It all started because my father was a book collector. Not of those smart glossy and gold embossed beauties that look great on a shelf, but rather sad, broken and faded ones.
My father was an English scholar who went to University College, London (and did rather well) in the early 1930s. He studied Early English and clearly loved old books, for he seems to have spent much of his spare time browsing the book stalls in Farringdon Street and buying volumes for a few pence. After the war book collecting continued, and by the time I arrived on the scene, he had many thousands of books lining the shelves of his study.
A small number of the books were leather-bound and lived on their own bookshelf in the lounge. However, these were the sort of books that most collectors wouldn't look twice at because of their condition, but my father bought them to read (I can see from the notes inside most of them that he did) as he loved literature. When I was young I liked to look in them because they were so old and gave me a real sense of history, something that was lacking when I studied the subject at school.
When my father died, the books came to me and I wanted to keep them for sentimental reasons. Some were in an acceptable enough condition to put on a shelf and be appreciated. But most were not - broken spines, disintegrating leather, detached boards, you name it - and if I couldn't put them on view to appreciate then I wasn't sure I wanted to keep them (even the idea of selling them was fruitless, dealers turned their noses up at them).
I knew that restoring old books was expensive, and I didn't love them enough to consider paying for that, except for one. It was the oldest of them all, printed in 1649, that had no cover and an enigmatic note written on the front page - but more about this in a later post.
So it left me wondering what to do with the rest - the options seemed to be to throw them away or possibly trying to do something myself. I'm a fairly handy sort of person, prepared to have a go at fixing anything, but I had no idea how to go about this, and judging by information found on the internet, difficult would be an understatement.
It was at this point while thinking about finding a bookbinder to restore my 1649 volume that I met Angela Sutton at a book fair in Stratford-on-Avon. Angela is an experienced bookbinder, teaches the subject, and was representing the Society of Bookbinders that day. She persuaded me that to have any chance of restoring a book myself, I needed to understand the basics of bookbinding and how a book is constructed, and luckily for me, she could show me how. So now I am taking my first tentative steps under her expert guidance...
As I work on books I may get round to documenting it in posts here, just as much (or possibly more) for my benefit as anyone else's.
