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My face when people on the internet use wildly wrong bookbinding terminology. Oh honey, no. Also my face when I get called a conservationist or a restorer. It’s hard being pedantic sometimes.

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Welcome to the 18th century, where the ex libris are made up and the straightness of your tooling doesn’t matter.

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I feels ya, book.

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Whoa. What a difference! Same publisher/printer/year/everything. Same library binding. Same library building, even. Very, very different results. The copy on the bottom is very, very brittle and brown. The copy on the top has paper that is still nicely flexible and white.  It’s possible the copy on the bottom was kept in a big city, […]

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Paste and methyl cellulose.

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Cleaning a book spine, to prepare it for a new lining. Printed binder’s waste was used for the original spine lining. The book is “From grave to gay; being essays and studies concerned with certain subjects of serious interest, with the Puritans, with literature, and with the humours of life” by J. St. Loe Strachey.

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“From grave to gay; being essays and studies concerned with certain subjects of serious interest, with the Puritans, with literature, and with the humours of life” by J. St. Loe Strachey

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*impotent scream of rage* File this away in “Bad Ideas to Not Repeat in Modern Times.” From: Huntting, H. R., co., inc., Springfield, Mass. Book Mending; Some Short Cuts And Labor Saving Devices. Springfield, Mass.: The H. R. Huntting company, 1938.

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Gloopaste. Just say it out loud. I guarantee you can’t not laugh while doing it. GLOOOOOOPASTE. From: Huntting, H. R., co., inc., Springfield, Mass. Book Mending; Some Short Cuts And Labor Saving Devices. Springfield, Mass.: The H. R. Huntting company, 1938.

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The scars of oversewing and a Demco hinge repair. I seem to rescue one of these previously-repaired books about once a month. Sometimes the original sewing is completely gone, hence the stab-sewing, but in many cases it was completely fine. This kind of side-sewing is particularly bad for books with brittle paper, as the paper’s […]