Recent Projects

These are two books I have treated recently in the lab. Unfortunately, I got ahead of myself with these books and did not take before images.
This book was a half leather reback. The text block was a group of pamphlets sewn together and one section was exceptionally brittle. Initially, I tried to tip in the loose pages of this section with paste, but it was unsuccessful. It had to be removed from the group, washed and deacidified,  then guarded and resewn into the text block.

After the text block was repaired, I repaired the case and reattached it as seen in my previous entries. This is the completed book.

This book originally had fake raised bands, so I decided to mimic that when I rebacked it. Before cleaning and lining the spine, I made a template of the band positions. To make the fake raised bands, I glued two pieces of leather together and cut them into strips of the appropriate size. Then, using the template, I positioned the strips on the new spine stiffener. This was good practice, but because the leather was rotting 19th century leather, nothing was gained by saving the spine pieces. This process should be reserved for either better quality leather or a more valuable book. This was the end result.

Limp Leather Long Stitch Binding

I was recently given some upholstery leather and wanted to find a way to use it. The leather was chrome tanned. This means the leather would be incredibly difficult to par and it's best use would be limp bindings.
To prepare the leather for a limp binding, I lined the back with paper and pressed it to ensure it dried as flat as possible. When I removed the leather, I noticed it had puckered in places from the paper shrinking. Fortunately I was able to fix this by rolling the leather. This unified the puckering and had a nice textual effect, which only worked because the leather was run through a machine at the upholstery factory. I gently sanded the leather to enhance the texture. Next, I trimmed the leather to the height I wanted, leaving the fore edge a little longer to trim later. Then I creased the area for the spine with a bone folder and cut slits for the sewing. Finally, I attached the text block and trimmed the fore edge. This is the end result (2010).