I thought sewing my own endbands was a waste of time until a binder in Ann Arbor showed me her 1890s ledger
She said machine-made headbands crack at the spine fold within 20 years, and now I am torn between speed and doing it by hand. Do you hand sew every book or only the ones you care about?
20 years sounds like a made up number to me. I have books from the 70s with machine made headbands and they're holding up just fine, no cracks at the fold. Maybe her ledger was stored in a hot attic or somewhere with wild temp swings, that would wreck anything. I get wanting to do things the old way but one binder's story about one book doesn't mean much.