This is the third and final installment in a three-part series on the subject of Book Restoration and Repair.

My standard line as a mender of hurt books is: “Half my work is pathology before I ever get to the surgery.”

A book falls apart for a reason. Sometimes, the reason is obvious—it was dropped, or it got wet, or the materials just rotted. But most of the time you have to let books tell you why they fell apart. And if you learn a little of their language, they’re marvelously communicative.

I’m going to run through a short list of problems that cause dealers to throw themselves and their books on the mercy of binders, discuss what may have caused the problem, and give you an idea of what you should expect from a binder if you find you need one.

Detached boards

Not all loose boards on leather books will respond to the Japanese tissue rehinge I described last time. The board may have originally been fitted improperly at the shoulder (Yes, there have been ignorant or sloppy binders throughout history). Or the book may have a decided wedge shape—narrower at the spine than the fore-edge, a binding aesthetic common from the late 17th Century well into the 19th Century.

In either case, the board is acting like a lever, with the textblock as a fulcrum, and prying itself away from the spine. This was no problem when the book was new. The cords and the leather overcame the pressure, which is why the binder thought he got away with it. But leather will (and cords can) rot. When that happens, pressure on the boards from other books on the shelf will pop the hinge. And it will probably pop a tissue re-hinge. A wedge-shaped book or one with boards substantially thicker than the shoulder is a candidate for a re-back.

Sewing breaks

If a book was properly designed and properly bound, the strain of opening and flexing the book is evenly distributed. Unfortunately, a lot of books weren’t properly designed or bound. The hinges were ill-fitted, causing a levering pull on the first and last few signatures. Or in some cases, the textblock was too heavy for the materials used and the sewing breaks in the middle, the point of maximum strain.

Most dealers hate to see broken sewing, because they think it means the book has to be taken down and completely resewn. If the book is worth it, that’s the best way. But most books won’t repay the cost of a complete resew. And most books with broken sewing don’t need resewing to be sound and flexible. Sewing can be repaired, or, in extreme cases, done away with altogether. It’ll cost you a re-back, but you were facing that anyway. In twelve years of repairing thousands of books, I have had to completely resew fewer than two dozen to make them solid and usable.

If the front or rear signature or two is loose or detached, they can be whip-stitched back on soundly through the shoulder. Often, there is a neat, clean, complete break at or near the middle of the book. There is a well-described, well-illustrated technique for whip-stitching the two halves and lacing the whip-stitching together in Arthur Johnson’s “Practical Guide to Book Repair and Conservation.” If your binder doesn’t have a copy, offer to buy him or her one. It will repay you several times over.

Occasionally, the sewing and signatures are so far gone that the leaves are either in fact, or in effect, single sheets. Many binders will insist that the leaves must be laboriously guarded back into folios and the folios resewn in signatures. Again, if the book is worth it, do it. Other binders will suggest oversewing. Oversewing involves whip-stitching several single sheets together and sewing the whip-stitched quires together as signatures. Even if the book is worth it, don’t do this! Other than a dogged adherence to tradition, there’s no reason to oversew anymore. Oversewing puts a line of needle holes, six to eight millimeters in, along the inner margin of the pages. Some inner margins can’t take that and remain readable. Plus there’s now a neatly perforated, dotted-line hingepoint on every sheet, along which even non-brittle paper is fond of breaking.

The now-accepted substitute for oversewing is the double-fanfold adhesive binding. The old pages are sanded (not chopped!) into single sheets, hopefully maintaining the original rounding of the spine. The single sheets are fanned one direction and glued with a flexible PVA white glue. Then they are fanned the other direction and glued and allowed to dry several hours. This leaves a hairline of glue on each side of each sheet as well as across the width of the spine. The glue is not considered reversible. But since less than a millimeter of paper is affected, it is considered far less invasive and damaging than oversewing. It’s considerably faster than guarding and resewing and therefore considerably cheaper. The glue, as opposed to the paper, takes most of the strain of hinging. And artificial aging tests indicate that the PVA will maintain its integrity and flexibility for at least 300 years. If your binder insists on oversewing, consider getting a new binder.

Obviously, this process dramatically changes the original bibliographic character of the book. But if it’s a choice between rebinding a book double-fanfold or tossing it in the dumpster, give it a chance to live and make a few bucks off it.