A Book A Week 2014: Made, Altered, or Repaired. Week 3

Week of 20 Jan 2014

Another repair at the public library. This one was particularly attractive to me for 3 reasons:
1. It was about Cicero. I was a Latin major (the language, not the geographic area) in college. My professor (James M May, Classics professor at St. Olaf College), is an expert on Cicero and talked about him all the time.
2. The endsheets are awesome - map of Italy and part of the Mediterranean.
3. I really like the color!

So, here you can see, the spine was coming off, and the book was looking shabby.

 Here's the endsheets:

 First, I removed the boards, and tidied them up. I relined all edges by applying book repair tape (the darker green), lifting the original lighter green book cloth to tuck the tape under.

Next, I created a new spine out of book tape:

 I've never used binder tape before, but I found it in the repair closet. I wanted to learn how to use it and to see how effective it was. For this purpose, I think it worked great. It is not what I'd use for an archival repair, but it will keep the book strong and able to survive many circulations.

Attaching the spine to the covers:

Some of the endsheet had to be covered because of damage:

 And I was able to attach the original spine label to the newly made spine.

 In good shape, and labeled for checkout: