Book Doctor

So I'm at PBI (although my luggage took the scenic route and arrived two days later than I did). One of the classes I have been taking is book repair with Ann Frellsen. The focus has been on quick treatments for damaged books, so that they will withstand continued use (in other words, not for rare or ancient books requiring specailized detailed treatments).

We used Japanese tissue to repair holes in pages and to reattach a page that has been cut out. We also did tipping in of pages, endpaper replacement, spine replacement, end cap reinforcement, and all sorts of other things in between. She was very good at showing us what needed to be done for each of the books we were working on since they are all different and some required treatments that others did not. These are not very exciting things to photograph since the finished work is not very obvious - or it shouldn't be very obvious!

One book that I worked on was this lovely orange book.
[Edit May 30]
The most obvious problem with this book was the dirt as it had been stored in a very dusty area for a long time. The photos I had here originally didn't really convey the magnitude of the cleaning that was involved so I've removed those in favor of this one that just shows a closer view. The front cover (on the right) and part of the spine have been cleaned. There were some little pen marks, scratches, and stains that didn't change, but the overall dirt layer has been removed. The back cover (left) hasn't been cleaned. Click on the photo to make it bigger if you want to see more detail.


[end Edit]

Also with this book, I reinforced the head cap, cleaned old adhesive from the textblock spine then re-rounded and backed it. The hinges of the case were weak, so they were reinforced and then new endpapers were attached and the whole thing was put back together.
Pretty exciting, eh?