So I have been busy with school and soon I will be spending time volunteering for the Panam Games. My goal for the summer is to get my Latin lup to speed enough to pass my level two exam. In the spring I took a course in Latin composition which brought me into the possession of a 120 year old Bradley's Arnold Latin composition book. At $12, it was quite a deal but is a little worse for wear. The binding is quite loose and some of the pages have torn at the bottoms of the individual gatherings. I did not want to make it my first try at rebinding a book so my poor sad volume of Katherine, by Anya Seton received the honour of becoming my book binding guinea pig.
Now the Katherine book had been through book hell. A one time library book in a high school, I found it in a pile of discarded items refused reentry at the end of a neighbourhood yard sale. Some of the pages had been retaped with cellophane and the back cover had been taped in place. It was a great read more than once and my husband credits it with lauching my career as a medievalist, though in truth it just galvanized for me the truth that inside a pharmacist was a historian trying to escape. Anyways, I didn't think that my poor Katherine book could possibly fare worse by being rebound by me, since badly together would be better than badly apart. So I gathered my supplies and started. When I pulled the book apart I found that the spine was merely glued. I had to strip off as much of the paper support as possible and reglue the spine, putting in new blank pages as the beginning and end. I also copied the fly leaves of the original to create the new fly leaves in order to retain the family trees of Katherine and John of Gaunt.
The results are less than perfect, but a good first try I think. I learned a couple of things that I think will be very helpful in creating a sturdy useable binding for the Bradley's. Firstly, the covers need an extra 1/2 inch in height, ie. 1/4 at the top and at the bottom, while the width only needs an extra 1/4 inch on the opening side. Secondly, the spine does not need to be larger than the actual spine of the book even when creating a curved one. And one last detail, when covering a thick piece of board, you need to mitre your cut of the covering material farther from the corner than you might think.
All in all I am happy and no longer afraid of losing bits of my book.
