We're all a bit quiet this weekend, which is actually quite nice. Darling daughter came down with a vomiting bug on Thursday evening and obviously hasn't been very well since then, and now I'm not feeling too good either. I doubt if I'll go down with bug but I'm definitely fighting it off. Despite the attendant lethargy I have managed to do the washing, clean the bathrooms, and spend three hours in the studio... Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day quietly relaxing! I hope you manage to have an relaxed weekend, too.
Hah! Scrub that bit: I've well and truly got the lurgy. In fact, I have got it worse than darling daughter and much worse than dearest husband. Still haven't managed to eat anything since Saturday morning although I am now trying a small bowl of plain white rice... As a weight loss plan it has its merits, but it's vile in every other way.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Monday, March 05, 2012
Lux in Arcana
If you, like me, have a bit of a thing about paper then you may also share my wonderment at old documents: scrolls and letters, books, maps, scraps, notes, lists and journals, the records of History and all our histories. I'm feeling less than poetic this evening so I can't muster a eulogy about the website Lux in Arcana, which accompanies an exhibition from the Vatican's secret archives. It is fascinating and for once the English language version is accessible and lyrical. I found the link - again! - through the Book Arts Listserve, and I could get absolutely lost in there. I just wish that our finances would permit a trip to the Capitoline Museum in Rome for a look-see before it closes in September. * Sigh *
60 linear metres of scroll in which over 200 Knights Templar confessed their sins as the French King wound up the order in 1311
The Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII: an assertion of his papal prerogatives, 27 of which were written down in 1075.
A letter from supporters of Henry VIII to Pope Clement VII, urging him to agree to the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Well, we all know where that ended up don't we? "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived"... like most of the signatories too, as it happened.
A letter from Empress Helena-Wang (Ming Dynasty) to Pope Innocent X in 1650, written on silk, notifying the Pope of her conversion to Christianity, and that of her son. The letter was wrapped up and stored inside an inscribed bamboo stick and carried to Italy by the priest who converted her - taking 5 years to arrive!
60 linear metres of scroll in which over 200 Knights Templar confessed their sins as the French King wound up the order in 1311
The Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII: an assertion of his papal prerogatives, 27 of which were written down in 1075.
A letter from supporters of Henry VIII to Pope Clement VII, urging him to agree to the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Well, we all know where that ended up don't we? "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived"... like most of the signatories too, as it happened.
A letter from Empress Helena-Wang (Ming Dynasty) to Pope Innocent X in 1650, written on silk, notifying the Pope of her conversion to Christianity, and that of her son. The letter was wrapped up and stored inside an inscribed bamboo stick and carried to Italy by the priest who converted her - taking 5 years to arrive!
Sunday, March 04, 2012
New work
I owe Andy at the Nexus Gallery in Bellingen a bit of an apology - well actually I've already apologised but clearly still feeling guilty! Despite the fact that I got my reminder about the show several months in advance, as always, this one has really crept up on me and I have been horribly disorganised. Then we had a "misunderstanding" about the subject of flyers for the show which means I missed out on a big mailshot and... you can see that things haven't been plain sailing. I've been looking at lots of cosmological equations as part of my preparations for this show, but at the moment the one that stares out at me is work + children + money worries + fatigue = recipe for HUGE last minute panic. YOU know what I mean!
Luckily I was able to call in a favour with my mate Willis who kindly spent last Saturday with me, screen printing the backgrounds on to five slates. We used a mid-grey with aluminium dust mixed into the medium so that it has a faint shimmer when dry, and printed a series of graphs and equations to do with particle physics and cosmology.
I love the flaky surface of the slates! It rubs off, but for me that is part of the fun of them and anyway, different parts of each slate are different so it doesn't flake off everywhere.
You can just about see the sheen of the metal particles in the silk screen ink.
Back in the studio I laid them all out and started engraving, scraping and gilding them - 23 3/4 carat gold leaf, in case you're interested.
