Restoration hand binding

Book Conservation

Book Restoration is one only one part of the larger topic of Book Conservation that includes cleaning, repairing, consoliding and preserving manuscript and printed materials. These may be books, albums, letters, broadsides, sheet music, etc. Sometimes, the protecting covering of these items is more important than the text itself and only it is in need of restoration, sometimes both the text and its covering need treatment. As in every trades involved in this type of business, there are many schools of thoughts advocating as many philosophy. One of these is that the least amount of manipulation and the less disturbance to the object restored, the better for it. For this, the conservator would clean and consolidate the item in question and build a box with archival materials to house it. This "first do no harm" approach to conservation is widely accepted in the field, as opposed to more drastic restoration philosophies.

Restoration

In Restoration hand binding, the pages and book covers are often hundreds of years old and the handling of these pages has to be undertaken with great care, and a delicate hand. The binding archival process can extend a book’s life for many decades, and is necessary in order to preserve books that sometimes are limited to a small handful of remaining copies worldwide. It is vitally urgent that such books are cared for in the most loving manner befitting the books’ rarity and subject matter. The first step in saving and preserving a book is found in its deconstruction. The pages need to be separated from the covers and the stitching removed. This is done as delicately as possible, all restoration is done at this point, be it the restoring of page tears. Various techniques are employed to repair the various types of page damage that might have occurred during the life of the book. Master Bookbinders are qualified to undertake restoration and traditional hand binding, and use great care to make sure this process does not further damage the pages, then they are added to the various groups of page signatures, which when collated are beaten flat and pressed. The preparation of the "foundations" of the book could mean the difference between a beautiful work of art and a useless stack of paper and leather. The sections are then hand sewn in the style of its period into book form, and great care is taken to use the proper stitching of the period in which the book was made.

Materials used in bookbinding

The next step is the creation of the cover; hand-tanned leather, which is dyed using vegetable dyes, hand marbled papers can be used, Finally the cover is hand-tooled in gold leaf. The design of the book cover involves the hand-tooling, where an extremely thin layer of gold is applied to the cover. Such designs can be lettering, symbols, or magical sigils, depending on the nature of any particular project.