I worked for another forty minutes updating my Web site with pictures of my latest projects and some nice new client endorsements.
As I went through the images I’d taken of the book box and pouch I’d fashioned for Baxter, I remembered my conversation with Inspector Lee the night before. So I attached the photos to an e-mail, wrote a quick note telling her what was included, and hit Send.
Feeling virtuous for having completed all the mundane tasks that kept my business alive and thriving, I gave myself the rest of the day to play. That is, to work. On books. Tearing them apart and putting them back together again. Fun stuff.
I rose from my desk chair and stretched my back before moving to my worktable. I’d already started on the first of six antiquarian books I’d been asked to restore for the Covington Library. My friend Ian had come up with an idea for a new exhibit of works by British women, featuring beautifully bound books by Jane Austen, the Bront? sisters, George Eliot, Beatrix Potter, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Georgette Heyer, the Mitford sisters, and many others.
Ian’s plan had evolved from my bringing him several tall stacks of old paperback mysteries that belonged to my neighbor’s aunt Grace Crawford. The books themselves were yellowed and falling apart, but the covers were fabulous. Screaming redheads, busty blondes, bulging eyeballs, and tantalizing silhouettes of women, all intent on luring men to their deaths.
Ian had created a small but eye-catching display of three dozen of these lurid noir book covers from the forties and fifties. He’d titled the exhibit “Pulp Fiction,” and it was attracting lots of new visitors to the library every week.
Grace’s collection had also included several Agatha Christie mysteries, and that’s where Ian had come up with the idea to feature female English writers in his next exhibit.
Ian had obtained many of the English authors’ books from the library collection itself and from a number of outside book collectors and benefactors. For the most part, the volumes were in beautiful condition, but Ian had given me six books that were in desperate need of my help. That was my job, after all: bookbinder extraordinaire, or so I liked to think.
All six of them were laid out on my worktable, waiting for me to attend to their needs.
I was almost finished with the first book, a small, charming edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818.
This was the easiest restoration job of the six. The smooth black morocco calfskin leather cover and endpapers were in exquisite condition, and the gilded title on the red embossed spine was still shiny. On a number of pages I found foxing, those patchy reddish-brown spots that looked like dirt but were thought to be caused by chemical reactions from microorganisms or oxidation. There were also two minor tears that Ian wanted me to fix. The back cover hinge had become loose, a simple problem that was easily remedied in five minutes.
I always liked to start with the easiest book first. That way, I could finish it up quickly and feel positive and upbeat about myself instead of feeling like a deadbeat loser incapable of accomplishing anything.
A neurotic approach, but it worked for me.
The book in the worst shape was a delicate first edition of Charlotte Bront?’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847.
I often fancied myself a surgeon as I took unhealthy books apart and put them together again. But once in a while, I turned into a pathologist as I tried to unlock the mystery of why a particular book had fallen into such a sad state of disrepair. Occasionally it was simple. The owner had packed the book away in a rat-infested attic, or dropped it in a puddle, or left it on a sunny shelf to be baked half to death.
Poor Jane Eyre had required extensive examination before I was able to reach a diagnosis: bad bookbinding. Yes, there were sloppy bookbinders out there, and this pitiful creature had suffered because of it. To begin with, the boards were crooked, having been unevenly fitted to the spine. Also, the book was wider at the fore edge than it was at the spine. This meant that over the years, as the book was opened and closed, the text block and the boards worked against each other, ultimately resulting in the hinge popping loose.
I supposed it was unfair to blame this uneven structure problem entirely on the bookbinder. A century or two ago when the book was made, this type of design had been considered visually pleasing. Nowadays, though, it was one of the top five reasons a book was rushed to me for restorative surgery.