I asked Dave from the Regional Gallery how he'd come up with a hanging system for the slates I had in there last year and he told me the secret: windscreen washer tubing and 9.5mm brake vacuum pipe on 65mm self-tapping timber screws. You twist a longer piece of the narrower tubing onto the screw, then push a short piece and then a longer piece on top. You screw two of these assemblies into the wall along the bottom edge of the slates, and the slates themselves fit into the gap between the two shorter pieces of tube, held in place by the inner pipe. Then you hold the slates on top of the two bottom screw assemblies and screw in the top two screws. Finally you put an end cap on the screw and, in my case, colour it black with a marker pen!
The gallery is a quirky little annexe to the main space which I had to myself a couple of years ago. It was literally built onto the side of the main building so the timber cladding of the old external wall forms the inner surface of the side gallery - perfect for screwing slates onto!
Fingers crossed I sell some work. The Nexus Gallery charges a very reasonable 25% commission and although I have bowed to pressure from all over the place to increase my prices, the work is still priced to sell. If you're in or near Bellingen, drop in and have a look! The Old Butter Factory houses a number of artisans as well as the gallery, and they do a nice coffee and lunch.
Luckily I was able to call in a favour with my mate Willis who kindly spent last Saturday with me, screen printing the backgrounds on to five slates. We used a mid-grey with aluminium dust mixed into the medium so that it has a faint shimmer when dry, and printed a series of graphs and equations to do with particle physics and cosmology.
I love the flaky surface of the slates! It rubs off, but for me that is part of the fun of them and anyway, different parts of each slate are different so it doesn't flake off everywhere.
You can just about see the sheen of the metal particles in the silk screen ink.
Back in the studio I laid them all out and started engraving, scraping and gilding them - 23 3/4 carat gold leaf, in case you're interested.
I asked Dave from the Regional Gallery how he'd come up with a hanging system for the slates I had in there last year and he told me the secret: windscreen washer tubing and 9.5mm brake vacuum pipe on 65mm self-tapping timber screws. You twist a longer piece of the narrower tubing onto the screw, then push a short piece and then a longer piece on top. You screw two of these assemblies into the wall along the bottom edge of the slates, and the slates themselves fit into the gap between the two shorter pieces of tube, held in place by the inner pipe. Then you hold the slates on top of the two bottom screw assemblies and screw in the top two screws. Finally you put an end cap on the screw and, in my case, colour it black with a marker pen!
The gallery is a quirky little annexe to the main space which I had to myself a couple of years ago. It was literally built onto the side of the main building so the timber cladding of the old external wall forms the inner surface of the side gallery - perfect for screwing slates onto!
Fingers crossed I sell some work. The Nexus Gallery charges a very reasonable 25% commission and although I have bowed to pressure from all over the place to increase my prices, the work is still priced to sell. If you're in or near Bellingen, drop in and have a look! The Old Butter Factory houses a number of artisans as well as the gallery, and they do a nice coffee and lunch.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
test post to see if I've been click-jacked!
I'm posting a link to my other blog, BookArtObject, in an effort to see how/where the sites have been click-jacked...
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Go away, I'm reading
I was reading a back-log of emails from the BookArts Listserve and came across this, courtesy of Margaret Fenney, and it's fun! I am going to print some out for myself...
Monday, February 13, 2012
A weekend first
This weekend we finally went camping, to Boorkoom campsite just south of Minniewater, about an hour and a half north of Coffs Harbour. I know that thousands of families do this regularly and it isn't a big deal, but for us it was new territory, not least because we didn't have a tent until one of my brothers-in-law very kindly donated his old tent to us at Christmas. Thanks, Pete! He hasn't used it in a few years but it's a fairly modern design with light-weight poles. Darling daughter and I put it up on Monday afternoon, thinking it would be a good idea to have conquered the basics before setting up camp on Friday evening! We were right: the tent is very big and the instructions are very brief, so it was great to have worked out what goes where before we all fell apart on the night...
