Bookbinding Automation: From Hand Sewing to ABB Robots

Every printed book starts as a pile of loose sheets. Folding them, sewing or gluing them into a block, adding a cover and trimming the edges was once all handwork. Bookbinding automation has taken over most of those steps, and the next round of changes is about making single copies as cheaply as long runs. This post follows the craft from hand binderies to Smyth's sewing machine and Emil Lumbeck's glued binding, then to the new Müller Martini hardcover line launched in October 2026. It ends with how ABB robots could handle book blocks, stacks and pallets around the binding line.

A small hand bindery in Portland, Oregon, with presses, boards and tools on the benches, 2005. Photo: Ferrous Büller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How books were sewn by hand and then by machine

For centuries a binder worked at a bench with a sewing frame, needle, thread and glue pot. Printed sheets were folded into sections, called signatures, and sewn through the fold onto cords or tapes. The block was then pressed, rounded, backed and fitted into boards covered in leather or cloth. In the 19th century cotton book cloth, which Archibald Leighton is credited with bringing into wholesale binding, made covers far cheaper than leather. Big binderies still needed rows of workers who folded, gathered and sewed by hand.

Staff at work in the bindery of the Seattle Central Library, around 1909. Photo: Romans Photographic Company via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sewing was the slowest step, so it was among the first to be mechanised. In 1868 David McConnell Smyth received his first US patent for a book sewing machine. That machine was not a commercial success, but he kept working and patented a much improved version in 1879. His Improved No. 3 of 1886 is described as the first truly successful book sewing machine, and sewing through the fold is still called Smyth sewing today. Other makers, Singer among them, also built sewing machines adapted for books in the early 1900s.

A Singer Model 6-9 sewing machine from about 1911, built for sewing books, at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Glue then began to replace thread. In 1938 the German bookbinder Emil Lumbeck developed a binding that used adhesive instead of sewing: the leaves are fanned out and coated with glue along the spine. Methods like this led to the perfect binder, a machine that gathers the sections, mills off the folded spine, applies glue and wraps on a cover in one pass. In Switzerland, Hans Müller founded Grapha Maschinenfabrik in 1946, the company now called Müller Martini. Its first machine was a hand fed saddle stitcher, and by the early 1950s it was working on a perfect binder.

The book bindery of the Library of Congress in Washington, 1920. Photo: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Bookbinding automation today and the book of one

Short runs are now the hard part. Digital presses can print a single copy of a book, so the bindery has to switch formats between almost every book. On 6 October 2026 Müller Martini released the Diamant PRO Digital, a hardcover book line it says has the highest level of automation available for hardcover lines. It uses individual servo drives and adjusts formats segment by segment, with barcode controlled changeovers along the whole line, so it can make round or flat back books from a run of one to a series without stopping.

A Wohlenberg perfect binder in the bindery of Merkur Verlag in Rinteln, Germany, 2017. Photo: Merkur Verlag Rinteln / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Diamant PRO Digital works with Müller Martini's Connex workflow and JDF job data, matching barcodes on each book block and case so the right cover meets the right block, and optional rejection systems pull out any block or case that does not match. Printers are looking at robots for the steps around such lines too. WhatTheyThink ran a column on 1 September 2026 under the headline that robots are coming to a print shop near you, and Keypoint Intelligence expects print providers to start investing in robot arms and mobile robots in 2026.

The spine of a sewn perfect bound book, showing the sewn sections under the glued cover. Photo: Al12si / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not build binding lines, and we found no ABB project inside a bindery. Its standard robots match the jobs around one, though. Finished books leave the line in cartons that IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers are built to stack. Flexley Mover AMRs could carry printed sheets and book blocks between the press, the binder and the trimmer, and a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could load and unload machines next to staff. ABB robots already handle plates in printing, as covered in our post on printing plate automation. In binderies these uses remain possibilities.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking goods at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Where bookbinding automation goes next

Print on demand pushes binderies toward lines that run without anyone changing settings. A publisher can keep a title in a file and print it only when someone orders it, which cuts warehouses full of unsold copies. That only works if each copy can be printed, bound, trimmed, checked and packed one at a time. Robots fit the gaps between those machines, for example stacking finished books and sorting them by order before packing. Such cells are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, so the cycle time is known before the hardware arrives.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, an autonomous mobile robot that navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

For order picking, ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to grab unknown items from mixed bins, which could in principle pick single books into customer orders after binding. At home, binding will stay a craft. Hobby binders, artists and small presses still sew signatures by hand, and fine presses keep making books the old way. For them, automation mostly arrives as digital printing for self published authors and better small tools. A robot arm on the kitchen table is a long way off.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to grab unknown items from mixed bins. Photo: ABB

A hardcover line, robots and their safety guarding cost a lot for a market where many titles sell only a few hundred copies. Book sizes, paper weights and cover materials vary from job to job, so grippers and fixtures must cope with thin paperbacks one minute and heavy art books the next. Paper dust and glue need regular cleaning. Binderies also face a shortage of skilled operators who understand both the binding machines and the robot programs, so easy programming tools such as ABB's Wizard, which builds robot programs from graphical blocks, help as much as new hardware.

Programming a single arm YuMi with Wizard easy programming on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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