On Going Book Repairs by Janice Healy

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The following will give you an idea of some of the things that are being done to improve the looks of the flood damaged books and other damaged books that have come our way. The photos were taken free hand while holding the book or tool, a nice trick when you can pull it off.

Typical page repair problem

Here are some of the red books off of the cartload that got soaked on March 18, 2008. In order to make them look less messy it was decided to edge treat these books. This is my fancy book clamp in order to do this. This one is getting the fore edge treated.

Here it is nearly finished

This photo shows the condition of some of these small red books.

This is a group of books so you can see how they look when they are done.

Marking a pamphlet before drilling.

Drilling the pamphlet and cover, there are so many of these that I have had to do that I found a much better way than the traditional hand drill.

Sewing

Removing the paper guard from the spine cover.

Wrapping the spine cover around the pamphlet

Here is the finished pamphlet.

Here are some that have been finished, the report cards have been made and they are all ready to be taken back out to storage. There are several hundred of these little books, the glue had died long ago and this was the most practical way to rebind them with the least cost as there were several hundred of these.

This cover was warped from the flood but with a little work, a bit of time in the press and some water it should come out much flatter.

Here it is set up in the press with Mylar and blotter board. The brass edge pressboards are to make it maintain a nice joint.

This shows the book in the bindery in a box, with the damp blotter paper clipped down so the moisture will wick out of it faster to prevent mold.

Many days later, it looks pretty good even if I couldn't remember which way I had photographed it the first time. Sorry to much time in between photos with to many projects going on for those kinds of details. Those are marks left from water drops on the spine edge of the tail.

This photo will give you an idea how much work I have ahead of me and this is only a few books of the over 4,000 that got soaked.

Which do you like the best the before on the left or the finished on the right?

Applying color

Coloring the head of a book

This photo is to give you a good idea of just what can be covered with edge treatment.

All finished, with a bit of glare from the flash.

This is a typical tear on a spine from someone pulling it off the bookshelf by hooking their finger into the top edge of the spine rather than grasping the book by the sides.

Tucking in a piece of gray book cloth to give the repair strength.

Here is the same book with the repair all finished, it is now ready to go back to storage as soon as a report card is written for it.

Here is another typical spine problem where the book cloth has broken away from the cover.

Here the spine has been removed and the book prepared for replacing the spine.

Here the old book label was cleaned by removing all the old covering and paste so that it can be reused.

Here is the finished book. The type of re-backing that was done on this one is called a Yale re-back. This is done on books where the cover is on the text block solid and the text block does not need any repair.

This book came to us in very poor condition. The cover had a "Z" fold breaking the board in two places. Unfortunately I didn't photograph it before I did a test repair on the lower right corner so you can't see the "Z" fold in this photo.

This is of the, front notice the tear at the hinge.

This photo is after the repair to the long cover break.

This photo shows what the inside of the front cover looks like before being fixed.

Here you can see that the cover is pretty straight now.

This is a close up of the cover before coloring the board to match the book cloth.

Here it is done, sorry the flash caused a bit of glare.

This is the inside after repair, what you can't see is the 3" patch to the mull the part that holds the text block to the cover. The old labels were cleaned and replaced with the oval being placed over the large cover break to give the cover more support in that area. The reason for trying to repair with out replacing the cover is this book is part of a very large set and I couldn't match the book cloth.

Showing the broken stitching in this book.

A close up of broken stitches

This photo is after it was re-sewn. This was done with out taking the binding off of the book and having to rebuild the book when the sewing was done.