Restoring the Reliquiae

This book was in a very sad condition.

There was very little of the spine left. The front and back boards were missing, as were some of the front leaves, notably the illustration of Charles I and the original title page. The text block was actually in good condition apart from it being spilt in two halves.

As I said in the previous post about this book, the title page was false. The experts I consulted were of the opinion it was a 19th century addition. Surprisingly for its condition the book was probably a Victorian rebinding, which would be consistent with the contemporaneous title page. The Victorians were in the habit of rebinding their collections in the current style, but apparently often in poorer quality, which means that books in their original binding can still be in better condition. I have at least one example of this.

The confirmation that this book was Almack's 31/Madan's 61 edition of the Reliquiae meant I now knew what the missing illustration and title page looked like. I decided that I wanted to rebind the book with the missing pages so it was close to its original state, and so I obtained copies of them from the British Library, who held a copy of this edition. The false title page and hand-written notes were moved to the back of the book.

The title page I was sent was of course a copy from a book someone once owned, so as usual they had written their name on it:

Original image from the BL

It wouldn't have been right to have the hand-writing of the owner of this page reproduced into mine (interestingly it seems to read "Ann Poley his booke"!?), and I also wanted to tidy it up generally and sharpen it prior to printing, so I gave it a good clean with my photo editor (the GIMP, a Unix program) to produce this version:

 That's better.

Similarly I needed to lift the picture of Charles from the double page image I was sent:

to produce this:

The images needed to be combined into one folio so when printed they would be folded with the two pages facing each other.

I wanted to match the colour of the pages in the book, which looked yellowed and aged. Clearly a white image would look pretty bad. So I photocopied a blank page from the book, duplicated it, reversed one and joined them together to create an image of a folded sheet:

and then combined the two images:

How about that! I was quite pleased with the result.

So to the rebinding itself. The loose leaves were removed to be tipped back in later. The remnants of the spine leather was removed. As with "The Idler", new stitching pulled together the two halves of the split text block and held the new tapes.

Here is a work-in-progress picture, showing the boards attached with the tapes recessed, the back lining applied and leather headbands just glued on and held by elastic bands.

The leather was from the same skin as "The Idler", dyed in the same way and suffered the same unexpected but serendipitous mottling.

I was happy with the overall result: