This is going to be interesting, especially if the fine motor skills motor has stopped running... Knuston Hall - Error
Good luck! A mate of mine makes part of his living from quite high end bookbinding. I'm not allowed near any of it. Neither clean enough hands, nor enough fastidious neatness.
Envious! Surprisingly difficult to find a proper book binding course. Still looking for one locally to me.
This one did seem a bit of a gift being an hour from home. Only got a couple of photos, being covered in paste and glue most of the day, but can't get them to an uploadable size on the phone. It's a strange feeling taking a scalpel to a book the first time...
I don't know if this will help but I use an app on my Android phone called Photo Resizer which lets me reduce pictures to an reasonable size for uploading. The closest I've got to book restoration is making a mylar cover for a couple of dust jackets. Did you choose to work on books that you value, and if so which ones?
Whether or not it was a wise choice, time will tell but I'm working on The Sikh Regiment in the Second World War and The Official History of the Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War: The Campaign in Italy - not exactly expendable but the textblocks in both were pretty much detached. Thankfully, I shouldn't have to retitle them...
The Campaign in Italy looks much the same as it did but The Sikh Regiment underwent a bit of a transformation:
Rhino Review is a large, hard-to-store magazine format so it's been given the full works. The staples were in pretty good nick but I removed them and stitched everything to the new endpapers. The hinges of the cover, second and centre sections were reinforced with Japanese tissue strips before stitching. Nice though it is, it's not really an economical approach for pamphlets in general. I'm certainly thinking of removing rusty, paper-rotting staples from Small Arms Training pamphlets and the like then stitching them but not sure whether or not to reinforce as a matter of course.
I think I just discovered where I might be able to take a course here in Toronto. ... I cycle past it on my way to work!? edit: but it's not cheap and it's only offered once a year.
Maybe it would be worth contacting the major libraries or universities to see if their conservators can offer any pointers? The impression I get from here is that everyone knows, or at least knows of, everyone else.
Never having seen a copy for sale, why not make one? Printed the downladable version onto A5 paper. Fan-glued the spine with book-grade PVA. Suffered a bit of cockling as the paper's grain is the wrong direction (but it's only a practice run!) Attached endpapers and lined the spine with linen. Made the case for a 'quarter-joint' binding where the spine of the textblock is 'slung' between the covers, not attached directly. The end result seems to work! Next time, I need to tweak the spine dimensions as it's too wide here. I will reduce it to textblock width plus one board thickness instead, not two. On the plus side, aligning the textblock and cover was fairly easy as everything is square. All the published advice about not gluing in the joint area seemed pretty pointless as the joint doesn't contact the textblock (and still shouldn't even if I reduce the spine width a bit).
This is awesome. Also deeply strange, and perhaps an indication that the bibliophilia has advanced to the 'possibly needs help' end of the spectrum. And yet, mostly, awesome. I'm very impressed. Bespoke bound war diaries next...
Don't be too impressed - the parallel project has been a comedy of errors all the way through. Binding a disbound journal article was supposed to be straightforward...
Bit of preservation today - a Combined Ops Cliff Assaults pamphlet with rusty staples and a foxed cover. Staples snipped and removed, pamphlet punched and sewn into a buffered medium-weight paper cover, with another one between the cover and the better-condition text block.