Anyone who handles old books knows the above images well: the spine lining, glue, or endsheets on that 20th-century case binding have finally given out, and the textblock has all but ripped itself out of its covering. If the cloth case is also in tatters, a cloth re-back is often the surest course of action to get the book back into working order. Oftentimes, however, when it's only the cheap mull or excessive hide glue that have loosed the book from its place, the case itself is in more or less perfect order, and it seems a shame to carve it up to complete a full re-back. Enter the Cloth Re-casing, a sort of modified reback procedure that offers the strengths of a full reback while maintaining even more of the original case materials, resulting in an almost invisible repair.
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'Useful, with a Pleasant Degree of Humor': The Farmer's Almanack - Robert B. Thomas, 1795, 17973/24/2020 Cheap books can be an incredibly dangerous delight. It's one thing to walk out of the Brattle parking lot with as many $1 grabs as you can carry, but in these isolatory times, the internet makes all sorts of 'deals' only a PayPal click away. It's all a collector can do to keep within their budget. That said, my most recent Craigslist purchase, at least in terms of historical insight and uniqueness, was worth every penny: two 18th-century farmer’s almanacks, from 1795 and 1797, with much more than meteorological projections packed between and across their covers.
Brattle Book Shop, Boston. Anyone who's been know it's simply impossible to visit and leave empty-handed. From my perusal of the $5 carts in the parking lot outside the shop yesterday comes this luscious volume from Samuel Johnson's The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets with Critical Observations on their Works, printed and published in London in 1781.
At long last, a classic dust jacket is freed of its pressure-tape mummification and returns to its corner store display a little more lively than it was a month ago.
I'm currently in hot, slow pursuit of a dairy-related enamel sign screwed to a seemingly decades-unused wooden door in an alley on Boston's North End, less than a block from the North Bennet Street School. While making my way back from yet another attempt at first contact, I spied this familiar title, in a sorry state, through the window of souvenir shop next to The Paul Revere House. A damaged book with a story based in Boston, during my first month in the city for a book restoration program? They say there're no such things as coincidences...
A couple years ago in San Francisco, a friend and I stumbled across an antique storefront's going-out-of-business sale in a warehouse in SOMA. It always fascinates me to think about how all these strange objects from across huge swaths of time and space and culture can end up sitting side-by-side, to consider their converging histories. Maybe a thing is a new arrival to the shelves and crates, just recently pulled from circulation, or maybe it's been sitting there since the beginning, waiting to be recognized for something - usefulness, beauty, novelty, curiosity - once again. I found a couple of black cloth, gold-stamped photo albums in less than fair condition, pasted full of black and white images from the ~1900s-1930s. That potentially permanent recorded evidence of so many single moments in time, with all the context packed into those pieces of paper, is a time capsule, proof of existence, for whatever that's worth. The doers - the picture takers and takees - felt it valuable enough to record, and I have a strong reverence any figment of personal creativity actualized, for the inspiration potential of any publicized idea. I bought the albums, a few dozen memories of ancient strangers, with the intention of cleaning them up a bit and giving them a place to stay for a while.
Every machine has a story and, in spite of it, deserves to serve its original function diligently until the steel itself turns to dust. Right up to that moment, it's a matter of respect to maintain its mechanics, keep it slicked and clean, give it the chance to do what it was built to do.
It seems only right to christen the inclusion of my typewriter collection and repair antics on this blog with the first machine I ever purchased, a 1919 Underwood Standard #3. This model features a 16" platen and an extended frame to support it... as such, it weighs about 60 lbs and is far from a 'portable' model. I received it in pretty decent shape, albeit with some dust, sticky keys, and a missing ribbon. New protective endsheets added Brown cloth case and title label recovered from the original paperback back cover. Nothing will stop the paper in this mass-produced volume from acidifying, browning, and eventually turning to dust, but until then, I can rest easy knowing that it has clothes enough to thrive in the hands and eyes of a few more readers. On a recent walk through Washington, DC, I stopped at a Little Free Library (and how could I not?) and picked up a worn paperback edition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Having recently moved to the city, I've been desperate for a reason to pick up a bonefolder again - here was my reprieve! |