Coil and Wire-O Binding

With wire and spiral binding, holes are drilled along one side of the printed pages, and either a wire comb is clamped down into the holes or a plastic spiral is threaded through them. Wire and spiral binding both lay flat and are often used for cookbooks and manuals.

How Spiral and Wire Binding is Made

To create a wire or spiral bound book, parent sheets are first printed, cut and assembled (but not folded). Holes are then drilled into the binding edge of the document. For wire binding, these holes are straight up and down, and for spiral binding they are drilled at a precise angle that depends upon the size and thickness of the book and the plastic spiral used. From there, either wire comb is threaded and clamped down by hand (for wire binding) or spiral is threaded through the holes by hand (spiral binding) to create the final product.

Design Considerations

The most important thing to remember when designing a wire or spiral bound project is that holes will be drilled 10 millimeters inside the trim line on the bound side of the document. Because of this, you should keep all important content at least 10mm inside of the trim line on the side that will be bound, otherwise any content inside those 10 millimeters may be obscured by the holes or by the binding itself.

Another thing to consider with wire and spiral bound projects is that unlike most other binding methods, your page counts do not have to go in increments of 4. Instead, they can be in increments of 2 (both sides of a sheet of paper) because wire and spiral books do not have to be folded in the binding process.

Finally, wire and spiral pages can have finishes (which are usually reserved for covers) throughout their pages. Many books that need to be spill resistant, like cookbooks, use lamination on every page.

Cover Design: Covers for wire and spiral bound projects are the exact same size as the inside pages of the project.

Coil and Wire-O Binding