So far, my work has included taking books after they go through the "cleaning" process, which is basically where the covers and spines are separated. It's my job to reinforce the "text block" (the chunk of pages without the covers and spine) by drilling and stitching it, then gluing on a spine liner.
As I add the covers back on, using linens to secure them to the text block, the book starts to come back together.
Next I choose a color of buckrum (the thick durable sheets we use to reinforce the spine) and apply it to the outside. Finally, I trim what's left of the spine label and glue it on top of the buckrum. The reconstructed book looks something like this:
This is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the thickest book I have repaired to date. I've also repaired such well-known titles as the Jungle Book and such obscure things as math texts in some unrecognizable script and fine arts books on gardens western Europe in the 18th century. The amazing part about the obscure books is that since all the books I repair come out of circulation, someone has actually just checked out every book I get.
I've come to identify books based on the type of wear and tear they get. Because the spine label is the last step of the process, I can go through almost the whole repair without knowing the title of the book. I've discovered that I can tell the genre before reading the title based on the "shoulders" of the book (the place where the covers open out). Books read cover to cover (novels) have deep shoulders at the front and back, while non-fiction books tend to have a deep shoulder in the front and almost no shoulder in the back, indicating that they are opened most often near the front. I thought I had found a flaw in this theory once when I worked on a book that had a deep shoulder only in the back. As it turned out, this was a math text book with an answer key at the back, so of course it made perfect sense that people often opened it to the back. Ah, what you can learn from books.
