The Idler - a full leather rebinding

My second leather rebinding was a book called "The Idler" by Samuel Johnson, published in 1799. It was in poor condition and of little value to me. The main reason for choosing this book for a first stab at full leather was its similarity in size to the "Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae" (the 1649 book I briefly alluded to in the blog intro) and I used it as a practice run for repairing the Reliquiae itself.

The boards of the book were already loose or detached, but I deliberately split the text block so that the starting condition of the book was very similar to the Reliquiae, so I would get to practice all the elements that the latter would need during repair.

The book was sewn on sawn-in (recessed) cords so there are no characteristic raised bands on the spine. This was fine for what I wanted; the Reliquiae also had a flat spine, quite typical for a 17th century book, and I wanted this to be the same. I chose to use tapes for attaching the boards to keep the back flat. These I sewed on while stitching along the back of some of the sections and cross-stitched across the split to hold the two parts together.

It looks a bit untidy (and is) but this was the first time I'd done this sort of stitching. In fact, as a newbie it was the first time of doing nearly everything here. In hindsight and with a bit more experience, I'm not sure how much strength this stitching really gives to the tapes and to joining the split in the spine. Perhaps Japanese tissue glued across the split and adhesive for the tapes is as good if not better, but that's for the future.

Anyhow, once adhesive has been applied to the back then it's all a bit stronger and tidier. Below shows the boards attached with the tapes recessed.

On the first book I sewed "proper" headbands but I found it really fiddly. For this one I tried something different - and quicker. Various alternatives are possible, one type is simply material - I used a thin scrap of leather - folded over a thin core - in my case, a thin strip of leather.

It's OK but I'd think twice about doing it again. One of the purposes of a headband is to give extra strength to the head of the book where fingers are used to hook the book off the shelf, and this headband is floppy and doesn't do that. Another downside I found was that it makes quite a bit of bulk at the head and tail of the spine, which then needs to be evened out when it is back-lined. You can see in the image below that I had to fill in between the headbands to make it flat before gluing a paper back-lining.

The leather used for the covering is calf, appropriate for an old book. I wanted the leather darker than the natural colour, so I dyed it with multiple treatments of a water-based dye. Below shows the leather after paring and dying. The colour is slightly uneven, but I was happy with that as I wanted a more "rustic" look rather than being completely clean and uniform.
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It didn't quite turn out like that. After the leather had been pasted, the surface turned dark, and unevenly so. For (new) leather to darken when it's wet is normal, returning to its original colour as it dries out, so I wasn't concerned. Unexpectedly, however, when the leather dried out it stayed the same dark colour, and having a strange mottled appearance. This actually looked OK to me as an aged piece of leather, but definitely not what it was supposed to look like.

No-one I've asked has been able to explain why this happened. The general feeling is that there must have been something odd in the leather tanning process. My theory is that during the process of dyeing the leather (and perhaps because I used multiple coats and it was water-based) the dye soaked into the leather, and wetting the leather from underneath (with the paste) brought the dye to the surface The cover for the Reliquiae (coming later) was from the same skin, and did the same thing. I've pasted dyed leather from different skins since then and not had the same issue.

After tooling, here is the finished book: