A history of a stitching Of course the point is to stitch a book, not to darn a sock. And, obviously, to stitch manually. And, less obviously, to make a side-stitched binding, meaning we stitch the sheets assembled in a pile, not in sections. We as if oversew the spine, rectangularly, not closely, externally, so the thread remains visible. This is a very simple and quite eye-catching binding, provided that the stitching has been made neatly and the thread chosen rightly. In this very case we use a twine, a very strong flaxen thread of natural grey colour, very noble in its simplicity, in lack of exquisiteness and of delicacy, in its rawness. First of all we have to drill the holes. Nobody has hands strong enough to punch a finger thick pile of paper even with the sharpest needle, and pull the thread through, like in case of a piece of cotton textile. Even a pile of a dozen pieces of cotton could be punched through easily. One hundred and fifty sheets of paper can not be punched through even with a super needle and super power. Holes need to be drilled. Absolutely. Because they should be at least twice as wide as the thread is thick for the thread will be pulled through them at least three times. The thread should be about five times longer than the book is. Hence usually we have a piece of thread a bit more than one meter long, or one and a half when the book is really thick. These are not monstrous figures which we couldn’t handle. We put the book on the table’s edge, the spine facing us. We start from the right. We put the needle from above into the first hole, pull the thread through leaving the end of it on the upper side. We hold this end with the finger not to let it slip away, we pull the needle out from the underside and put it into the next hole, it is to the second to the right. We pull the needle out from above, pull the whole thread through, wind the spine and put the needle from the underside back into the same hole. Then we put the needle into the third hole, pull the thread through the third hole, wind the spine and put the needle back into the same hole also from above. We take the needle out from the underside and put it into the fourth hole, also from the underside. We pull the thread through the fourth hole. Pull the needle from above and wind the spine… And so on. Thus we get sort of tacking-oversewn stitch. Everything is simple. Nothing wrong should happen. Yet it does. Quite often. Why does it happen? We would like to write this is so because we have to pull many times the thread through the holes which are not perfectly smooth and have quite sharp edges, and the thread which itself is not perfectly smooth though it looks like smooth and even gleams slightly, begins to be jagged slightly, friction increases, various forces begin to work more bravely, and after some times what was straight though not rigid begins to twist and toss, and we should remember that the thread was unwound from a spool hence it used to be curly, we need then to remember all the time to let it fall loosely, gravitationally, it doesn’t matter it weighs little more than nothing, thus it will get straight rejecting the great desire to twist spirally turning into a rope, because if we don’t control this, then only a bit of distraction, an inadvertent jerk is enough for a knot or kink to appear. Usually these are mock knots or entanglements that look like knots tied intentionally, but they are not real knots, so can be untangled quite easily, provided that we keep being in self-possession, because a fury and rage can cause but tighter and greater entanglement and eventually create an untiedable knot though not tied. And if mock-knot is disentangled, then we have to be twice as careful as before for the thread once tangled loses its natural flexibility and only lies in wait for a next occasion to get entangled tighter. OK. That’s enough. We would like to write, that it is but a flaxen thread, and a flaxen thread is not a cable. <<<