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Hot take: the bindery room at the Cleveland Public Library main branch is better than any class I have paid for
I drove up to Cleveland last Tuesday to see the special collections room and ended up spending 40 minutes just staring at the repair bench they keep out for tours. The head binder there showed me how they reinforce a cracked hinge with a strip of airplane linen and wheat paste, about a 6 dollar fix, and it looked cleaner than the $200 rebinding job I paid for two years back. Their bone folders were all burnished to a shine from decades of hands, and she said each one gets retired after roughly 15 years of daily use. So here is my gripe, most of us are overcomplicating our setups when the folks doing this for a living keep it dead simple. Anyone here ever talked their way into a library workroom and picked up a trick you still use?
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cole_mitchell811d ago
Man, this one hit hard for me. I feel you on the overcomplicating thing because I did the exact same stuff when I got into book repair, buying fancy glue and clamps and all this gear I barely touched, when a librarian could've shown me in ten minutes that wheat paste and a decent brush do most of the work. That bit about the bone folders getting retired after 15 years says everything, those tools earned that shine and the people using them earned the know how. It honestly bums me out that we treat library workrooms like they're off limits, because there's so much free knowledge sitting in those rooms. The $6 fix beating your $200 rebinding job is the perfect example of why simple usually wins.
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