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A book and an artifact might look exactly the same. But they are completely different things and need to be treated differently.
A book is only important because of its content. The words on the page are all that matters. For that reason it is not all that important or necessary to save the binding and related materials.
An artifact is a book-as-object in which the book’s significance exists beyond its content, or even the physical object itself. Who owned it, how did they use it, where did they keep it, why did they have it, did they read it? What mattered to them?
What can be difficult is that what makes something an artifact is most often something outside the object itself.
You might have two books on a table that look exactly the same. What are they: books or artifacts? Let’s say that one of them was owned by me. The other one went to the moon. Or one book was in Jefferson’s library and the other one belonged to an Athenaeum someplace.
Knowing that information would greatly alter the approach to the repair of the object. An artifact requires that the repair be as unobtrusive and unintrusive as possible. It requires that all (ALL!) original pieces be saved and hopefully reused. If they can’t be reused they should be stored with the object, perhaps in a box with drawer.
But it doesn’t need to have been held by Lincoln to be an artifact! A book you used as a child and want to have repaired so you can gift it to your grandchildren would also be an artifact.
Why does it matter? Because the object itself tells a story.
How was it covered? In leather? Does that indicate the wealth of the owner? Does it indicate the culture they came from and what they valued in a binding?
What kind of leather? That might indicate the local economy, the kinds of animals raised around there. In might say something about the leather industry in that part of the world.
This can go on and on. What kind of paper was used? How was it printed? What was the structure of the binding? What techniques were used?
All of these questions tell stories, and all of them add up to paint a picture of a place and time and a person.
Removing an original binding erases all those elements and destroys the picture.
Of course with marginalia it’s clear how that contributes to the story. Seeing the notes of famous people shows what they were thinking when they read a particular passage. Their unguarded thoughts, who they actually were, and what triggered their reactions.
But a child’s marginalia, your marginalia from your youth, can be just as important and significant as Washington’s. It tells a story, tells something about you.
The sad part of this story is the movement away from books to mobile devices. No covers, no paper, no marginalia. No stories for them to tell.
But what is sadder is binders putting new, overly-decorated covers on old books—books which had very nice, functional, and usable bindings that told stories, told a part of history—and then calling that work conservation. It’s not. It’s the opposite of conservation. It’s the opposite of conservation!
I recently saw a tarted-up binding done for a first edition of The Book of Mormon. Lots of gold, lots of leather, lots of wow. The binder posted it as an example of conservation. I’m sure the owner asked for it to be done. I wonder if the binder talked to them about the value of conservation over rebinding. Of the history in the binding, perhaps of the monetary value of having the original binding repaired. Perhaps there was no cover and that wasn’t an option. Still it made me a bit sad.
As a private binder and conservator I often tell my clients the difference and then let them tell me if their item is a book or an artifact. Often they are not historically significant books in the traditional sense, but they are significant to them and their family. In that case the owners are the only ones who can make that distinction.
But at least the question is asked and discussed. And the decision is almost always the right one because the question has been asked. It’s when the question never comes up that unfortunate things
tend to happen.
In the summer of 1986, I uprooted my life and moved to Boston, just for a year. At the time I was a high school social studies teacher and there were no jobs in Western Washington. I decided to take a year off, do something else, and then come back and get back into teaching.
I was hired in an archives. It turned out I really liked the work, so I stayed. I did a variety of things: copied glass plate negatives, rehoused some artifact collections, organized stuff, checked on some historic houses. It was a great job.
A year or two in they asked me to fix books. I was shown a manual on book repair by Jane Greenfield and I followed her directions. I loved the work and hated the result. She taught repairing books to make them structurally sound, but these weren’t beautiful repairs.
The repairs would end up looking like this.
In one sense they were perfectly good repairs. They made books usable again, books that had no value in the covers. Still, I hated doing those repairs. It felt like I was ruining the books unnecessarily. I think that part of my reaction was because the books were bound in leather, which filled me with dread and awe. I should add that the books I worked on were in much better shape than the one shown in this photo.
Looking at that book now, about 28 years after I worked on it, the repair is perfectly fine mechanically and the book throws up the right amount (that’s how much the spine of the book elevates when the book is opened). Greenfield was good and right in what she taught, obviously.
