Ever have a book just gut you like that?

A friend put The Road in my hands around 2015 and I told him bleak books were just a cheap way to feel something. I was wrong about that. The scene where the father washes the dead man's brains out of the boy's hair and then tells him they're still the good guys, that's the part that flipped it for me. He's not pretending things are fine. He's just refusing to let the kid turn into the world around them. I read it once, handed it back, and still catch myself thinking about that last paragraph where the trout are in the streams. So yeah, I came around to your take.

So the guy who has been binding for 30 years never made a book that cracked in a year himself? Look, there is a real thing here, which is that the spine should not be so tight that opening the book puts all the stress on the first and last sections. But 5mm gaps on every stitch everywhere is not the fix people think it is. What you actually want is a bit more give near the spine and a firm, even pull through the rest of the section, not uniform looseness all the way across. Loosening everything is why your boards feel floppy now, because the whole text block lost its backbone, not just the part near the hinge. Go back and check how the book opens at the middle and at the ends, and if the middle still lies flat and the ends do not crack, your original 3mm may have been fine all along.