[soft music]
[light scraping]
[water pouring]
My name is Sophia Bogle.
I've been restoring books for over 25 years,
and I started my company, Save Your Books,
so that anyone can learn archival-book repair.
The book I'm restoring today is
the Hans Christian Andersen "Fairy Tales" book
from the late 1800s, early 1900s.
[soft music]
The first thing that we do
in pretty much any full restoration
is we have to separate the cover
from the text block.
The tool that I prefer to use
is the book-repair knife.
It has a rounded tip
and is less likely to do damage that you did not intend
as an X-Acto knife would.
I'm removing the old tape.
It's very acidic,
and if I leave it on the book at all,
it's going to affect the book later on.
When you're removing some of the original material
and you know you're going to be
replacing it with something,
it's good to mark where it was
in relationship to the other materials.
And so in this case,
I've used a pencil and a piece of paper
to mark where the original went.
I'm using a 100-grit sanding block
to clean the edges of these boards off.
It makes a nice, clean edge.
[soft music]
[light scraping]
A lot of general cleaning can be done
using a book-repair knife,
and using the book-repair knife
to just remove some clumpy bits
that are stuck to the end paper.
[water pouring]
When you're repairing a book,
usually all the pages are still connected,
and there are some pages that will benefit
from this washing technique that I have.
It'll help us to get the tape off of the page,
in a way that you couldn't do
if it was attached to the book still.
To wash a page,
to get rid of the tape,
you just have to put it in fairly hot water.
You aren't going to need any additives to clean these pages.
It's just hot water.
It's surprisingly effective.
It can sit in the water for hours.
You're also just going to have to be
very delicate with the paper,
because it's in a more delicate state
when it's in the water.
I'm using a microspatula to help separate the pages,
and I'm also using a ruler
to help hold down the other page.
You can use a soft brush
to help you to brush away the old adhesive.
[soft music]
When you're touching up anything black on a cover,
you're going to want to use an archival pen.
It's a 0.08-micron pen,
and it is archival ink.
The smaller the tip, the better, in a way.
Do not use a Sharpie.
Those will damage and discolor.
[soft music]
While I was cleaning,
I also noticed that some of the gilt stamping
has been removed.
When I'm using the word "gilt,"
gilt refers to gold.
So it's gold stamping on the cover.
Some people would call it embossing.
Originally, this was stamped with hot metal plates,
with foil coming down onto the book.
The best way to fill in gilt stamping
is to use shell gold.
I'm using a liner brush,
and I have all the control in the world.
You're going to make mistakes.
You can actually remove the gilt
by using a cuticle stick,
and then you can clean up your gilt.
[soft music]
If you want to match the color of your book
and do touch-up on the covers,
it's not as hard as you might think.
You look at this, this is a greenish brown.
The brownish colors that tend to be on these older books,
they're muddy looking.
And the way to get to that muddy-looking color
is to go across the color wheel
from the color you think it is
and add that other color to make it more muddy looking.
[soft music]
When you find tears on your pages
and you want to repair them,
I highly recommend using Japanese tissue that's thin
and an archival paste,
such as what I have here, which is nori paste.
It's a rice-starch paste.
A really thin tissue is going to be better
than a thicker tissue.
You don't need very much paste.
[soft music]
You get everything ready.
You've got your book in the cover,
right side up.
You're going to be gluing all of those materials.
You're going to glue that mull and that little hinge,
and you're gluing that decorative end sheet back,
and then you're going to close the cover.
[soft music]
And then you slip a sheet of wax paper in.
And then you put the pressing board in.
When I discovered that there were
pages missing from this book,
I found a version of the story that connected
to where the book started with the pages missing.
I used paper that's called antique endleaf.
[soft music]
I am using a colored pencil to color the edges
of the new pages that I added to the book.
I don't want them to pop out.
I don't want it to look obvious
that I added these new pages.
[soft music]
And that's it.
That's our book.
[soft music]