Repair
Manual Home
Introduction
Guiding Principles
Setting up the Area
Toolbox
Parts of a book
Practical Guidelines
Identifying Repairable Materials
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Your Comments
Self-Closing Wrapper
Cleaning
Torn pages
Tip in a Page
Hinge Repair
Corner Repair
Sewing a Single Signature
Spine Repair
Air Dry Method
Hinge Tightening
General Guidelines and Practical Advice
- Keep your repair tools in good repair, clean and well-sharpened.
- Keep the work area clean. After completing repairs put tools and supplies in their proper storage location.
- Some of the tools you will be working with are extremely sharp. Please exercise caution. If you do cut yourself, try not to bleed on the books--blood is extremely hard to clean from paper.
- Wash your hands frequently.
- Batch similar repairs.
- Do not eat or drink in the repair area.
- Treatments should not be visible.
Tape and Adhesives
The only tape we will use in simple book repair is archival quality repair tape such as Archival Document Repair Tape or Filmoplast P. Occasionally, translucent mending tape is used for items with a short shelflife and in preparing damaged materials for reformatting (such as microfilming). Archival tape is extremely expensive, please be conservative with its use.
PVA: Polyvinyl acetate, a plastic based adhesive that when dry is extremely strong. Used in most binding, spine, and hinge repairs. Frequently needs to be thinned with water before using.
Methyl cellulose adhesive: Semi-synthetic adhesive that sets slowly but is reversible with water. Put 1 oz. of water in a small cup. Sprinkle small amount of methyl cellulose powder on water and beat until smooth. Add more methyl cellulose until consistency of thick gravy. Let stand 20 minutes. Add more water as needed. May also be thinned with water before storing.
PVA and Methyl cellulose adhesive may be mixed together in the ratio of 2 parts Methyl cellulose to 2 parts PVA. This mixed adhesive is appropriate for repairsneeding a strong bond but using lighter weight paper, such as gluing down end sheets.