Leather Reback - Wooden Boards

This was a book from the Ranke collection at Syracuse. The spine was deteriorating and the boards were detached. It was not a good candidate for rebinding because of the level of tooling on the boards. The boards were also wooden, which is not common, and therefore should be preserved. This was the original condition of the book.

I cleaned the spine with methyl cellulose and lined it with Japanese tissue and linen. I made some page repairs with heat set tissue, and resewed the end bands. I lifted the original leather at the spine and corners, attached new, and repaired missing areas or cracks with Japanese tissue. Finally, I toned the tissue to match and applied a coat of SC 6000. This is the end result.

Note: For this particular book, the SC 6000 was a mistake. It caused the tissue areas to shine more than the original leather surface, even after a coating of Klucel G. I would advise against the use of SC 6000 if the original material had lost sheen or if the repaired area is very large.