“You read the book…now you get to FIX the book! It’s the exciting new sensation, now available in your local library’s conservation lab!” Read this last year, repaired it today. The copy I read was from a different library than where I work though.
When you find out that water leaked from the ceiling INTO the Preservation lab: Then you find out the water came from an overflowing toilet… And that it’s happened before!
When someone asks me to fix their book and says, “The cover’s just fallen off a little bit…it shouldn’t take too much to fix it…” …it’s not as simple as just slapping some glue on it and sticking it back together. Well, most of the time it isn’t.
When I hear the phrase “we fixed it with some tape”…
This book had an ombré spine lining! The red is probably the result of over spraying when they colored the head edge of the textblock. Also I dig the yellow and purple color scheme.
Someone “fixed” this with some poorly placed pieces of double-sided tape. Sigh.
So, I just learned about a Preservation ‘urban legend’ yesterday, while working a preservation “clinic” at a workshop hosted by my library. A man had brought a very brittle and fragile army base newspaper that belonged to his father. It was falling apart, and the paper was very pulpy and probably wouldn’t survive much more […]
So you know how you can tape things to other things by making a little loop of Scotch tape? Turns out it’s not a very good way to repair books.
Little Monday morning surprises found squashed in the margin of a book I’m resewing.
More uses for the wood burning hot tool: removing really stubborn not-water-soluble spine linings.