[Homestead] book restoration

EarthNSky erthnsky at bellsouth.net
Thu May 15 02:25:47 EDT 2008



Clansgian at wmconnect.com wrote:
>> The spine of the book 
>> is coming apart and the cloth binding is very worn. 
> 
> Bev,  I've rebound a number of books.  When you say the spine is coming 
> apart, do you mean the stitching that holds the signatures together?  Are all the 
> signatures intact or has the stitching for the individual signatures come apart 
> as well?
> 
> James   </HTML>

No, sorry to be vague.  I wasn't up to par on my bookbinding vocabulary.
Ok..
The inner hinge has come loose and the spine piece has separated from 
the signatures. The signatures are still stitched together to each 
other, but not to the spine.  The mesh, mull, crash or whatever you call 
it, is attached to the spine piece.  I can see 8 lines of stitching 
across the signatures to hold them in place.  The book is approx 5 x 7.5.
The pages themselves are in fair shape except of course those in the 
first part of the book.  The only remaining attached first page is  now 
the preface.  The Title page, a dedication page and a quote/dedication 
page are separate, but I do have them.  Someone taped these together 
with what looks like cellophane tape, now old and yellow.  I doubt there 
is anything to do about these first tattered pages, but if the spine 
could be reglued...
If you think it is a simple matter of reglueing, I can probably attempt 
that myself.   I just don't want to skip any steps.  About 1/4 of the 
glues I make and test at work are cool bind glues for bookbinding, so at 
least I won't have to buy anything.  It would be challenging to figure 
out which one would work best in a manual repair application,though.

What do you think now?

B

-- 
BevanRon of EarthNSky Farm   NW Georgia USDA Zone 7
34.498N	85.076W	   Bev is Earth, Ron is Sky					


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