This Woman Deconstructs 100-Year-Old Books To Restore Them | Obsessed | WIRED

one slip of the hand and this 100-year-old first edition book could be ruined forever that's why restoring a book like this takes immense patience and precision I used to take the books apart a little bit in front of my clients until I said their faces would just be like they don't need to know nobody needs to know what I'm doing so but you guys get to know meet Sophia Bogle book restorer educator and author who has dedicated her life to preserving our stories I have probably restored thousands of books I don't actually know the number some of the most important things in book restoration some of the steps involved are deconstruction opening the spine scraping the old spine doing color matching for the text block there's page washing if needed page repair and then reconstructing the book not every book is the same it's one of the main reasons that makes this such a difficult specialty to become really good at here I have the first edition of The Lost Princess of Oz and it's in terrible shape very dirty on the front cover the spine is breaking pages are torn up so normally a restoration like this could take between 8 and 12 hours one of the first things is to separate the text block from the cover there are other book repair knives out there this one I designed to be like a fingertip it does sometimes feel like book surgery sometimes more than others especially those tight joint tight back leather books those are nerve-wracking talk about surgery you have to cut into the leather around the little panels dye the leather and make that match so that everything is as invisible as possible having done all that this is the result some pages need to be washed other Pages might just need a few repairs this kind of tear right here is a beveled or a scarf tear it just means it has two overlapping areas and those are the best kind because you can just put some paste in there so I've got my rice starch paste literally just going to paint these two [Music] together so now we're going to use the shadow Tracer a piece of black paper and then something clear in plastic over it we're tracing the shape with some water so that we can tear it out so now think I'm going to put it on this side [Music] starting to look better there we go so that's a good start I might actually do that again to make that thicker but for now that's that's good and that can just be trimmed to fit and then that's fitted in there while a lot of Sophia's work centers around her desk her Workshop is full of unique tools for restoration all right so this is my binder and over here I've got my old sewing frame which uses these old-fashioned keys and then over here I've got kind of the more modern version this is the Jeff peachy no key system it's kind of cool have both kinds this is a job backer and it's pretty old from the 1800s you put the book in here and then you squish it and then you can work on it with a hammer or a saw which really freaks people out this is the gold finishing stove and my Apprentice used to call this the bear trap because it looks like it could just close up on your hand at any moment this is something that you need to do leather restoration work this was all done by hand you put the gold on and then you do the tooling and this is an example of the the gold leaf I just keep little scraps of it in here it's really hard to work with cuz it's so delicate so here I've got my Quick Print stamping machine and I've got a lot of weird little do daddy things that you can stamp with as well as a lot of fonts and this is a whole another thing where anything you can put into a black and white design you can have made into a diee you know here's Toto this is how it operates you put your little device in here bring it back down and you squish it the impression that it makes is called the kiss which I just love let's see how that turned out so then over here is my nipping press these were originally made to make copies these days everybody who's a book binder would want one of these because you can put your book in here and press it and it works really well sometimes in the restoration process Pages themselves need to be removed from the book and washed some of them are very dirty this one has some blue ink on it I'm going to test before we begin and the way to do that is to take cotton swab get that wet you put a drop of water and you just stare at it I can see that's already starting to go one of the things that we do to help keep the pages together is we have this Holly Tex which is the spun polyester paper and I'm just trying to submerge it it's like it's taking a little bath I should get little floaty duck or something then you can take just a clean brush so that's basically it this snack for invisible Artistry has been years in the learning and part of a Lifetime Love of literature I was at the University of Minnesota getting my English degree I got a student job at the library binder it was quite the transformational experience I knew I wanted to do something with books and I walked in here and I discovered that books were taken apart and put back together and there was one person over in the corner throwing books into buckets of water and sewing and you know all the beautiful things and I was like oh that's the job I want Sophia's been doing that job for over 30 years saving history one book at a time what I want to do is I want to get at this cover spine liner by cutting here getting that open and same thing over here and then I can start to remove this old paper which is fairly acidic when it's more acidic it falls apart quicker and just clean up the last little you know bit of that section restoring the book's spine is an important step in the process but some spines POS particularly unique challenges so this one was truly one of the most difficult and for such a special unique book literally one of these books was made in the world the original spine was just gone and they had restored it with this suede so my challenge was removing this oh it took so long with a a knife and just scraping really carefully and just trying to get that off of there and it came out like this I mean I I get chills really because this is Frank bomb's copy for his mother and there's a wonderful inscription on the first page so it's just really fun to be part of that story too regardless of what steps are required to return a book to its former glory the final step is always putting the book back together or recasing I've got the hinge that will be tucked in there I'm actually noticing right now that the Japanese tissue that I put on there is extending too far and I have two options I can lift this up further or I can tear some of this off and I'm going to go for the tear some of this off version and just get some of that the edge of the mle makes a nice Edge to tear it against so super easy but meanwhile this is the most fun part I don't think I've even told you about this you can write things on the spine of the book this book restored by Sophia September 2023 and then my signatures I always put three dots on I do love the fact that there's the story in the book there's a story of the restoration of the book there's the story of who has owned the book and now I'm just in there just a little bit more I'm taking the the PVA and you just don't want any glue on the spine the spine needs to not be attached to the other spine um because this is all going to get tucked in now it's getting there and I'm just going to go ahead and put this in to protect it and now it needs to go up in the Press it's really important that the book goes in square and that the pin of this is over the area that you need it to be over there we go so I'm going to leave this in here overnight by tomorrow it'll be finished and ready to go home no matter how many books she's restored Sophia takes the work of book restoration as a vital responsibility I'm preserving cultural history it's really important so many books are being thrown away I want more people to collect books to think about that like what can you collect what can you put on your shelves and take care of and take stewardship of so that they'll make it to the next Generations

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,133,309

Keywords: antique book, antique book restoration, antique books, book, book collecting, book obsessed, book obsession, book restoration, book restorer, books, how to restore book, how to restore books, obsessed wired, old books, ott obsessed, preserving books, rare books, restoring books, sophia bogle, wired, wired obsessed, wired obsessions

Id: OIsN0kiL9fI

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023