Bookbinding - Conservation and Restoration

Conservation and Restoration

Conservation and restoration are practices intended to repair damage to an existing book. While they share methods, their goals differ. The goal of conservation is to slow the book's decay and restore it to a usable state while altering its physical properties as little as possible; the goal of restoration, however, is to return the book to a previous state as envisioned by the restorer, often imagined as the original state of the book. In either case, the modern standard for conservation and restoration is "reversibility." That is, any repair should be done in such a way that it can be un-done if and when a better technique is developed in the future. Bookbinders echo the physicians' creed, "First, do no harm."

Books requiring conservation treatment run the gamut from the very earliest of texts to books with modern bindings that have undergone heavy usage. For each book, the conservator must choose a course of treatment that takes into account the book's value, whether it comes from the binding, the text, the provenance, or some combination of the three. Many professional book and paper conservators in the United States are members of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC), whose guidelines, set forth in the AIC's Code of Ethics, are generally considered to outline an appropriate approach to the treatment of rare or valuable materials.

In restoration hand binding, the pages and book covers are often hundreds of years old, and the handling of these pages has to be undertaken with great care and a delicate hand. The binding archival process can extend a book’s life for many decades and is necessary to preserve books that sometimes are limited to a small handful of remaining copies worldwide.

The first step in saving and preserving a book is its deconstruction. The text need to be separated from the covers and, only if necessary, the stitching removed. This is done as delicately as possible. All page restoration is done at this point, be it the removal of foxing, ink stains, page tears, etc. Various techniques are employed to repair the various types of page damage that might have occurred during the life of the book.

The preparation of the "foundations" of the book could mean the difference between a beautiful work of art and a useless stack of paper and leather.

The sections are then hand-sewn in the style of its period into book form.

The next step is the creation of the book cover; vegetable tanned leather, dyed with natural dyes, and hand-marbled papers can be used. Finally the cover is hand-tooled in gold leaf. The design of the book cover involves such hand-tooling, where an extremely thin layer of gold is applied to the cover. Such designs can be lettering, symbols, or floral designs, depending on the nature of any particular project.