Author: The Book Roadie

Care and Feeding of Books

Posted on by The Book Roadie

How do you take care of your books?

For most folks, the thought never really occurs. Books get tossed on shelves or plunked into boxes and left in all sorts of storage spaces, with little thought about their wellbeing. Those of us who are bibliophiles, think about these things.

Bugs and heat and moisture, oh my!

The biggest enemies of books are those three. There are plenty of bugs that can get into books, though cockroaches and silverfish are the most common where I live. They nibble on covers and pages and make a horrible mess. And, as anyone who’s ever left a book in their car in the summer can tell you, heat can warp the heck out of a book. Even worse is moisture, and wide swings in temperature will leave moisture on your books very happily (if you’ve ever wondered why outside walls with furniture close against them often wind up with mildew, it’s the moisture that collects during large temperature changes).

Moisture in large quantities (from the humidity of a bathroom or from actual immersion in water) is the bane of books everywhere, and that’s fairly obvious, but the moisture exposure over time from storage in a place with wide temperature changes is insidious and not very obvious.

What to do, what to do?

The easiest way to deal with all these problems is to store your books in a cool, dry, clean location. Think of a large public library. If they have large windows, they have coverings or UV proof film. Libraries have air conditioning, and good circulation around their books. Plus, libraries are cleaned regularly!

The rule of thumb I learned early on was to store your books in a room that would be comfortable to live in. Attics, basements, and storage units tend not to be comfortable living spaces due to their heat in summer, cold in winter, and stuffy natures. They don’t make good homes for books, either.

My bookcases are against an outside wall, but I pull the books forward on the shelves so there’s plenty of circulation behind them, and I regulate the temperature in my apartment as best I can without actual air conditioning (I chose carefully and my apartment is well shaded and on the first floor so it doesn’t get too hot in the summertime). We all have to make compromises, but if you pay attention and strive to get as close to the ideal as possible, your books will have a long and happy life with you.

When is a Book not a Book?

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Last week I finished a two-part class at the San Francisco Center for the Book which was ostensibly about making multiples of a structure (say, making a bunch of blank journals with the same number of pages and style of binding), but which turned into a guide to making small art books once we exhausted the planned curriculum.

IMAG0735
Tiny bits of bookish art

Our teacher owns a small specialty press in the East Bay, and specializes in custom editions of things like invitations. She also makes amazing tiny art books like the one pictured here.

IMAG0737It was interesting to look at the structures she had made. In some ways, they were clearly books: they had pages and covers, and most of them had text in them, even if it was just something like “Happy New Year! – Jocelyn.” And yet, they’re not quite what I think of as books — they have odd constructions, and are meant to be decorative more than to hold information.

What IS a book, exactly?

I’m a big believer in defining my terms! I define a book as: a physical structure which holds information in an easy-to-access, analog format (ie, markings on its surfaces). Books can be made of just about anything, really — metal, vellum, parchment paper, wood, whatever. Those cardboard books designed for babies are still books. I don’t consider an ereader to be a book, though. If it can run out of batteries or break irretrievably when you drop it, it’s not a book, it’s a piece of electronics.

By that metric, these little art books are indeed books — hell, a scroll can be a book, depending on whether you think it’s easy to read a scroll. It’s easy to slide into a philosophical discussion about what is and is not a book. What about those folks who take discarded books and carve them into strange shapes? Are the items they produce still books? I’d say no, as they’re not holding information in markings on their surfaces; they’ve become sculptures, and a sculpture is not a book.

What do you think?

Where do you draw the line between book and not-book?

The Sensual Art of Bookbinding

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In my day job, I sit at a desk and work on a computer all day, documenting all kinds of things, many of them theoretical (I recently spent over a week on a flowchart of how a very complex system of servers works). I write movie reviews on the side, too — which involves sitting in the dark and using my vision and hearing to take in a movie, then sitting at a desk and writing about it. I also do computer gaming (mostly on my XBox), blogging, and generally spend a lot of my time staring at either a computer screen or a tv screen.

Sure, I have hobbies that involve other senses — gardening, knitting — and I adore them, but they take up a tiny part of my week comparatively speaking. Also, for me, they’re not really crafts in the craftsmanship sense. I enjoy them and do them well, but I don’t have specialized training in them.

