Category: Ramblings

This rebind may have been one of my favorites. 

I don’t remember all the details about the owner, but I do recall that one of his close relatives had used this book when attending a seminary. The book’s publishing date was in the early 1890’s, and it had been well bound in leather. However, the book had seen quite heavy usage. 

The original owner had taken copious notes, written in the margins in Greek. His printing was exquisite; he was obviously a detail-oriented person. We make it a habit to not read a person’s private notes they’ve written in the books we rebind for them, and this one was no exception. It helped, of course, that I can’t read Greek. Yet I did love the beauty of his writing as I inspected the book and prepared it for rebinding.
The book was originally bound in the 19^th century and earlier tradition of securing the coverboards to the text block using cords onto which the pages were sewn. The flyleafs were beautiful marbled paper, and the binding was hand sewn. After more than a century, the thread and spine were still tight. However, the leather was dried out and the hinge on both the front and back covers had given out. Because of the sewn-on-cord binding, quality paper, and good care, the book itself was still structurally sound. 

The current owner wanted a facsimile of the original cover for the rebind. We tried to match the look and feel of the original as closely as we could, with the tools at hand. Since the book was originally hand bound, we needed to cut the spine sewing apart and resew on new, longer cords in order to have enough length to attach new coverboards. I love the hand sewing process on these old books. It takes considerable time, but it is a soothing repetitive process that allows the mind to mull over thoughts that might come my way.
For the cover, we chose English calf with a die that would closely match what the owner thought looked like the original cover when it was new. The leather was cut to size, pared, and set to new coverboards that had been recently attached to the fresh sewing. Inside, we applied new marble papers to replicate the book’s original style.

The old coverboards could have been used, but the old leather was still well adhered to them. It would have been a tedious process to recover them. There was no sentimental writing on the old marbled paper, so the old cover was simply returned to the owner along with the rebound book. 
I loved the finished product so much that I actually hoped the owner would “forget” about picking it up. Alas, to my disappointment, the owner was just as excited as we were about this beautiful volume and didn’t hesitate to retrieve it upon notification that it was finished.
I never know what beautiful books will find their way to my recovery workshop, but books like this keep me excited about bookbinding.

Sometime later, I began to realize that my life wasn’t where it should be and I began looking for ways to correct what I knew to be wrong. Pastor Carney was a man I respected and one of the few to have made a significant impact in my life. I remembered that he had given me this book and I went looking for it. Sadly, after multiple moves, it had been relegated to the world of storage boxes. It took me some time, but I eventually found it and began using it regularly.

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