Hand Made

Up until the latter half of the 19th century a lot of bookbinding work was done by hand, folding, sewing, casing-in, etc.  Sewing was done "all-along", or in a variation such as "two-on" after a sewing channel or "kerf" has been sawed into the spine of the text-block.  As mechanization spread throughout industry eventually all of the tasks were taken over by machine.  The Smyth book-sewing machine was patented in 1868, by David Smyth and was purchased by the publishing company Appleton that had an in-house bindery.

machine sewn book on the left, hand sewn on the right

You can really see the difference between hand work and machine work in these two spines.  I was cleaning the old adhesive off the spines when my colleague Melanie looked over my shoulder and pointed it out.  The machine sewing is straight, paired lines of chain stitching while the hand made book on the right has crooked kerfs and is even missing one at the tail. 

annotated Ulysses

OK, sometimes, student graffiti is funny...

The Reluctant Dragon

double checking the page sequence

In addition to working on rare books I also spend time working in the book repair unit for the Library's circulating collections.  I work alongside the book repair technicians although I tend to work on the more complex repairs, in addition to offering training in advanced skills. 

The book I am working on now is Kenneth Grahame's "The Reluctant Dragon" which is an adorable story about a little boy who is the son of a shepherd but also a great reader, who "spent much of his time buried in big volumes", a dragon who loves to write poetry and the knight St. George.

Working on circulating collections can be fun, especially when the book is such a charming read, but it also reinforces skills I use in working on more rare and delicate books.  The page mending techniques and materials are the same, and in the case of this book, the need to collate the book so that I can be sure I put the pages back in the right order.  This book is only three signatures, or sewing sections, but it doesn't have page numbers which means that I have to double check to make sure that I am putting the detached pages back in the right order. In the good old days of  manuscripts, printing and hand binding "catch words" were used to make sure the pages were in the correct sequence, but they haven't been in common use since the late 18th century. 

Good thing that the story is such a fun read, because I have to re-read the last few lines of one page and the first few lines of the other to make sure I've got it right.