We went with very good friends of ours, Taja and Robin and the two girls and one of their friends so we had a total of 4 adults and 4 children which worked well. The campsite has a gas barbeque and a composting toilet; we brought small gas stoves and our own water.
This is our Tent Mahal: it is ENORMOUS! The main tent would easily sleep four people, if not five or six, and then there is a separate room at the front with a net insert that darling daughter had all to herself as her bedroom.
The whole experience was great - apart from the numerous insect species who bypassed Robin and Taja in order to feast on dearest husband and me. This is despite large quantities of insect repellent, so I don't have any idea what works! I am one large itch with dozens of bites, some big, some small and most in undesirable areas. Dearest husband is in a much WORSE way: his back is a large mass of lumps and bites including one very impressive wound the size of my little fingernail: I don't want to think too hard about what caused it! I hope we all stop itching soon, but meantime I will keep applying the haemorrhoid cream (the largest % of Lignocaine in an over-the-counter remedy, in case you're interested, and thus excellent for insect bites!).
Just in case you thought we had it easy I want to tell you that on Saturday morning the skies darkened, the wind howled, and the rain came down, just as Taja and I were out walking with the girls. Robin and my husband had stayed behind and luckily thought to put up a large tarpaulin for a shelter, but we bore the brunt of it on the beach and came home uniformly dripping, as was our tent. Sadly a few years in a bag has loosened all that lovely tape that keeps the seams waterproof, and much of it peeled off as the tent was being put up and taken down. We had thought ahead and taken a roll of plastic builders' film which we were able to place in between the tent and the fly, but only after we discovered how wet everything was! Luckily the weather after the storm was hot and by the time we packed up to come home everything was dry again; I didn't want to try drying off a huge tent in the car port in our current humid weather...
What was the bad weather doing while we began to dry off ? Why, the storm went south, of course, arriving in Coffs Harbour some time that afternoon:
When we got back we found trees down everywhere (you can imagine what our 1.5km dirt track looked like, wending its way through the woodland!), and a falling branch cracked one of our solar panels - although it is 1 out of 30 panels so we're still OK.
Hooray for camping! We need to buy our own big tarpaulin to put over the tent in case of rain, but otherwise we're older, wiser, more tanned and definitely bitten to pieces, but happy!
We went with very good friends of ours, Taja and Robin and the two girls and one of their friends so we had a total of 4 adults and 4 children which worked well. The campsite has a gas barbeque and a composting toilet; we brought small gas stoves and our own water.
This is our Tent Mahal: it is ENORMOUS! The main tent would easily sleep four people, if not five or six, and then there is a separate room at the front with a net insert that darling daughter had all to herself as her bedroom.
The whole experience was great - apart from the numerous insect species who bypassed Robin and Taja in order to feast on dearest husband and me. This is despite large quantities of insect repellent, so I don't have any idea what works! I am one large itch with dozens of bites, some big, some small and most in undesirable areas. Dearest husband is in a much WORSE way: his back is a large mass of lumps and bites including one very impressive wound the size of my little fingernail: I don't want to think too hard about what caused it! I hope we all stop itching soon, but meantime I will keep applying the haemorrhoid cream (the largest % of Lignocaine in an over-the-counter remedy, in case you're interested, and thus excellent for insect bites!).
Just in case you thought we had it easy I want to tell you that on Saturday morning the skies darkened, the wind howled, and the rain came down, just as Taja and I were out walking with the girls. Robin and my husband had stayed behind and luckily thought to put up a large tarpaulin for a shelter, but we bore the brunt of it on the beach and came home uniformly dripping, as was our tent. Sadly a few years in a bag has loosened all that lovely tape that keeps the seams waterproof, and much of it peeled off as the tent was being put up and taken down. We had thought ahead and taken a roll of plastic builders' film which we were able to place in between the tent and the fly, but only after we discovered how wet everything was! Luckily the weather after the storm was hot and by the time we packed up to come home everything was dry again; I didn't want to try drying off a huge tent in the car port in our current humid weather...
