This well-loved personal bible was brought into the College Press with a worn, decaying cover, only held together by packing tape. It was a limp leather binding with a hollow spine, the cover only attached to the text block by the endpages.
The College Press has modern bookbinding equipment, which could have been used to give the book a paper or chipboard cover. However, because I was already engaged in a project involving more traditional methods of binding, it was given to me to work on.
I began by removing the leather from the endpages with an X-Acto knife and careful fingers. Because the leather did not peel off cleanly, I decided to remove the outermost half of the endpages on both sides of the text block.
With the cover and half of the endpages removed, I added new ones by glueing them to the remaining inner half of the existing pages.
Once the new endpages were added, I reinforced the spine with a strip of mull and a generous coat of glue. I also added a new bookmark ribbon, and repaired the headbands. I would have liked to add new headbands altogether, but because of time constraints, I would not have been able to obtain them quickly enough. Instead, I cleaned, straightened, and re-glued them in place.
Finally, the leather was cut to size, aligned, and glued to the endpages.
The result was a clean, rebound personal bible that should remain useable for many years to come! The customer was extremely satisfied, and I was happy to be able to use my binding skills to preserve such an object of importance.
Project completed March 3-13, 2017. Published March 20, 2017.
J.D. Smirl 