why [and when] PVA?

Our very favorite bookbinding glue! But why?

PVA (polyvinyl acetate) is an essential bookbinding adhesive. It holds up well over time, it dries quickly, and perhaps most important of all, it’s quite rubbery and flexible when it dries. That flexibility means that we can load up the spines of our books with PVA, and when they dry we’ll have strong books whose adhered signatures can still open all the way up.

Lots of different glues (Elmer’s glue, wood glue) are technically also PVAs, but bookbinding PVA is also acid-free, which prevents it from yellowing and affecting the interior paper over time. In bookmaking it’s often handy that PVA dries so quickly, but it does limit your work time on certain elements of your books. For example, you can’t press your board down willy-nilly onto some gluey paper and scoot it around into the perfect position if you’ve used undiluted PVA.

If the short work time is giving you a headache as you work with PVA, since it’s water soluble you can dilute it with water. We recommend going slow and adding small amounts of water to a small container of glue (rather than the other way around) and testing it on small slips of paper until you are getting a bit more dry time. Make sure not to go too wild with adding your water - too much and your glue will be way loose, tough to work with, and it won’t be super reliable.

Other types of glue can be used in many elements of bookmaking, and it’s a matter of personal preference how many glues to use and when you should use each one. Particularly for beginners, PVA is our number one choice in most situations - while one-glue-fits-all isn’t always correct, PVA is one of the only glues that can do almost anything you need it to as you create your book forms.

Want more material info? Check out our writing on archival materials here.