What was the bad weather doing while we began to dry off ? Why, the storm went south, of course, arriving in Coffs Harbour some time that afternoon:
When we got back we found trees down everywhere (you can imagine what our 1.5km dirt track looked like, wending its way through the woodland!), and a falling branch cracked one of our solar panels - although it is 1 out of 30 panels so we're still OK.
Hooray for camping! We need to buy our own big tarpaulin to put over the tent in case of rain, but otherwise we're older, wiser, more tanned and definitely bitten to pieces, but happy!
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Rain, rain, go away
I'm officially fed up with the rain now. Today it started raining some time after 5pm (lucky I took my wellies and a rain coat down to the studio just in case, eh?) and in the intervening 4-ish hours we've had approximately 4 inches (just over 10 centimetres) of rain, in addition to the 33+ inches (over 80cms) of rain we've had this month according to our weather station. I think our position on the side of a hill near the sea definitely affects things: the clouds seem to dump their water on us, en route to Coffs Harbour, as our rainfall is noticeably higher than in town.
On the one hand, this is great! We have no mains connections of any kind so we rely completely on water draining off our roofs and into our water tanks and - extra advantage! - in this sort of weather we don't have to water the garden, no sir. On the other hand, it's a pain in the backside: our dirt track is both washing away and being eroded by a certain lunatic driver who lives next door, which makes getting in and out difficult; we're using LOTS of diesel for the generator, which is an unexpected expense; and everything is going mouldy...
The drainage works we had done at the end of last year have really helped and in fact we haven't had any mould until the relentless downpours of the last two weeks. This time last year I was going frantic, cleaning the furniture off every couple of days and despairing about the state of my shoes - if I've only started moaning about it now then things are definitely better than last year! But it's getting boring now. This morning I was woken by the unusual event of sunshine reaching into our bedroom, which meant leaping up and putting some washing on as we don't have an electric dryer. I managed two loads of washing, both of which dried in the 6 hours or so of sunshine that we had, but this evening I went into the back room and noticed all the cupboards have mildew on the doors, anything wooden has a thin layer of blue mould on it, and even the floor in the pantry is mouldy. Yuk. And there's not a lot of point trying to do anything about it right now: best to wait until later this week when apparently the rain will dry up a bit and we might have a bit more sunshine. Then I'll be able to open all the doors and windows and start washing everything down with vinegar, tea tree oil, oil of cloves and a splash of dishwashing liquid and hope that it all dries out.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Bargain books
Recently I went to the local Tender Centre and placed a successful bid for a box of tatty books. For those of you unfamiliar with Tender Centres, they're places where people send unwanted items for a silent auction: you turn up on the viewing days, arm yourself with a clipboard and a bidding form, fill in your contact details and make an offer against the lot numbers. On the Sunday evening you get an email that directs you to look on-line at your account and see if you were successful, unsuccessful or able to negotiate with the vendor.
A couple of weekends ago we went along and placed several bids, won a few, failed on three, and came away with the above-mentioned box of books, which was cleverly disguised amongst the bric-a-brac by being placed in between a box of decaying encyclopedias (encyclopedii?) and a LARGE box of evangelical tomes on Christian marriage (you know what I think about evangelical Christianity). We also bid successfully for a box of fossilised wood, a pair of hedge clippers and a sander. I could have been forgiven for failing to notice the books, I feel, but I'm glad I didn't.
