Tuesday, February 02, 2021

Book Restoration

by Rick Blechta

A good year or two ago I posted some videos about how leather-bound books are made and restored. Since we all enjoy books, I figured visitors to Type M would be interested. That turned out to be an understatement. Everyone found the videos as engrossing as I did.

Here’s one I ran across the other day and the skill level of the restorer is quite amazing. Some interesting parts — like how disassembled volumes are re-assembled — are missing, but there is a lot of solid and engrossing information here.

So I thought I would share it with everyone. We all have a few “well-loved books” in need of help. I certainly do. I just wonder what this talented woman’s fee would be.

Enjoy!

3 comments:

  1. Interesting, but....
    OMG. Seriously? She soaked the pages? Any time I've dropped a book off the dock (actually, one of them simply leaped; the other slid down between the boards) they have never been the same again, no matter how much I dried them, ironed them, weighted them down for days on end. No. They're still in pretty sad shape.

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  2. Good rag paper survives soaking. Not surprising, since it began its life in a bath, much like us. Years ago a nice man decided to learn bookbinding and offered to practice on my well-loved anthology of poems, promising a lovely cloth binding to replace the original textbook-style composition binding. The new cloth binding is nice, but he sewed up the signatures in the wrong order; I think his dyslexia must have taken over.

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  3. To both Susan and Anna, that's one of the things I would have liked to be included in the story. Both of you are right. Rag paper will survive a dunking (if dried properly). The cheaper acid-free paper that began being used in the mid-20th Century will not survive being put in water, so obviously the technique in the video of removing tape and cement by soaking will not work on a more modern volume where acid-free paper was used. I wonder what techniques will work on that kind of paper?

    Thanks for commenting!

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