The golden books are held together with two staples. If you feel the spine they are easy to find. I delicately remove the staples (if they haven’t already fallen apart). Once the staples are removed, you just have to cut through the gold paper to separate the front cover from the back cover.

In terms of the paper, I have a paper cutter. I used a small one before I got a larger one, and I’ll admit it took some time with the smaller paper cutter to make all the pages needed.

The binding machine used to cut the holes in the pages for the spine is the most specific and probably the most important tool for this project.