Look what I learned to do this fall!
Rebel Belle pre-repair. The back cover is sitting underneath the stack of inside pages, so you can’t see it in this photo.
This fall I’ve been volunteering in my daughter’s middle school library. Mostly the job involves shelving books kids have already read and helping kids find the books they’d like to read next.
But a few weeks ago I was promoted to Apprentice Book Repair Person.
The students have read the library’s signed copy of Rebel Belle by Rachel Hawkins to pieces. Three of them to be precise — the front cover and spine, the back cover, and the block of pages in the middle.
It turns out the only thing holding the book together was that Mylar cover librarians put on books to protect their dust jackets.
All dressed up and ready for the next school dance.
Once I took the Mylar cover off, the inside pages promptly divorced themselves from the rest of the book.
The librarian handed me a sad little stack of book parts, a repair manual, a rebinding machine, a stash of repair supplies, and asked me to do my best.
Reader, I fixed it.
I cannot in good conscience use the words “good as new,” but Rachel Hawkins’ Rebel Belle is ready to be loved again.
The sweetest thing?
The book needed to sit on the repair shelf for 24 hours before it could be re-introduced into the stacks. My librarian buddy saved it for me, and I got to return it to the stacks myself when I walked in last week.
Sniff. I love librarians.
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9 Responses to “Look what I learned to do this fall!”
My youngest daughter binds books the medieval way. I made the frame for her.
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That sounds really neat. Does that mean she sews the bindings by hand?
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[…] cleaning up the nonfiction 500 section of the middle school library after a particularly riotous set of future scientists, I came across David Quammen’s […]
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Yes, she does it all.
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That’s so neat. One of the vendors at the holiday fair I’m participating in next week also makes journals/books by hand. I’m not-so-secretly planning to stock up at her booth. The 11 year old loves hand crafted journals.
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