Saturday, February 02, 2008

Book Repair

Book repair is something I haven't focused on very much. A bunch of years ago, I did some book repair in a class with Joe Landry; since then, it hasn't come up too often. But a friend of mine asked if I could fix this book for her daughter. The textblock was intact, so I didn't have to sew it. The hinge area of both covers was torn so the spine part of the cover was almost entirely detached.

Before

So I replaced the spine part of the cover and used book cloth to cover the spine. I used some Japanese repair paper on the inside of the hinge areas as you can see in this close up photo. Then I covered up that stuff with some new pasted endpapers.


I think I should have attempted to get the book cloth in between the paper and board...rather than pasting it on top of the cover paper. That would have solved the issue of covering up part of the title on the front cover. But when I tried to separate the paper and the board on the covers it was just tearing too easily. I think there were a couple issues: the paper on the covers of this book is brittle, likely low grade, maybe acidic... and I was probably using the wrong tools for the job since I haven't acquired tools for this kind of work, making me "all thumbs" while doing this.

After

2 comments:

Savannah Dempsey said...

this is a really cute book. i've been oogling your creations for a while, but this is the first time i've come across you blog!

as such, you're my "cool online thing of the week". yay you. (it's not that big of an honor, my blog dosen't have that many readers. but oh well)

TJBookarts said...

Wow, it looks like someone dropped that book from a rooftop. :o)
Nice job on the repair.
Just a thought for the future, it may have been easier to make a whole new cover with the cover pictures glued ontop afterwards. They don't look like they would have been too hard to get off the boards.

Jackie