was one of their major hubs, pretty much had to special order everything. Down in LA I’m sure there were more options, of course now it’s trivial and there’s always IMLSP.
In bygone days. Not any more,
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