In amongst the beautiful covers of "With Nelson in Command" by Robert Leighton ("A Story of the Battle of the Baltic"), a volume of Churchill's early life and two volumes of "An Historian's History of the World" (1889) was a battered book block with a black covers... which turned out to be a 1729 King James Bible. 1729! That's older than the history of white settlement in Australia. I'll have to show you the Nelson book in a future post: it's hilarious, but right now I'm most excited about the bible, not least because I'm dyslexic with numbers (if you see what I mean) and initially read the date of publication as 1792 before I realised I was out by 63 years!
To be honest with you, I'm not sure what to do with it. You can see the beautiful front cover, but the back cover is missing. The spine is fused to the book block and I know NOTHING about 18th century bindings so I'm not sure how it is constructed or how to dissect it - if I had the courage to dissect it, which I don't. I'm not even sure if the cover is thin leather on board or embossed paper on board, although I do know that the hand marbled end-papers (front only, sadly) are exquisite. The book block itself is in extraordinarily good condition, especially considering the humid conditions of sub-tropical New South Wales! As well as the Old and New Testaments there is also a Psalter at the end of the book and I must look and see what the front page of the Psalter says.
Had I not bid successfully for the box, I wonder what would have happened to the books? The Tender Centre system allows items to be shown for two consecutive sales, after which they are returned to the vendor if not sold. I find it hard to understand that the vendor didn't realise the value of the box: the other books are probably worth $100 or so each, to the right purchaser of course. In a new country it is thrilling to hold in one's hand a book that pre-dates 'modern' (i.e. 'white') Australia. How amazing to hold something that is almost 300 years old! I can't wait to show it to the kids in my daughter's class - and I can't wait to find out more about the bible itself, if that's possible. How did it end up in a sale room in Coffs Harbour? Almost 300 years ago it was printed in Oxford, England... it's obviously had a heck of a life since then.
A couple of weekends ago we went along and placed several bids, won a few, failed on three, and came away with the above-mentioned box of books, which was cleverly disguised amongst the bric-a-brac by being placed in between a box of decaying encyclopedias (encyclopedii?) and a LARGE box of evangelical tomes on Christian marriage (you know what I think about evangelical Christianity). We also bid successfully for a box of fossilised wood, a pair of hedge clippers and a sander. I could have been forgiven for failing to notice the books, I feel, but I'm glad I didn't.
In amongst the beautiful covers of "With Nelson in Command" by Robert Leighton ("A Story of the Battle of the Baltic"), a volume of Churchill's early life and two volumes of "An Historian's History of the World" (1889) was a battered book block with a black covers... which turned out to be a 1729 King James Bible. 1729! That's older than the history of white settlement in Australia. I'll have to show you the Nelson book in a future post: it's hilarious, but right now I'm most excited about the bible, not least because I'm dyslexic with numbers (if you see what I mean) and initially read the date of publication as 1792 before I realised I was out by 63 years!
To be honest with you, I'm not sure what to do with it. You can see the beautiful front cover, but the back cover is missing. The spine is fused to the book block and I know NOTHING about 18th century bindings so I'm not sure how it is constructed or how to dissect it - if I had the courage to dissect it, which I don't. I'm not even sure if the cover is thin leather on board or embossed paper on board, although I do know that the hand marbled end-papers (front only, sadly) are exquisite. The book block itself is in extraordinarily good condition, especially considering the humid conditions of sub-tropical New South Wales! As well as the Old and New Testaments there is also a Psalter at the end of the book and I must look and see what the front page of the Psalter says.
Had I not bid successfully for the box, I wonder what would have happened to the books? The Tender Centre system allows items to be shown for two consecutive sales, after which they are returned to the vendor if not sold. I find it hard to understand that the vendor didn't realise the value of the box: the other books are probably worth $100 or so each, to the right purchaser of course. In a new country it is thrilling to hold in one's hand a book that pre-dates 'modern' (i.e. 'white') Australia. How amazing to hold something that is almost 300 years old! I can't wait to show it to the kids in my daughter's class - and I can't wait to find out more about the bible itself, if that's possible. How did it end up in a sale room in Coffs Harbour? Almost 300 years ago it was printed in Oxford, England... it's obviously had a heck of a life since then.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Book First Aid, Part Three
What, you thought that was it on the first aid front? No! My Italian friend gave me two books, the second being this paperback which was nonetheless sewn in signatures - without tapes - and glued straight into a spine which had completely disintegrated.
