A cookbook that will not stay open is a cookbook you stop using. You prop it with a jar, it snaps shut halfway through the method, and eventually it lives on the shelf while you cook off your phone instead.
There are three ways to make a cookbook lay flat for good, and they are not equally good.
1. The counter at an office store
Cheapest and fastest, when it works. You walk in, they trim the spine, punch the block, feed a coil through it and hand it back, usually for a few dollars.
Where it goes wrong:
- Thickness. Most counters stock a narrow range of coil. Once your block is past an inch, there is a fair chance they will decline the job rather than order a size in.
- The cover. Ask specifically whether your own cover goes back on. Some counters bind the text block between fresh plastic and hand you the original cover loose in a bag.
- No second chance. The spine is cut before anyone checks the inner margin. If your book has tight gutters, the punch takes the first character of every line and there is no undoing it.
It is a good option for a paperback you are not precious about, and a poor one for anything you would be upset to lose.
2. A mail-in bindery
You post the book, somebody who does this all day rebinds it, it comes back. More expensive than the counter, and slower by the length of two postal trips.
The reason to choose it is that the decisions get made by someone looking at your specific book. A bindery measures the block before quoting, checks the inner margin before punching, and can stop and call you if the two do not agree. It will also have the coil size your book actually needs rather than the nearest one in the drawer.
Watch out for turnaround. Traditional binderies quote in weeks, not days — six to ten is common, because their normal work is sewn hardcover and library rebinding, and a coil job goes in the same queue. Ask before you post.
3. Doing it yourself
A punch and a box of coil will cost less than binding four books, and for a stack of church-cookbook copies it is genuinely worth it.
For one book it is a bad trade. The cut is the hard part: a guillotine takes the glued strip off square in one pass, and a craft knife does not. A spine that comes off crooked cannot be fixed afterwards, and you will see it on every page.
The thing nobody mentions: clearance
A coil sized exactly to the block cannot turn. It needs roughly an eighth of an inch of room, which is why a book measured at 0.9 inches gets a 1⅛ inch coil, not a one inch one.
This matters to you because it is the fastest way to tell whether the person binding your book knows the trade. If you are quoted a coil the same size as your block, the pages will bind against the wire every time you turn one.
Before you commit, check one thing
Open the book flat in the middle and look at the inner margin — the white space between the text and the spine.
If it is half an inch or more, coil binding will be clean. If it is noticeably tighter, the punch line will run through your text, and no amount of care at the bench can prevent that. It is a property of how the book was typeset, not of who binds it.
Community cookbooks, the spiral-bound-by-a-church-committee kind, are usually generous. Mass-market paperbacks with small margins are the ones to measure first.