Still, doing work like this kept me awake at night. Seriously, it did.
I felt like this wasn’t really the level of work I wanted to do. But I had no idea what the level I wanted was, or even where it was.
I took at class at the Boston Center for Adult Education on bookbinding, but we made these books. It was, no doubt, a great class for what its intentions were, but my goal was something completely different.
I was disappointed because I wanted to learn to make a “real book.” I hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Next, I bought a bookbinding manual at Buddenbooks on Boylston Street, just across from the Pru. It was Bookbinding, Its Background and Technique by Edith Diehl. Turns out it is THE American bookbinding manual. I set out teach myself.
I’d been pretty good at making stuff in the basement of our house growing up. Learned a lot from my Dad, who could make and fix anything. As an aside his arms were about the size of my legs. One night, coming back from Bellingham, I got pulled over for having a broken tail light. The next day I bought a bulb and set out to remove the lens from the car. It wouldn’t budge. My dad came home and asked what I was doing. When I told him, he said, Let me try. He took the screwdriver and twisted and twisted harder and twisted harder until he broke the screwdriver. He broke the screwdriver. He looked at me, tossed what was left of it in his hand onto the ground, laughed, and went into the house. Try that sometime.
Anyway, Diehl, though probably unable to break a screwdriver, wrote a fantastic book. The first half is a history of binding. The second half is an instruction manual. A great one. But without any context, I got nowhere with it.
At work one day after that class and
my self-teaching experiment, I called the Massachusetts Department of
Vocational Education and asked where to learn bookbinding. That’s when I first
heard about North Bennet Street. It’s a bit of a story as well, but I quit my
job, enrolled the next year, and was able to sleep better.
After studying there, I was able to
do work like this. And when I knew what good work was, it was a relief and
exciting. And led me down a wonderful path that I’m still on. 1986 was a great
year.
There's not too much in binding and conservation that would make us popular at parties. Well, hardly anything actually.
But there is one thing that would, at least temporarily, make us part of the cool crowd: paper splitting.
Basically paper splitting is taking a sheet of paper and splitting it in half. Not tearing it in half, but splitting it in half so that a piece of reinforcing japanese paper can be inserted to strengthen the paper and make it usable again. Needless to say it's pretty intrusive, and can be a bit nerve wracking, but under the right circumstances, and where there really isn't any other option it's fantastic in its utter amazingness.
This is a sheet of paper from a book of mine that I started working on about seven years ago. I repaired it and resewed it, but the paper was so brittle that just touching the edges of the paper resulted in pieces breaking off resulting in a wave of anguish and despair. The answer was (can you guess?) to split the pages and I've finally gotten to it.
Here is a page in the "before" state. If you enlarge it I think you can see how fragile it is, especially along the fold where the sewing had been. Really, I think if you look really hard at the page it'll break, and I think you should try that now. It might take a few minutes, I'll wait.
The first step is to use a water soluble, heat activated glue to attach two sheets of paper on either side of the bad paper. I've been using kraft paper and hide glue. It is preferable to use gelatin, actually, but I have a pot of hide glue sitting around so that's what I've been using. First I glue out the page itself and lay it on the kraft paper, then I glue out the second side of the page and lay a second piece of kraft paper on top making a sandwich, where kraft paper is the bread and the page is the filling.
The key is to thin out the hide glue so that it doesn't tear the paper when it is brushed on. You need to work pretty quickly, and try to keep it off your fingers. Or else your fingers will end up sticking to everything you touch.
After that step you put this sandwich in a press for a few hours. Some say it should dry completely, but I have found with this that it's ready to go in three or four hours in the press. I think a bit of moisture helps the paper to split, at least it's seemed that way.
You start at one corner and pull the kraft papers apart from each other and it starts doing this:
You just keep pulling and it ends up with what you see in the next two pictures. You can see the text on the left side - except you are looking from the inside of the paper so the text would appear reversed. Most often one side comes off a bit more than the other, but not always and it doesn't matter if it does.
