I took a call one day from a new customer. He told me he had a book "worth a couple thousand dollars" that he found at a flea market for twenty five cents and he wanted an estimate to get fixed as it was in pretty bad condition and he wanted to sell it. So I told him to bring it in and I would look at for him, but then I didn't hear from him again for months and one day he just showed up unannounced at the shop with the book, "A Walk Across Africa" by James August Grant, and yes it was in terrible shape.

"So what makes you think this is worth a couple thousand dollars" I asked.

"Well, I saw it on line for about $3,000." I did a quick search with the shop computer and found the copy of the book he was citing but then I had to bust his bubble a little. "This $3,000 copy is a leather binding, in pristine condition, with the rare map still intact and in very good condition. Your book is a cloth cover, heavily soiled, missing the spine, and has the map, but the map is torn in many places and needs some restoration work. There is a cloth copy on line for $500 without the map, so I guess your book is more likely in that price range before restoration. If you restore the cover and spine to original condition, and fix the map, you could ask $1,500 and that would be a fair price."

Being a low end flea market hunter, he didn't have the money required to put the book back into a condition where it could command a price like that. But I had book seller who I thought would be willing to buy the book at the right price and make an investment in the cover restoration. Laurie Wolfe from Classic Books said she would be interested, but only if I could duplicate the original spine design, clean the crummy covers, and print and insert a facsimile copy of page of definitons that was missing.

I downloaded a jpg of the original spine that I found in a Google search. Imported the image into a graphics program, traced it and made two magesium stamping dies, one for the main title and one for the publisher info located on the bottom of the spine. Next up I tried cleaning the cover, so I tested a small area for color and book cloth durability with the cleaning process. You can see how well the cover cleaned up, but it was never going to be pristine again.

I selected a light color premium book cloth to use for the reback but before I mounted the cloth, I stamped the original spine graphics in gold, with the newly made stamoping dies and did this while the cloth was flat. Matching the color and patina of the cleaned front and rear covers was problematic, because despite the dramatic improvement that came from the cleaning, the overall cloth color was not uniform and still had large color variations throughout. I used dry color pigments mixed into a wheat paste mixture to produce a "book cloth paint" that would be archival in quality, yet not look painted. It did take numerous trials before the exact color match was made, and then the replacement cloth was paste tinted to the matching color and then allowed to dry before being coated with a fixative. The damage sections of the valuable map were repaired on the reverse side with tegujo tissue and archival paste, but not until a small sample of the map was tested for color fastness. By this point all the hard work was done and the only thing to do was to mounted the new cloth spine.

This job turned into a win-win-win for everyone. The flea market hunter made a large profit on the sale to the book sellers, I got the job of restoring the cover, and the Laurie and Craig picked up a rare book with an even rarer map.

For history buffs here is a short synopsis from Wikipedia.

James Augustus Grant, CB, CSI,FRS, FRGS (11 April 1827 — 11 February 1892) was a Scottish explorer of eastern equatorial Africa.

Grant was born at Nairn in the Scottish Highlands, where his father was the parish minister, and educated at the grammar school and Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1846 he joined the Indian army. He saw active service in the Sikh War (1848–49), served throughout the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and was wounded in the operations for the relief of Lucknow.

He returned to England in 1858, and in 1860 joined John Hanning Speke in the memorable expedition which solved the problem of the Nilesources.[1] The expedition left Zanzibarin October 1860 and reachedGondokoro, where the travellers were again in touch with what they regarded civilization, in February 1863. Speke was the leader, but Grant carried out several investigations independently and made valuable botanical collections. He acted throughout in absolute loyalty to his comrade.

In 1864 he published, as supplementary to Speke's account of their journey, A Walk across Africa, in which he dealt particularly with "the ordinary life and pursuits, the habits and feelings of the natives" and the economic value of the countries traversed. In 1864 he was awarded the patron's medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and in 1866 given the Companionship of the Bath in recognition of his services in the expedition

Repair My Book

The Flea Market Find