I could still picture the sturdy, pale pink cloth binding with its green cloth spine. The front cover had featured an illustration drawn by Tasha Tudor, a sepia-toned version of the little girl standing by the garden wall. She wore a plaid coat and hat and carried a jump rope in her hand. She appeared to be emerging from the secret walled garden through a heavy wooden door.
My clever parents had bought the book for me the summer they moved our family from San Francisco to the new commune in Sonoma County. They knew us kids well, had known we weren’t happy about the move. Their solution was to surprise us with goodies to keep our minds off this major disruption. My gift was The Secret Garden.
I had adored that book and read it over and over again that summer. Then one day, I went to find the book and it was gone. Puzzled, I searched all over the house but couldn’t find it anywhere.
I walked outside and saw my big brothers, Austin and Jackson, and a couple of their friends tossing something back and forth. It was my book! I screamed at them and they dropped it in the dirt and ran away, laughing.
I gingerly picked up my beloved Secret Garden. The cover had been ripped from the text block and dangled precariously, held on by a mere thread or two. I began to cry and tore into the house to find my mother, hoping she would agree to help me beat the boys with clubs.
Though she wasn’t happy with what they’d done, she refused to punish them in the manner I’d suggested. I was inconsolable and ran to my room, sobbing. A few minutes later, Mom walked in and sat on my bed. As she rubbed my back, she suggested that I take the book over to the commune’s bookbinder. Perhaps he could fix it for me.
The bookbinder was Abraham, my teacher and friend, who died last year.
He had taken one look at the tattered book and had called my brothers into his studio to put the fear of God into them.
“I am not happy about this,” he’d said in his soft baritone.
I’d watched my brothers’ eyes widen in apprehension, because when Abraham wasn’t happy, people tended to run for the hills. The man was tall and husky, with a big head of wiry hair and really large hands. His voice grew softer the madder he became. All the kids agreed he would make a great bad guy in a science-fiction movie like The Thing.
He wasn’t a monster at all, of course, but a big softy and a darling man. I loved him for counseling my brothers—after he had first frightened them thoroughly—that part of their job on this earth was to respect and treasure their family and to take care of the little ones, like me.
He’d added gruffly that anyone who didn’t take care of books was downright stupid.
“You don’t want to be thought of as stupid, do you?” Abraham murmured. “Wouldn’t you rather have us believe that you’re intelligent young men?”
Jackson and Austin looked like bobblehead dolls as they nodded in agreement.
After listening to Abraham, I felt a little sheepish about having asked my mother to beat up my brothers and their friends. But I kept that to myself.
Abraham fixed my book and returned it to me in better-than-original condition. After countless readings by my little eight-year-old self, it had been admittedly a bit shabby, but Abraham had made it look beautiful again.
As he’d worked on my book, I had hounded him, showing up at his workshop hourly to check on his progress. His bookbinding skills fascinated me, and once my book was restored I continued to visit him almost daily to beg him to teach me how to do what he did.
Finally, he reluctantly agreed, and I began the journey that eventually made me the bibliophile expert I was today.
I sat back in my chair and checked the time. I still had another hour before I had to stop, so I opened the book and found the pages that contained the minor foxing I’d pointed out to Vera. I wrote down each page number that contained even the slightest discoloration. There was foxing on only twelve pages. That wasn’t so awful.
I still wasn’t sure if I would bother eliminating the spots or not, because the procedure could be destructive to the book. But the sad fact was that while some buyers accepted that foxing was inevitable, others were likely to downgrade the book’s worth with each instance.
Happily, the paper was a thick, creamy vellum, so if I decided to go ahead with the bleaching procedure, the pages would be able to withstand my gentle attempts to clean them.
Foxing was caused by various types of mold spores or mildew that reacted to elements, mainly iron, within the paper itself. The problem with trying to clean or bleach the brown spots was that an individual spore could react completely differently, depending on the paper. You never knew exactly what you were dealing with until you saw the results.