The Boston Cook Book
September was a crazy month in the bindery, as we prepared for two different book show events, so I decided to go back into the photo archives and pull up an older job that looked like a disaster but turned out pretty nice in the end.
People love cookbooks. I have one client who collects White House Cook Books. The first White House Cook Book was issued in 1887, and then came out every time there was an executive change in the White House and sometimes when there was a change in the White House Chef.
But the most common cook book that finds its way to the shop is Fannie Farmer's Boston Cook Book. The first edition was published in 1896 and only 3,000 copied were produced. Since then it has become of the standards cook books of our time and is still produced today. I believe I have restored no less than four copies of this book, including one an original from 1896. The one I am going to show you here was a later edition.
Here is what it looked like when it came in. You can't see it in the picture, but most of the spine was present, but the real issue was the tape that had been used to hold the book together. In this photo, most of the tape is off, but it took over an hour just to get it off.
The pages are heavily damaged, the cover corners worn and bent, and the text block was very loose. Since the client wanted to continuing using this copy the book, I told her it would need to be resewn.
So, I finished taking the spine and spine material off, got the rest of the tape off, repaired the paged with a combination of heat set tissues and glued on Japanese tissues. I injected wheat paste into the bent corners then cover the bare sections with a strong paper. After I sewed the text block I did a cloth reback and put the old spine back on over the new cloth. The book was now structurally sound, but it was still looking much like a hurt book. I used water color pencils to enhance the faded titles, then I mixed a fabric dye to match the original color and I applied it sparingly where the color was most washed out. Since the new cloth used for the reback was a different shade of yellow, the dye would not change it enough to match, so I had to resort to some arcylic colors and finally made a good match. Here is the rescued book in all its new glory.
