This would seem to be an odd question, but take a look at the spine of your favorite book—hardcover or paperback. If it’s a hardcover, what do you see oozing out there from underneath the signatures? And if it’s a paperback, what’s that opaque stuff holding the pages to the cover? Glue, of course. And what is glue famously made of? …
We actually got this question the other day from a Harvard professor working on an article, and we did a little digging to find out whether animal glues are still commonly used in book production. For this, we turned to Paul Parisi, the president of Acme Bookbinding Co. in Charlestown, MA, one of the premier bookbinders in the world (no joke—we are lucky to be located so close to them).
The answer? We can say, it turns out, that virtually all HUP books are, in fact, vegan. Mr Parisi:
I think the only place you are likely to see animal glue (now called “protein glue” —less offensive to the lovers of Mr. Ed) would be in case-making glue and possibly in spine lining—where the headband is glued to the book. Most adhesive binding for perfect binding, notch-cased binding and sewn bindings would be EVA (hot-melt which is wax based—not protein), PUR (polyurethane) or PVA (polyvinyl acetate). These are all chemical formulations and I imagine have some petroleum basis rather than protein/animal.
In short, the glues used in bookbinding today are primarily chemical emulsions with no animal content. It’s possible, our production manager speculates, that older, animal-based adhesives are still used in lower-end binding, like that for catalogues, directories, and the like, but when it comes to books, binders have pretty much completely switched over to newer chemical formulas, save for a unique project here or there where a customer has requested, say, "calf-binding," which is just what it sounds like.
If you really want to get technical about it, however, remember that today’s inks are primarily petroleum-based, thus carbon-based, and thus composed in large part of the fossil remains of creatures that dwelt upon this earth however many millions of years ago ...
Image: An HUP title in hardcover with a traditional sewn binding—click the image to get a close-up.