Now that I’m setting chunks of time aside to work on books, it’s like my senses are suddenly coming out of hibernation. I was recently working on sewing  a book, using a cast iron paperweight I bought in Portland at the Japanese Garden, and I was struck by all the sensory input I was being swamped with. Stitching the signatures of a book together doesn’t take a lot of abstract, intellectual thought, just care and some attention. It’s very zen.

Just sitting there, I could:

  • Smell the beeswax I’d used on the linen thread
  • See the light of my desk lamp on the pages, the growing pattern of the stitches, and the lovely paperweight (I’m trying to come up with a good name for him)
  • Feel the paper under my left hand as I held it and the vibration of the thread against the paper via the needle in my right hand
  • Hear the whisper of the thread against the paper and the reassuring thunk of the weight whenever I moved it

All I needed was something to taste and every sense would be involved! I’m considering having a special drink or snack at my side just when I’m working on books, if only to get that last sense in there.

It was wonderful!

The sensory input of bookbinding permeates the craft. The feel of the paper, the sound it makes when I fold it, the click of the bone folder sliding off its edge, the smell of the paste, the whisper when I cut it. It’s the sound, feel, and scent of bookbinding I notice the most, which makes sense given that so much of my time is spent looking at things. Visual art is nothing new — I read blogs with gorgeous design, watch videos, look at cat macros — but doing something so rich in the other senses is astonishing.

It’s a delight.

Powell’s Pilgrimage 2011

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Powell's City of Books I just got back from a week in Portland. It was awesome. (You know you wanna see my vacation pix.)

As usual, it involved multiple trips to Powell’s. Also, my first ever purchases from the Rare Book Room and the locked case in the Gold Room (which is Fantasy/Horror/Sci-Fi/Mystery)! SO exciting.

I simply cannot articulate my adoration for Powell’s City of Books (there are several satellite stores, but the CoB is the main one, and the one most folks, including me, mean when they refer to Powell’s). It’s enormous. It has used and new books shelved together so you can see what your options are. It has all kinds of weird and rare books, and a really nifty cafe where you can take books you’re thinking about buying and look them over while you sip an Italian soda or nibble a pannini. Bliss.

Here’s my haul for this year:

And a shot of my lovely first editions’ covers:

This trip is why I saved my spare change (and a few bucks here and there) all year long. Getting $100 in a raffly thing at work didn’t hurt, either. 🙂

Now comes the fun part: reading them all.

An Experiment!

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I’m a big fan of the scientific method, so when I heard that one way to save a book that’s been dropped in water was to toss it in a self-defrosting freezer, I had to check it out for myself.

It’s like magic!

The idea is that the water will freeze and the sublime (like evaporating, but from solid to vapor instead of liquid to vapor) the same way your ice cubes do if you don’t use ’em. The book gets left behind in almost good-as-new condition. Apparently libraries use it after flooding and whatnot. Pretty cool, eh? Apparently it takes several months, is the only tricky part.

But it’s HERESY!

The tricky bit, of course, is that this involves risking the wellbeing of a book. Getting a book wet is anathema to me, but this is for a greater good, right? Fortunately, I just tossed aside a book I couldn’t stand and was going to sell it or something. I decided rather than inflict it on someone else, I would use it for this experiment.

Before anyone gets up in arms, yes, I know there are people who love this book. I hated it. It happens. Especially when a book is froofy philosophy without any real logic or decent reasoning underlying it. GRAH! I love philosophy but only when it actually makes sense. Since the vast majority of philosophy is of the sort that makes me bang my head against the wall, I wisely majored in English instead of paying attention to my philosophy prof’s urgings.

Anyway.

Here are the before and after photos of the book. I got it wet by dunking it in a full sink of water on 4/23.

I’ll let you all know what happens!

Bookbinding 4

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Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of taking Bookbinding 4: Focus on Leather at the San Francisco Center for the Book. It was basically a day to practice the basics of paring leather so that when we go on to Bookbinding 5 we aren’t having to learn a bunch of new stuff all at once.

At first, I had a lot of trouble with it. Paring the edges of leather pieces takes precision and care, and I am not good at being patient when learning new stuff! I could see how it worked in principle, but couldn’t get my coordination to actually do what I wanted. By the end of the day, though, I was doing all right.

