07 February, 2005

My Next Book Restoration Project



1881, D. Appleton & Co. New York

Included in this book are illustrations of the homes and libraries of The Fireside Poets and friends, complete with descriptions and short biographies. This is a gorgeous, gilt-edged, rare book I found a few years back, and am repairing and re-casing. It had a large, washed-out stain on the back that I was able to re-color. Around the same time, I removed the text block from the cover, cleaned off the old spine material, created a new spine, and am in the process of repairing and reinforcing the spine cover by color matching on Japanese Kozo. The spine cover is intact with the cover, and just needed some reinforcements underneath, before reattaching the new linen lining into the cover.

I am back in a vintage book restoration class, so I can finish up this project, and begin another one.
I have an 1885 paperback copy of Parables From Nature by Margaret Gatty. It is falling apart, so I am planning to case it (make it into a harback book) as soon as I'm finished with the Elder Poets re-casing. I'll be able to save the original paper cover and inlay it onto an inset in the new board cover. Doesn't that sound fun?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's a beautiful book. repairing books sounds tedious! But I'm glad someone does it :-)