In short, almost everything can be restored. In practice, there are four main areas of repair or restoration work:
Restoration of the binding
Required when the binding cover is torn off from the book block (entirely or in separate places). In any case, most likely, the book will need to be disassembled: with separation of the book block, removal of endpapers, cleaning of the place of attachment to the spine, etc. When these procedures are completed, you need to make sure that the stitching of the notebooks that make up the book block is not damaged – and then prepare it for future gluing. It is also necessary to create new endpapers. Moreover, in such a situation, they are often reinforced with a narrow strip of fabric or gauze, glued from the inside along the fold of the notebook. Thanks to this, the risk of the binding cover being torn off from the main block again is reduced. After this, everything is assembled and glued – so that the cover returns to its rightful place.
Restoration of cover and spine
Restoration of these book elements can be very different: from simple, when edges and corners of the cover are strengthened, to complex, when the cover and spine are created from scratch. However, even simple strengthening is not an elementary one-time action. In this case, strips of thick fabric or calico (cotton material) are glued on top of the damaged areas. They are made with an allowance that must be glued under the endpapers (on the inside) and under the covering material (on the outside). And this requires special skills and can take a lot of time. However, there are much more painstaking operations. Thus, the complete manufacture of the cover is considered complex, which can repeat the original or be new in design (with embossing, printing, etc.) and materials (paper, leather, leatherette, etc.).
Restoration of the book block
Over time, both individual sheets and entire notebooks may fall out of the book block. There is essentially only one solution to the problem: strengthening the book structure. But this can be done in several ways, and their choice depends not only on the existing “breakage”, but also on the technology of production of the publication (how its binding is made: machine sewing, French binding, gluing, etc.). It is also worth noting: such strengthening can be “cosmetic”, without serious intervention in the block itself (for example, alignment and additional gluing of the “broken” sheet), or capital. In the latter case, in order to access the spine, it is necessary to cut the endpapers, re-stitch the sheets in the book block and then restore the original appearance.
Restoration of sheets
Perhaps, this type of book repair is the most diverse. The pages in the book can be torn, frayed, worn out, wrinkled, have folds, traces of a pen and pencil, be warped as a result of exposure to moisture, and also simply lost. And therefore, in each case, a completely special procedure is used. For example, when gluing a tear, it is necessary not only to connect parts of the sheet, but to do it as unnoticeably as possible: without a visible trace and with an exact match of parts of letters and drawings at the place of the repaired joint. And, for example, when restoring from water or a drink that got on the page, it is necessary, on the one hand, to get rid of the characteristic imprint of the drip, on the other – to return the sheet to its original, maximally smooth surface texture.
