Beddall Bookbinding
Conservation & Restoration

Conservation & Restoration

A lot of the work a traditional hand bookbinder does falls under the description restoration and conservation. One of the basic tenets of today's binder is that we should never do anything to a book of value that cannot be undone. That usually means using soluable glues, pastes and other reversible techniques.

My first restoration was of a book of relatively minor monetory value although, as is usually the case, it had a high personal value for the person getting it "fixed" since it had been his father's. The hard part was finding the correct cloth with which to re-case the Book of Praise. Although the cloth was still available one usually has to buy 20 or 30 yards from the mills. This is not practical when all you need is 1/2 a yard to mend a book. If you can't talk a mill into sending a "sample" you sometimes have to resort to dying cloth to match, not usually too successful with such an odd colour.

picture of Fannie Farmer cookbook Fannie Farmer's CookBook is a favourite of people and we often get asked to fix them up. I did this one and, although I had my choice of cloths to recover, the client wanted to keep the endpapers intact because they contained useful charts. I lifted them off using a wet technique although I usually prefer to use a dry one because the covers were not going to be re-used. picture showing printered endpapers

I also do binding of periodicals and newspapers. Here's a binding of 15 days of the Times Colonist Newspaper from Victoria that I bind regularly. I also bind periodicals in full cloth as well.

Drop me a line and let me know how I can help you with restoring your treasures.




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