After thinking hard I decided the best thing to do was to salvage as much of the cover images as I could and re-glue them onto proper hard covers, mending the individual pages and sewing them onto tapes and into a full cloth binding.
Something I forgot to photograph was the smoke damage on some of the pages. I asked my colleagues on the Book Arts Listserve how best to deal with the discolouration of the pages using a low-tech solution and they recommended a dry cleaning pad - which I just happen to have. Used gently the pad abraded the soot off the pages: it wasn't perfect but it did help and ultimately the pages were readable if not fully 'clean'. And I've conquered my fear of hard cover binding!
I've thoroughly enjoyed restoring both books: there's the technical satisfaction of doing a half-way decent job, but also the happy thought that I've prolonged the useful life of the books by another few decades (I hope) which makes it all worthwhile. No cash has exchanged hands: instead we'll be bartering for services in kind in due course! The owner is a tree surgeon, after all...
After thinking hard I decided the best thing to do was to salvage as much of the cover images as I could and re-glue them onto proper hard covers, mending the individual pages and sewing them onto tapes and into a full cloth binding.
Something I forgot to photograph was the smoke damage on some of the pages. I asked my colleagues on the Book Arts Listserve how best to deal with the discolouration of the pages using a low-tech solution and they recommended a dry cleaning pad - which I just happen to have. Used gently the pad abraded the soot off the pages: it wasn't perfect but it did help and ultimately the pages were readable if not fully 'clean'. And I've conquered my fear of hard cover binding!
I've thoroughly enjoyed restoring both books: there's the technical satisfaction of doing a half-way decent job, but also the happy thought that I've prolonged the useful life of the books by another few decades (I hope) which makes it all worthwhile. No cash has exchanged hands: instead we'll be bartering for services in kind in due course! The owner is a tree surgeon, after all...
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Book First Aid, Part Two
Once the spine was reinforced and dried I was able to take the book out of the book press and check to see how strong the sewn-in tapes were - and they're fine! Phew. Then I was able to glue in the end papers: obviously I couldn't do what I would usually do, which is to paste a strip of mull along the folded edge of the end papers and wrap that around the first and last signatures before sewing onto the tapes. Instead, I had to rely on a thin strip of glue along the folded edge of the end papers which adhered them to the first and last pages. I could have simply glued the whole of the first and last pages to the corresponding end papers, I suppose, but the last page of the book was printed with the final columns of the index, which I didn't want to lose!
While the end papers dried in place I made a replacement spine out of thin card, kraft paper and black book cloth. I glued on the fragment of the original spine with the book's title and author.
The kraft paper strip acted as an additional support for the new spine, extending inside the covers. I couldn't extend the book cloth as far because it would have obscured the gold embossed lettering on the front cover. In the photo I haven't trimmed the kraft paper, but once the book block was in place I trimmed the upper and lower edges to match the edges of the end papers.
If I say so myself, I think the end product is not bad for 5 hours' work. The new head and tail bands and the two book marks smarten the book up, and their red and gold colouring is picked up by the beautiful hand-marbled end papers which I bought in Italy - just right for an Italian book!
While the end papers dried in place I made a replacement spine out of thin card, kraft paper and black book cloth. I glued on the fragment of the original spine with the book's title and author.
The kraft paper strip acted as an additional support for the new spine, extending inside the covers. I couldn't extend the book cloth as far because it would have obscured the gold embossed lettering on the front cover. In the photo I haven't trimmed the kraft paper, but once the book block was in place I trimmed the upper and lower edges to match the edges of the end papers.
