Last summer I had the pleasure of working on this sweet book. It came to me from a small rural church in my local community. The book was in rough shape, as you can see from the picture below, but it was very meaningful to the church community. The Bible, which dated to the late 17th or early 18th century, had been owned by the church’s founder and served to physically and spiritually connect the current members to the past history of their church.

The cover was old and worn, but still in decent shape.  It was almost completely detached from the pages.  The front cover provided a wonderful illustration of the way that the sewing was attached to the cover board and also contained the name of the original owner on the leather turn-in (probably not an original signature).  The inside pages were a mess. Pages were missing and those that were there were out of order, worn, and burned at the edges.

I took the whole book apart, mended all the pages, and resewed the book with new endsheets at the front and back.

I sewed onto raised cords and laced them onto the the new boards, in keeping with the original structure.  We decided not to put the original cover back on because doing so would have covered up the lovely history it contained. Instead I created a new leather cover in as close to the same style as possible.

The original showed faint signs of very simple tooling, which I carried onto the new cover.

Because of their importance to the church’s identity, the repaired book and original cover are to go on permanent display at the front of the church.  To help safely display them, I created custom display cradles in which each of them snugly sit, along with a treatment report and instructions on how to slow future damage from light and dust.

It was such a pleasure to work on this book and in a gentle, respectful way contribute to the ongoing history it holds.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 9:00 am.