We learned to do edge paring with our leather knives (and edge pare is where you make the edge of the leather taper instead of just being a squared-off cut) and also how to use a Scharf-fix machine to thin pieces of leather down to the desired thickness. It was all extremely messy, but pretty fun once I got the hang of it.

I’ll tell you, though, by the end of class my hands were killing me. Lots of unfamiliar motions, done over and over, with a fair amount of strength totally pwned me. Yeow. I wasn’t the only one who had that problem, let me tell you!

The other awesome thing we learned was honing and sharpening blades. My knife was new enough it didn’t need sharpening, really, but I practiced anyway. Honing, though, is pretty much a constant — leather is so tough that you have to hone your blade every few cuts or it gets so dull that it’s almost impossible to use. How do you know if it’s sharp enough? You try shaving your arm. I am not even joking. I now have bald spots on my arm from testing my knife.

I managed to go the whole day without cutting myself, my classmates, or anything I didn’t mean to cut, so I consider it a win overall. I didn’t take very many shots, but have put the ones I did get down below. I can’t wait to do Bookbinding 5 now!

Twins

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Today I’m donating a pair of blank journals to a charity auction supporting Gemini Crickets — as befits a donation to a parents-of-multiples support group, they are matching but not identical. Check it out!

It was fun making them — they’re pretty much the same as the books I made in Bookbinding 1, although I used a couple techniques I learned in Bookbinding 2 and 3.

Now I’m starting a run of blank books to sell on Etsy! Woot.

Zen and the Art of Paper Cutting

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One thing I absolutely adore about bookbinding work is getting to work with really good paper. I’ve always loved paper — I used to collect stationary and write lots of physical letters, and the feel of really high quality paper under my fingers has always been something that has a lot of appeal. I already knew that working with paper (like doing a collage) easily turns into a meditative, relaxing activity, but oh, man, when I get to work with really good paper? Best. Thing. Ever.

The paper I am currently smitten with, Mohawk Superfine 70lbs, pretty much only comes in parent sheets (which are enormous) or in 8.5″x11″ reams, which are pretty useless for the blank books I want to make. Thankfully, I learned how to tear down parent sheets in one of my bookbinding classes, and the San Francisco Center for The Book will rent out access to their workshop, so I went ahead and ordered a bunch of parent sheets. Check it out:

The stack of parent sheets sitting on my couch

Those babies are 25″x38″. To get them into usable pieces, all you need is a bone folder and a good paper knife. I wound up enjoying the process so much that rather than just do a few and do the rest at the SFCB with one of their guillotines, I’ve been doing all of them — and that means hacking up almost 40 parent sheets into either eight sheets (for medium sized journals) or into 12 sheets (three for a large journal I’m making for myself and nine for little pocket notebooks). That’s a lot of cutting, but boy howdy,  I’m really enjoying it! It works like this:

Fold the paper along the line you want to cut, and crease it well with the bone folder.
Carefully use the knife to slit along the fold.

 

Repeat until you have the size of sheets you want.

It takes a bit of care to slit right along the fold — it helps to line the fold up with the edge of the table and use the surface of the table beneath the paper to keep the knife flat, but you don’t want it to be totally flat, it needs to point up just a teensy bit or you wind up scalloping into the bottom side of the paper. It requires total attention, which is part of what makes it so enjoyable for me. I can’t get distracted by whatever I’m worried about or let my mind wander down some random avenue of thought or I’ll ruin the cut. A little scalloping isn’t a huge problem, since I’m going for a handmade look and anyway, some of these blank books will get trimmed on the huge book guillotine at the SFCB. But still, a perfectly straight cut makes the paper easier to work with and is a lot more satisfying.

I practice sitting meditation regularly, and can tell you from experience that it is a lot easier to enter a meditative state when you have something to focus on. Just sitting there, zazen-style, and trying to clear your mind and slow the chatter is really, really hard. It’s even harder when you’re exhausted or cranky or generally in need of a little meditative-style soothing! Something like a mantra or paying very close attention to your breathing (usually by counting each breath) can be really helpful, and it turns out that paper cutting is doing it for me — which is awesome, since it has an actual, tangible output!

