Adventures in foil blocking

Adventures in foil blocking

Click here for the french version / cliquez ici pour la traduction française

Foil blocking is one of these things which in my opinion does not stand mediocrity. Anything less than great is just terrible.

If any of you have ever practiced it, you will know that sometimes it flows, but when it resists, it really resists.

With this edition job that we delivered in June 2024 (The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, Suntup editions, lettered) I had made a prototype the year before, which I wasn't entirely happy with: the foiling had been an issue.

Light green on white goatskin. The two didn't get along.

So, in the months prior to the start of the production I had ordered three other white goatskins, from different suppliers, and three alternative green foils, also from various foil manufacturers.

I went ahead and tested all that : notice how widely different the results are!

Then I went ahead and fine-tuned the combination that seemed the most promising. Playing with temperature, pressure and dwell, until I came up with what I thought would be the winning formula.

With that in mind I then went ahead and ordered the skins for the edition, no less than 40 skins, which seemed like an entire herd when it arrived. 

We (Théo Fousse and myself) started the work on the books : sewing, endpapering, edge gilding, forwarding etc... Things were going well and it wasn't until we got to the finishing stage that I noticed that this batch of forty had obviously received a different surface treatment than the one skin I had ordered a few months before as a sample, because my formula no longer worked!

I was back to square one.

Up until this point I already had made about 15 plaquettes. I did many more, and simply couldn't figure it out.

Kieke and I sat down one night and thought about it, trying to forget everything we knew about foil blocking, looking at this problem with, as the buddhists say, beginner's mind.

What was the issue? Perhaps the leather was greasy. After all, we're trying to adhere 'colour' to a substrate, and it's a well known fact that things don't like to stick to greasy things.

How do you remove stickiness?

By cleaning.

With what?

Acetone came to mind, and so did mineral spirits, and white spirit.

I went ahead and tested this, applying different spirits in different ways, different quantities, with different drying times, and a horror show happened, immediately followed by a miracle of sorts. FYI: at this stage I had made a total of 29 plaquettes, not mentioning the amount of full size covers I began to test, and partly ruin.

 
I settled for the following : Apply white spirit to leather liberally, wipe off excess, and with no further ado, make the first pull. This is the horror show stage: the foil sticks very well, but not just in the marks, everywhere in between, too. But then, with more white spirit, the excess can actually be wiped away, and the horrible green cloud on the leather has the elegance to depart as well. Job done.

 
White spirit. Who would have thought?

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