Our Village - a half leather rebinding

The first leather bound book I rebound was "Our Village" by Mary Russell Mitford, published in 1824. It's a second edition, not a valuable or particularly old book, and one I'd chosen as my first attempt for that reason - if it turned out badly it didn't really matter.

It was in pretty awful condition, tatty and falling apart. The text block was uncut and the edges were extremely uneven, worn and dirty, making it look ready for the trash.

As the stitching holding the sections together had largely disintegrated, I started by "pulling" the book - taking it apart completely and separating the sections.









The outer folio of every section needed guarding, sometimes an inner folio as well. Some of the outer pages also needed repairing.

All of this guarding meant a great deal of swell when the sections were stacked together. To reduce this the stack was put under weights for a few weeks.

Having reduced the swell as much as possible it was ready to be reassembled. The sections were stitched two-on - not the way it originally was, but I wanted to reduce the additional swell caused by the stitching as much as possible. Sawn-in cords were used.

I had also decided to tidy up the text block by trimming the uncut pages. This was done using a plough plane, and I was pretty happy with the results.

I wanted to retain the original front pastedown because as is often the case it had the signature of a previous owner, so I soaked it off the front board. In doing so, it revealed some of the covering marbled paper, and because it was protected inside the cover and under the pastedown, still had its original colour - very different from its state on the front cover. From this piece of paper I was able to find something quite similar to do the recovering.

Interesting that the binder had written "Calf" on the board to remind him what he was using for this particular job. Also it wasn't until this point that I realised that the book had a half-leather binding - that is, it had leather corners which were not obvious until now.

Below is the book with sewn headbands, rounded, backed and with new boards laced onto the cords, and ready for the leather.

And the finished book!

As well as my first attempt at leather binding, it was my first go at tooling. It's not brilliant but fortunately it doesn't have to be perfect to look acceptable. I'm happy with it. But the process of tooling directly onto the book feels so risky if you're inexperienced - if you mess up, there's little you can do to retrieve the situation. All that rebinding work spoiled!