7.29.2011

from the bindery: broken

Book Repaired book broken again

bad repair job broken again + soggy corners

cleaning the paper off the spine before gluing it back actually matters

Spanish bindings from the turn of the last century are beautifully crafted even if they break

grain direction matters

sewing only lasts with proper adhesive and lining

bizarro breakage


classic. sawn-in cords disintegrating

tree calf leather disintegrating

secret paper lining revealed!

also classic

5 comments:

Nancy said...

those are a lot of crazy old books. you have certainly changed my idea of fixing a book. I won't even scotch tape the ripped picture books from library anymore (thus having to take them to the desk and endure the embarrasment of admitting that our kids ripped another one of their books and hope they don't make me buy the whole book).

christina q thomas said...

believe me, they respect you all the more for admitting it AND especially for not taping it. well. . . . depends on how your library handles that sort of thing. at the Lee Library people who tape books don't pay for them but they cause a lot more damage. Picture books are a little different because they replace them quite frequently. mending tears in pages is actually very simple!

Monica Holtsclaw said...

These photos are awesome! I especially liked seeing the warped boards, unscraped spine cloth, and the poorly lined book. What a great lesson! I bet you learn a million a things a day. Slight exaggeration?

Erin M. said...

It's good to see why certain techniques matter. Interesting.

Sue Rasmussen said...

So now I'm thinking it would be great to see a tutorial on mending torn pages. When I was a child, my mom loaned all our kid books to someone while we lived two years in Wisconsin. The someone had a good heart and returned them all repaired as best she could with contact paper. It was a good solution for the time and we didn't mind at all. I was certainly better than no repair at all for the inexpensive books we would outgrow in a couple of years.