Mending with Love

Part of my job is to repair books, and while it pains me to see books in disrepair, I'm generally crafty and artsy and truly enjoy the process of mending them.

Plus, it's satisfying to see the finished product ready to go out to the public again.

Over the past few years, the amount of serious mending I've done has diminished. The library has opted more for weeding, reordering, or sending them to an outside company to be rebound. So, up until recently, most of my repairs had been ripped pages and recovering dust jackets.

We've had some staffing changes from pre- to post-pandemic, and I just got to dive in to a significant pile of damaged books. I wanted to share a couple of before-and-afters with you, as well as discuss some of the trends and challenges I've noticed.

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For starters, so much more can be done with hardbound books than paperbound!

Once a paperbound book starts to fall apart, it's a goner, especially the mass market paperbacks. The glue and paper holding them together is so thin that once it cracks or gets old enough that is starts to break down, the whole book falls apart. When faced with a desperate librarian, I have occasionally used some stop gap measures of reinforcing the cracked spine or trying to re-glue the pages, but now there's a weak point and a faultline for the stress put on the book. The book can maybe get a couple more circulations (depending on how the patrons treat it), but then the crack fully breaks or the pages next to the repair start falling out, and it's off the deep end.

Hardbound books, on the other hand, can be glued and reinforced and rebound and reattached in so many different ways before they are too far gone.

A common issue I fix is illustrated below. The back flyleaf (usually along with whatever the very last page of the book is) becomes detached from the rest of the binding. It's fully secure to the back cover, the rest of the binding is perfectly intact, but for some reason this quarter inch comes lose.

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I don't know what causes it or why I see it so often in new books, but I'm thankful it's an easy fix. A little more glue on the binding and you'd never know that bit had peeled back in the first place. Given that this problem plagues newer releases rather than the older parts of our collection, I figure it has to be related to some change in how they are manufactured.

I do wonder what the libraries that don't have staff to fix such things do with them.

Less common, and what I classify as a more serious repair, is a break in the middle of the book. As I said, with a paperbound book this might be the end of the road, but a hardbound book I can reattach. This particular example we caught early enough that a bit of glue was all it took. I have also mended books with binding tape when something like this gets even worse (binding tape is a strip of fabric that you glue along the back of the spine; it does the job of the mesh in my photo examples and holds the pages together).

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Hardbound books can also be entirely rebound. We send our books to a company that photocopies the cover, cuts of the original cover (and a bit of the spine to remove the previous bindings), and completely recovers them. As you can see in my photos, hardbound books usually have enough of a gutter (the blank space between the text and the spine) that this can be done multiple times before the process has the potential to interfere with reading the text. It can be done with paperbound books, and we have done it, but usually only once, if that. Paperbacks are designed for economy, so there is not a lot of blank space to work with.

What I love about this process is that it means that we can mend a hardbound book in house several times, including several minor fixes and at least one more major repair, and then send it to get rebound and start the process over. This lets us get so much more life out of the book! And that means a lot to us and our patrons because, rather than follow the more modern book store model, our library tries to maintain a deeper collection so that you can still get book one of the series you recently discovered that just published book ten.

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On a related note, it is a pet peeve of mine when people try to fix books with tape.

More specifically, patrons "fixing" library books with scotch tape.

There have been so many times that I've been given a book that had been salvageable and will now have to be recycled because a helpful person taped it.

The typical scenario is that someone rips a page of the book they're reading. Happens to everyone, no need to fret. Then, that someone grabs a handy piece of scotch tape and tapes the rip back together, and I die a little inside.

In a library book, that page gets turned an insane number of times. While that piece of tape did technically fix the first rip, the page now has an often stressed section with different thickness and rigidity, which means the page is now even more likely to rip than before, and it will happen at the edges of the tape.

Why this is such a frustrating problem, in addition to the potential for additional damage, is that glue does not stick to tape. So now, I can't properly mend the new rips in the page because I can't glue them back together with the tape there, and it becomes a vicious cycle of tape and destruction. This problem is exacerbated when the issue is not just a rip but a page that has fallen out or some failing binding that someone taped back together, because then the book also can't ever be sent to be rebound. Glue does not stick to tape. If we tried to rebind it, the new binding wouldn't stick and the problem page or spot of binding would still be an unattached problem.

Plus, it's just surprisingly difficult to line things up properly when taping them together.