Again, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them. Here is what a compete split looks like. The kraft paper extends beyond the page on one end and acts like a hinge so that they will line up exactly right when they are reattached. Again on the left is one side of the paper, the other on the right. There obviously is a bit more of the page on the right side, since you can't see the text on that side. No big whoop.
A piece of thin Japanese paper is then inserted between the pages, using paste. This is a special paper I bought some time ago from Hiromi which I used, well, because I had it around and I thought it would work well. And I think it does. The key is that it doesn't really need to be all that heavy of a paper in order to make a significant difference in the final result. (I think was about 15 g per sq. meter.)
Here is the page after the Japanese paper has been inserted. You can see it extends beyond the page, it'll get trimmed later.
Next I'll remove the excess. Not all of it because I can't see the page I'm splitting but I get pretty close.
The last step is to remove the kraft paper. Remember it was a heat activated, water soluble glue that I used to attach the kraft paper. So I boil some water and pour it into a tray. Then I pour in more water so that it is a bit cooler (I shoot for around 140 - 150 degrees, measuring it with my infared thermometer). Then I put the sandwich in and within two or three seconds the hide glue releases leaving just the page with the japanese paper inside.
I take it out and press it under some weights, since it is likely that the paste will be a bit softened and I want to make sure it stays adhered.
It ends up looking pretty much like it did at the start of the process, except it is infinitely stronger.
There actually is a long history of doing this. Bookbinding manuals from around 1900 describe the process, and the East Europeans did it a lot probably because so much of their paper was so bad it was the only way to preserve it. There are also machines which completely automate the process but what's the fun of that?
I was shown it by Per Cullhed. I don't think he used it to pick up women, but he could have.
It really would be a great parlor trick and could have completely transformed my experience in high school by making me, at least for a few minutes, one of the cool crowd. Oh well, when I do this in the barn these days I'm sure the rabbits and other wildlife outside are really, really impressed. I think I even heard an appreciative rattle after one particularly nice split. And you know what? It was nice to hear.
Books have been, and are, such a constant presence in our lives. I don't think I have known anyone who didn't have at least one book, and I have known many people who have had hundreds and hundreds of them.
As a binder, what has surprised me is that none of them have any idea how books function, or how they are made. I suppose that's because it's not a common subject, and they didn't know they were interested in bookbinding until they met a binder or saw a bindery.
I firmly believe that people, in general, know more about how cars function than they know how books are intended to work. Consider how much more complicated cars are than books! How many more parts make up a car!
I would also say that they have no idea of how books are repaired, or even what a good or bad repair is.
That was certainly true of myself. I was working in an archives, mainly working in a darkroom copying and duplicating glass place negatives, when I was asked if I would fix a couple of books. Not valuable books, of course. They gave me a manual by Jane Greenfield, and my boss walked me through a repair.
I was left with a repair I felt was horrible, but I had no idea what a good repair was. It actually kept me awake at night, I felt so bad for the books. Even though the bindings had no value before the repair, and all I was doing was helping to preserve the content, I couldn't live with myself repairing books that way.
At that point I wanted to learn how to do it right, whatever that was. After calling around I found out about the North Bennet Street school. (How did I find them? I called the Massachusetts Department of Vocational Education! They had one listing for bookbinding!) I visited the school and the instructor at the time showed me a book he had fixed. A light went off.
Almost immediately I made plans to quit that job and go to school. I had to.
The point of this, though, is that people have brought me books to repair for about 20 years now and few of them really know what they want, or what to expect. Will the book look new? Will be it function again but still look it's age and show its use? How long will the repair last? I suspect many have these questions somewhere in their head, but lurking in their subconscious. Few ask.
That leads them, at times, to ask for repairs which are ethical and proper to do, but not really the best thing for the book. Explaining that to them can be difficult, and cost is very often a limiting factor. Of course. There are so many ways to approach a book repair.
After I graduated from NBSS and started repairing books at home, moonlighting from my job fixing books at Washington, I struggled a bit with how to proceed with these kinds of book repair. What was the right thing to do with them?
I decided my mantra would be that I would do the work the current owner's grandchildren would wish that I had done. Whether the client is paying for that level of work or not. (Hopefully they are.)