Plus, the resulting page edges are lovely: soft, with an almost fuzzy or torn-looking edge, except they’re nice and straight (if I do them right, anyway). They remind me of old books I’ve read — my Mom’s cheap book club books from the fifties full of stories about The Saint. But they also remind me of books from a few centuries ago, when the pages didn’t get slit down until after they’d been bound. The parent sheets got printed on both sides and then folded up carefully to make each signature, and once the book had been bound the pages had to be slit apart. It was actually a special thing to slit the pages yourself, because it meant you bought the book brand new and nobody else had read it.

Regardless, I’m enjoying the process immensely. It’s not terribly efficient, but I’m doing it because it helps me unwind after a long day rather than to make money.

Paper Mending

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Over the weekend I took another class up at the SFCB — this time on basic paper mending. It was really interesting to learn a few methods of cleaning and repairing mangled pages. We also learned how to reattach pages that had fallen out of a trade paperback.

One theme that the teacher kept coming back to was considering whether you’d be doing more harm than good by trying to repair the object in question. For example, if you’re trying to mend a document that has water-soluble ink on it, the chances of the paste making the ink run are very high (we learned how to test for water-solubility while minimizing the chance of damage to the object, which was cool). Plus, even the best mend is visible – creases and tears can’t be completely eliminated, just minimized. Reattached pages usually involve a hinge of some sort, which is visible. It’s just not possible to make the object exactly what it was before. There are always trade-offs. You have to consider why you want to mend the  item — are you trying to make it usable again? Trying to make it look nicer?

We used high-quality wheat starch paste and a variety of thicknesses of Japanese paper to mend tears and cuts, and learned to fill in spots where a tear had left a hole. We also learned how to uncrumple paper with the least amount of damage to it. It was a rather slow class in the beginning but the afternoon was really interesting and I had a good time.

The teacher works at UC Berkeley doing restoration/conservation on materials in the university’s library system, and she said that often the best course of action is to try to stabilize the item rather than try to make it be just like it used to be. Old books that are falling apart can be stored in specially-made boxes, documents can be sealed into mylar sleeves, and so on.

One thing that complicates the decision-making process is that book conservation is relatively new — less than 100 years old — so it’s not entirely possible to know how your additions will change over time. Apparently a lot of mending techniques that were considered safe in the fifties are now causing damage as they age. Chemicals in the adhesives, mending materials, and the objects themselves can react in surprising ways, given enough time.

At any rate, it was really interesting and I had a great time. Plus, I learned how to make the kind of wheat paste that requires cooking! I’ve ordered the materials to make a batch of my own and will let you guys know how it goes!

Here are some images from the class:

Pilgrimage

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Powell's City of Books. Photo by lwy, under cc.

Every so often, I get to visit Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. When I was little, I always asked my parents to buy me issues of Asterix the Gaul that I didn’t already own. Now, I buy my own books, and endeavor not to bankrupt myself in the process.

The last time I was there, I got so many books that I could barely fit them all into the generously-sized baskets they provide their shoppers. The clerk said, as she rang me up, “you’re not from around here, are you?” When I said no, she said that she could always tell — it was the visitors who bought heaps of books, not the locals. “It’s almost like it’s a pilgrimage,” she said.

In a lot of ways, it is. For a gatherer, Powell’s City of Books is a sort of Mecca. Check out this map (pdf) and you’ll see why – over a million books are on the shelves. The place takes up an entire city block! What makes it particularly exciting to browse there is that used books are shelved right alongside new ones. You never know what treasures you’re going to find. I’ve snapped up reasonably-priced, good-condition copies of out-of-print books I never thought I’d get my hands on, sitting quietly next to the latest trade paperback. Plus, there’s the Rare Book Room, which is the sort of collection that inspires hushed reverence from book collectors. I’ve seen some amazing things up there — not that I could afford any of them, but man. Getting to see them was almost as awesome.

I’m going to be going there again next month, and I can’t wait!

This is probably a symptom of my bibliomania — after all, I haven’t finished reading the books I bought last year! But even so, it’s hard not to feel a thrill at the thought of tracking down rare books I don’t have yet. I’ve started making a little list of things to look for when I’m there, and looking eagerly at the money I’ve been saving the last few months. I’ve even got a count-down widget on my smartphone (34 days!).

Powell’s!