Bound and Rebound

By Norman Elliott Anderson

As a librarian, I picked up some bookbinding skills -- basic booksbinding skills, nothing like what some professional bookbinders can do. Someone asked that I post pictures of some of the books that I have bound or rebound, so here is a sampling of four of them:

The Apology of Aristides on Behalf of the Christians from a Syriac Ms. Preserved on Mount Sinai, edited with an introduction and translation by J. Rendel Harris; with an appendix containing the main portion of the original Greek text by J. Armitage Robinson (2nd ed. Cambridge: University Press, 1893; in series: Texts and Studies; v. 1). This had previously been bound in paper. I bound it in buckram in 1994. The binding is simple and sturdy. The endpapers are a plain creamy white.
Les mandarins: roman, [par] Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, c1954). This was a paperback copy that I bound in November 1994. The boards are covered with a white fabric, perhaps linen (I've forgotten). The label on the spine was recovered from the original spine. The endpapers are marbled in a glossy yellow and green.
The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne & The Complete Poetry of William Blake, with an introduction by Robert Silliman Hillyer (New York: Random House, c1941). This was rebound in the spring of 1999. The boards are covered with a piece of my then favorite shirt. Isn't that a cool way of rescuing part of a worn-out shirt? I made the label on my printer, but the ink is water soluble, so I'm afraid of handling the book after washing my hands, lest a drop smudge it. The green endpapers are handmade (purchased). Every time I rebind a book, I learn something new, in this case that PVA (polyvinyl acetate, which is used as an adhesive) easily bleeds through some kinds of handmade paper.
The Tranquil Isle, by Santiago Rusiñol; English version of "La Illa de la Calma," by Mary Lake; illustrated with woodcuts by Duplessis-Bracons (Palma de Mallorca: Editorial Baleares, [no date]). This was a paperback that I had bought in Falmouth, Massachusetts for $1.00. I bound it in September 1998 using a cloth print, which took some effort to line up well. The marbled endpapers are dominantly gray in color, with tinges of black, white, and orange. I think that using marbled endpapers might have given this book a slightly gaudy effect, but otherwise I like the result. You might notice the bookmark, which is a scrap of the marbled paper that I used.

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Photos taken by NEA, July 4, 2003; document posted, July 4, 2003; new url, January 28, 2004; last modified, January 28, 2004, by NEA