Irony #1 - Currently one of the most common book-making methods uses an all glue binding. This binding is weak, often falls apart immediately, and even when working properly makes it difficult to open a book completely; and it is called, Perfect Binding. That is the actual name of the binding method... Perfect...
Irony #2 - The book we will be repairing today, which fell apart because it used this terrible, poor quality, Perfect binding, is actually a catalog for archival, conservation, and preservation supplies... Naturally...
WARNING: Before I go any further, I'd like to emphasize that this is NOT a repair to use on a rare, expensive, or otherwise important book. So don't use this repair on your first editions. Go find a trained book conservator to work on important books like that. (If you need help finding a conservator, see our Stuff We Like section for a link to the AIC Caring for Your Treasures info, or contact us.)
This repair is meant for books that are recently published, which has an adhesive binding, that you probably bought from Borders, and it was not too terribly expensive, but expensive enough that you don't want to buy it again. For example, I recently used this method of repair on a gardening reference book. I had bought the book when it first came out about a year ago. The crappy binding just couldn't keep up with how many times I had to look up what I was doing wrong in the garden and the pages soon fell out in chunks, much like in the picture below of the catalog we are fixing today.
Not all adhesive bindings use terrible glue, but a lot do. The terrible-type glue is stiff, not very strong, and ages badly. Because it's stiff, you can't open the book fully without cracking the binding, and thereby hastening its demise. Because it's not very strong, it usually doesn't hold on well to the pages, especially if the paper is heavy, glossy, and slick, like they are in many contemporary books. Because the glue ages badly, regardless of how carefully you open the book, the binding just really isn't ever going to last long (especially if you leave it out in the sun, like my gardening book)
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| Detail of the notches on the edge of pages and the chunks of deteriorated glue that has already fallen off. |
You'll notice when these books start falling apart that the edge of the paper that was bound has notches cut into it. These notches are to help the glue have more paper surface to grip. Don't worry about those notches, they will help us later, when we rebind the broken book with better glue.
So the first step and really the only step we're going to cover today (because I'm tired), is to finish what the book's general crappiness started: coming apart. You can't fix the book until you've gotten all the pages loose, and all the old crappy glue off.
Usually half the pages have already fallen out, so you're already half done. With this particular catalog I was able to just pull off the remaining pages one by one, like I was pulling sheets off of a notepad. Then when all the sheets were loose, I just picked off any little clumps of glue still attached to the pages and to the cover spine with my fingernails. So all that stiff, yellow crap you see in the picture below was picked off completely.
Then I took a break. I'll post the rest of the treatment later (where we actually glue the thing back together in a better way, with a better glue). Try not to mix up the sequence of the pages in the meantime...
P.S. My thanks to Michele Hearts Paper for providing the non-archival catalog of archival supplies for our repair example.
-J
nice..
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