Saturday, August 19, 2023

Tape Repairs

I see lots of books that have been previously given an unauthorized tape treatment, sigh. In fact, most of the time, tape will probably make the situation much worse then if it had been left alone. Also, although there are products out there called things like "book tape" and "repair tape" and even "archival book repair tape," none of them are actually good solutions.

Nonetheless, here are a couple before-and-after examples of books where I had to remove a lot of tape. It's tricky and tedious, but it can be done.



2 comments:

The Idaho Beauty said...

My mother wanted her family bible to rest on the altar at my wedding but it was in bad shape, the leather binding mostly separated from the text block. Newspaper obits had been pasted to the inside of the covers, so when the word from a bookbinder/restorer was that the cover would have to be replaced and the bible rebound with a new cover, we all balked. My dad's solution was to tape it back together with black electrical tape wrapped around the edges of the leather cover and covering the spine area of the cover (now feeling a bit brittle) and probably regular cellophane tape, now yellowing, to attached the text bloc back to the cover (this was in 1975). I wasn't living at home at the time, so didn't know this is what was happening and was quite horrified when it was presented to me the day before the wedding. Ah well, dad meant well and the family bible was present at the wedding. I still have the bible, with it's pages of family genealogy in the middle but keep thinking I should just junk the bible and just keep those pages and the obits (which I've already photocopied). As a book, it's hardly worth the money to have it restored properly. Am wondering if you've ever run across this solution? I guess I should just be thankful he didn't use duct tape, which he once wrapped an entire package to me in. ;-)

MyHandboundBooks said...

Hi! I see a lot of those old family bibles. The large ones always suffer from similar problems, detached covers, broken spine pieces, paper damage, etc. Often the family tree pages are the part that people want to save. Personally I think it is absolutely fine to remove those family pages and toss the rest of the book. You might even take those family pages to a bookbinder and have them bound into a nice cover to protect them. Then they are saved and protected and take up a lot less space!