Book Repair

We repair our books here in the Library/Media Center office. We use simple techniques. If the book requires more, we can send it to be rebound, or replace it. It seems like the bindings of books are progressively becoming cheaper and less sturdy over time. This can take up a lot of our time, and due to the cheapness of the bindings and the high volume type of use books get in our library/media center, they may not last too long, and may be cheaper to replace.

Yet, we persist in trying.

Here are some links to a few web sites that give an overview on book repair. Some of them become quite detailed with the project, but we keep it simple. This is just to give you an idea of how to do it. We usually limit our repairs to gluing spines, repairing and reinserting pages, reinforcing corners and bindings, and replacing barcodes and spine labels.

For some great, basic book repair techniques, look over the Philobiblon web site. It contains photos that show how to repair binding and pages. This site is especially helpful.

For a more comprehensive list of repairs to books and other kinds of publications, go to the Book Repair page by Elizabeth Dodds.

This is another web site with book repair basics from Dartmouth College. Do not try to read the whole thing, but pay attention to Guiding Principles, Parts of a Book, Practical Guidelines, Torn Pages, Hinge Repair, and Hinge Tightening.

For links to more in-depth book repair sites, see the Philoblon list of web sites.

This site was last updated 07/09/04