So the first question I ask myself when presented with a broken book is just that. And it's been very helpful in sorting out treatment options to present to the clients. What's great is that it answers every question. Should I clean off this tomato stain, or coffee cup ring on the cover? What should I do with these totally destroyed cover boards?
The answer lies in this: would the grandchild of the client find any of that helpful in understanding either the book or their ancestors? The wear of a cover can often say a lot about how the book was used, how often it was used, etc. Book archeology!
The beauty of this question is that it's completely comprehensible to the clients. It gives them a perspective from which they can make the right decisions.
Assessing books when working for collectors or book dealers is completely different. The latter want their books detailed in the same way one would detail a used car for sale. Hopefully not quite as superficially as is done with cars, but often the work is just that. For collectors it's a completely different esthetic.
But for everyday folks with their favorite books, just imagine their grandchildren in forty or fifty years and ask them. They'll know.
I started binding at home just after I graduated from North Bennet Street School in 1992 and moved back to Seattle for a job at the University of Washington. Twenty years ago today!
I started off with my bench, Kutrimmer, Kwikprint, combination press, and small book press crammed into my bedroom where I began to work through the curriculum from NBSS. I wanted to do it all again just be sure I understood what I had been taught. It was an incredibly helpful and productive time.
But I also began to get calls for book repair which was both a good way to continue to learn and grow but it also gave me the financial means to buy more tools and equipment.
One problem was that I needed a way to store all the pieces and parts of books I was working on. Working in such a small space (the next year I moved to another apartment in that building which gave me a whole bedroom to use as a bindery! What luxury!) made that an important issue. Having no place to put things aside, or even much storage space at all, my only choice was to be very careful.
When I would pick up new eyeglasses I was drool a bit over the trays that the glasses and paperwork were stored in. The problem was that they were too small for books.
One day I was wandering around IKEA and I heard choirs singing and rays of sun pouring through windows. Then I turned the corner to see why and saw these:
They are called Trofast and are a toy storage system. You know, to store toys in! They were the perfect size for books. Not every book, of course, but 96.23% of books. Maybe a bit more.
When I get a job I put the name of the client outside the box using blue tape. I think it has to be blue tape, I tried brown and they caught fire. (If you don't know that's a joke you probably should be reading something else.) Then I put the book and the paperwork for the project inside. Then it gets slid into the rack. There is a top to keep dust out, which is very helpful working in the desert.
When I'm working on that book the box comes out onto the bench and when I take it apart I put the pieces inside (sometimes inside an envelope if they're very small). I've found how necessary that is, because sometimes clients will come into the bindery and not realize that little piece of book is extremely important and suddenly it gets brushed onto the floor, or pushed aside, or other bad things.
Fortunately I've never lost significant parts of book, but this makes it much easier to keep that up. They come in several colors and depths, but I've stuck with white because I'm boring. Or traditional. Well, boring.
I have a second rack for books I've finished and are waiting to be sent off or picked up.
Like all good things it makes life simpler and better.
Led Zeppelin. I survived because of Led Zeppelin.
In 1977 I saw Zeppelin at the Kingdome. Back in those days all concerts were "festival seating" meaning no assigned seats. Clearly this was before The Who and Cincinnati. The Kingdome was a huge concrete dome and the sound was going to horrible, the only hope was to be down front. So I got there in the morning of the show and waited all day for them to let us in.
The point here is that when I got there everyone was having a great time. I got my spot in line and sat down. When the line moved I went with them and sat down. When they let us in I ran down on the field and as close to the front as I could, and sat down. By the time the concert started I was probably 30 yards from the stage. And folks were dropping like flies from having been standing for over 12 hours. A few songs in I was ten yards from the stage.
This scan shows the stub, just to prove I'm not lying here:
I should mention that it was so loud that I couldn't discern what songs they were playing until half an hour in when I think my ears got so numb that I could figure out what they were. Still it was fun and I have great memories of that show.
The point is that I learned success is dependent on sitting as much as you can, I think in every aspect of life. Unless you're a marathoner, then that might be difficult. Maybe I need to revise the lesson. Anyway, I did sit as much as I could this weekend and it was a good thing.
