Yeoman's in the Fork Blog

I have recently returned from a weeklong bookbinding repair class at John C. Campbell Folk School located in Brasstown, NC. It was a fantastic experience! There were ten of us in the class and the instructor (Dea Sasso) had her work cut out for her considering we all brought books in varying stages of disrepair in a variety of materials. Since everyone was working on something different, we got to see a plethora of techniques that we might not have been able to see if we were working on only one type of repair. I tried to do one cloth book and one leather (neither of which I finished despite 10-12 hour days in the studio!). In true "Michelle" fashion, I forgot to take a genuine "before" picture, but I have a series of pictures highlighting one of the books I worked on. The book is "Historical and Literary Curiosities" and was published in 1875. The original leather spine and corners had red rot and were practically falling off the book. The covers were already detached. I removed the leather (careful to keep as much of the gold tooling intact as possible!) and the covers looked like this:



Also when removing the original leather, I endeavored to save the original spine with the gold lettering. This should give you a good idea of what the leather looked like:



New leather was cut to size and attached to the covers:



Then the old spine was attached to the new leather spine:



And then dyed to match!



Proof I did work on it myself:



To be clear, this is only laying out the steps that I took in order to repair the OUTSIDE of the book. While all of this was going on, the textblock spine was being cleaned and resewn in order to reattach it to the covers. And after all of this, I'm still not quite finished. New endpages need to be attached and the marbled paper could definitely use some attention, as well as a few pages in the textblock. Hope you enjoyed the pictures and I'm hoping I can remember all the information I crammed in my head over the week! Be sure to check out John C. Campbell Folk School (www.folkschool.org) for a variety of classes for the creatively-inclined. Be prepared to make some great friends, eat some good food and learn a new craft!