Thursday, January 29, 2015

A book repair manual

The synagogue I belong to has a problem: all its prayerbooks (siddurim; siddur - singular) were poorly bound by the publisher, and are in desperate need of repair. I took a look at them, and saw that they were quite fixable. I was given permission to run a class on book repair, to teach congregants how to repair them. Since I want to pass on the skill, I felt everyone would need a DIY booklet with the specific steps and methods for repairing these books.

Naturally, I underestimated how long it would take to make the booklet. 12 or 14 hours later I had 2 booklets in pdf format. I decided on 2 so I could limit their size to something manageable to make, download, and view

I thought my blog readers (or anyone searching Google Drive, for that matter) might also be interested in learning a little about the structure of a book, and some repair skills. While the directions are targeted for a specific set of books -- our congregation's siddurim -- with a specific set of problems, the methods may be applicable to other non-valuable hard-bound books. Kid's, adults, seniors: DON'T try repairing any book that you think is valuable or important (to you or anyone else).

By the way, you will notice I never mention the use of tape of any sort in these booklets. Why? Because taping up a book to fix it is like drinking arsenic to make a headache go away.

So here are the links to view the pdfs in Google Drive:

BookRepair-Booklet1.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1BwxFAypY1BU2Rkdnk3LVM1bEU/view?usp=sharing

BookRepair-Booklet2.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1BwxFAypY1BUVR1RWllUVJXOFE/view?usp=sharing

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