I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last five months mending our books, and a few of them were interesting enough that I decided to document the job in case my ideas help someone else. These are pretty amateurish fixes, but the books are back in circulation, which is what counts in my opinion. This first book, Evangelists in Chains, was a typical perfect-bound paperback. Perfect-bound books are simply glued into their covers, and often the glue gets brittle and the pages just fall out (the name is a misnomer, in my opinion!). With this book, so many of the pages were loose that I carefully pulled all of them out, in twos or threes, and then glued them together as shown. Then, I glued the cover back on and put the whole thing in the book press that Esther made awhile ago, for a day, and the book is nearly as good as new. For glue, you want to make sure to use a flexible book glue. Something like Elmers glue, or school glue, will dry hard and crack when the pages are opened, leaving you with a book that is still falling apart. A flexible PVA book glue, though, allows the pages to open and close the way you want them to. The technique I’m using here to put the glue on the pages is called fan binding. Esther came across it somewhere when she was interested in bookbinding, and I’ve been happily using it ever since. (I now make books this way when I have loose printed pages I want held together–they take up much less space than a ring binder!)
Our old copy of Elsie Dinsmore needed help, too; the spine had ripped off. I wanted to preserve the original look of this book, so I created a new spine with some book tape–see the second picture. The white layer is hinge tape cut to exactly the original size of the spine. Any kind of paper would work, also; you don’t want the tape to be fastened directly to the spine of the book, but you want it to be loose. Then, I brushed book glue onto the original spine and glued it to the tape so that the book still looks nice. Not a professional job, but it works for our library!
The next time I had a couple of paperbacks whose pages had come loose, I decided to make a video of the fix-it job. See if this makes sense!
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