Here is a shot of the festival from the Arizona Daily Star:
They estimate that over 100,000 people attended. I had the same booth I had last year and had a great time. I pushed classes and repairs, and got a good response to both of them. The strange thing is that I really won't know how successful it was until a few months.
I also had some stuff I made around Christmas when I got curious about how many jigs I could use and how I could organize the work more effectively. More an exercise than anything else. Still I sold several things, which was a bonus.
Here is a shot of the booth. The weather was mid-70s each day. Perfect.
In this picture are our friends Jim and Lynne Owens, owners of Thorn Books. They're pretending to be customers. I'm pretending to help them. Hopefully a casting director will read this blog and hire me for blockbuster movie role. Notice how into character I am here, my "essence" is just pouring out of my pores, but not in an artificial or contrived way. Just like Lawrence Olivier, John Gielgud or the guy who played Greg Brady on the television show.
Diane came by to bring me lunch, which was a nice improvement over last year. I think you can see the difference between Diane and myself, she's playing a role where I fully inhabit a character. Can you see it?
A few folks brought damaged books by, which is always pretty fun. But mainly it was a chance to talk about to people about books, which is always fun.
It was pretty smashed on Saturday, but slower on Sunday - especially Sunday morning. Still, even though there were less people on Sunday, I ended up talking to about the same amount of people both days. Gave out lots of brochures, cards and class schedules. Really had a nice time.
It did occur to me that I should keep records during this, like count how many of each thing I handed out just to gauge interest from year to year. I do think I gave out many more than last year, but have no statistical proof of that. Doesn't matter on some level, but I'm kind of curious. And I like statistics. But the only stat that matters is how many people follow up.
This weekend I'm going to be at the Festival of Books here in Tucson. It's the fourth year of the Festival and I heard that it has become the third or fourth largest gathering of its type in the country. They expect around 100,000 people.
I did it last year and it was really fun. It's always nice to talk to people who are interested in what I do. Last year was the first time I did it and so I had no idea what to expect, what people would be interested in, how many people I'd actually talk to. As a result I used one table where I set up examples of repairs (because most people have no idea what a good book repair is) and brought some models of historic bindings.
One thing I find fascinating about books is how few people understand how they are made, or how they are intended to function. I truly believe that most people know more about how their car works, how the internal combustion engine works, than they know how their books function. I suppose I believe that because it explains why the public is to willing to buy incredibly poorly made books just because the cover is pretty, or because they like the content. Commercial bindings have become the Yugos of manufacturing, and that's a sad, sad thing.
But, with all these things, I think it creates a renaissance of hand made, quality books that a segment of the public appreciates and understands. I think most people would understand if it could be explained to them. Still, it's sad that the Kindles of the world are replacing awful bindings, instead of replacing well made bindings. It just doesn't feel like a fair fight.
A book from 1508 I repaired.
So that's what I try to do at the Festival. Show people how books were made, and how they should be made today. I'm avoiding my rant here about how books can be sewn by machine for less than a penny per section and less than a second per section. That means that the typical book could be manufactured in a sewn binding for less than 25 cents per book. (See how restrained I am about this, by not putting that last sentence in italics and underlining it?) Of course a sewn book on good paper will last centuries. Centuries.
A sewn book.
When I was at Washington students would come in with engineering textbooks which had fallen apart in a few weeks because they were glued bindings. For which they had paid over 75 dollars! Irony, eh? They obviously replaced them, but not doubt it just happened again. If they're going to produce crap then why not give up and run to the Nook? After all it feels like publishers (at least the large ones) aren't really producing books any more, they are just producing widgets that have the appearance of books.
The book in the picture just above was less than a month old and broke. Why? Because the people manufacturing the book had no idea how to make a book of that weight and heft strong enough to last longer than that. It was just a widget to them.
I spent the past two days getting my things together. It felt like packing for a trip where you just want to get on the plane because then there isn't anything more that can be done. It'll be nice to get set up on Saturday morning. I'll have some historical models, some new stuff to sell and information on upcoming classes.
Should be beautiful weather. And thousands of nice, book loving people. Now I just need to show them the exciting world of binding. And not rant too much.
I'm at booth 110, the same as last year. Stop by if you're there and say hi.
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