A cereal box taught me more about hinge design than 5 years of binding

Last Tuesday I was eating breakfast and the kid's cereal box flap tore off along the perforation, again. I got so annoyed I grabbed it and studied the fold, the scoring, the way the cardboard fibers were compressed. Then it hit me, I've been fighting with book hinges that crack or fail at the joint for years, but I never thought about mimicking a box flap's simple scored fold with a cloth hinge. I ran to my bench and tried scoring a heavy paper hinge at a 90 degree angle before gluing it to a text block. It worked way better than my usual method, the joint opened flat without fighting me. I've rebinding a 1940s novel this weekend and I'm going to use that trick. Has anyone else stolen a technique from random packaging or other everyday objects?

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