If I say so myself, I think the end product is not bad for 5 hours' work. The new head and tail bands and the two book marks smarten the book up, and their red and gold colouring is picked up by the beautiful hand-marbled end papers which I bought in Italy - just right for an Italian book!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Book First Aid, Part One
Just before the end of last term a friend asked if I could help him save a couple of his books from complete disintegration and although I have NO experience or training in book or paper restoration or conservation I did - rashly - agree to help. I can't de-acidify paper, invisibly mend torn pages or get rid of foxing, but I reckon I can use archival materials to re-bind something so that it will last a little bit longer. Neither of the books is 'precious', in the sense of being valuable, but Andrea loves them for their practicality and the fact that the wisdom they contain is now hard to find. Both are books of recipes: not food recipes but recipes for things like cement, creating different coloured patination on metals, making ink... that sort of thing. All in Italian, as Andrea is Italian, so I don't have a clue what else the books contain but I find them fascinating.
Task one was to separate the covers from the book block and the spine, using a scalpel. The front and back covers are a bit stained but otherwise quite robust, but I couldn't successfully detach the end papers (which were not that special) so I decided to carefully tear them back and put in new end papers, using some Italian hand-marbled paper from my stash.
I cut out the title of the book from the original spine, thinking to glue it onto the new spine so that if the book sits on a shelf Andrea can still see what it is called.
When I took the book block out of the covers I discovered that the sewing is still in perfect condition, but that there are only stubs of the tapes left - and when I say "stubs" I mean about a centimetre! Clearly not enough to make a firm connection with new covers so I decided to sew new tapes to the old tape stubs, hoping that the resulting double layer wouldn't be too bulky under the new end papers.
Before I could sew on new tapes, though, I had to clean the tapes and the spine of the old cow glue. At least, I presume it's cow glue, because I remember the smell... Reading up on the web I found that I could safely remove the excess glue and scraps of paper by damping down the spine and tapes with distilled water and a sponge. I put freezer paper and a dry cloth in between the tapes and the bookblock in order to prevent the pages getting wet. To my surprise, the glue softened very easily and I was able to scrape it carefully away with my scalpel, revealing the signatures and the stitching.
I sewed on new tapes using a fine linen thread and a small needle, sort of darning the old tape into the new tape in order to weave them together as much as possible.
Once the new tapes were in place I was able to reinforce the spine with mull, gently round it, and leave it to dry in my book press overnight.
Task one was to separate the covers from the book block and the spine, using a scalpel. The front and back covers are a bit stained but otherwise quite robust, but I couldn't successfully detach the end papers (which were not that special) so I decided to carefully tear them back and put in new end papers, using some Italian hand-marbled paper from my stash.
I cut out the title of the book from the original spine, thinking to glue it onto the new spine so that if the book sits on a shelf Andrea can still see what it is called.
When I took the book block out of the covers I discovered that the sewing is still in perfect condition, but that there are only stubs of the tapes left - and when I say "stubs" I mean about a centimetre! Clearly not enough to make a firm connection with new covers so I decided to sew new tapes to the old tape stubs, hoping that the resulting double layer wouldn't be too bulky under the new end papers.
Before I could sew on new tapes, though, I had to clean the tapes and the spine of the old cow glue. At least, I presume it's cow glue, because I remember the smell... Reading up on the web I found that I could safely remove the excess glue and scraps of paper by damping down the spine and tapes with distilled water and a sponge. I put freezer paper and a dry cloth in between the tapes and the bookblock in order to prevent the pages getting wet. To my surprise, the glue softened very easily and I was able to scrape it carefully away with my scalpel, revealing the signatures and the stitching.
I sewed on new tapes using a fine linen thread and a small needle, sort of darning the old tape into the new tape in order to weave them together as much as possible.
Once the new tapes were in place I was able to reinforce the spine with mull, gently round it, and leave it to dry in my book press overnight.
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