Jane's Fighting Ships was first published in 1898 by John F.T. Jane. This set of three volumes recently restored for James T. Flynn, Jr. are 1908, 1910, and 1912 editions. According to Jim, a Historian for the US Coast Guard Tug Association, any copy published before WWII is hard to find, and even harder to find in useable condition. This is the third set of Jane's Fighting Ships that we have restored for Jim.

Each of these books was in need of a cloth reback, and some titling. For the 1912 edition we successfully removed the existing spine material with the title intact and after the cloth reback was completed the original spine was reattached over the new cloth.

The 1910 edition, in a different color and cloth material had a spine title that was so damaged we could not save enough to make a decent looking spine if we tried to use what was left of the original title, so we decide to make a new spine and stamp it in the same manner as the old one.

The last volume, a 1908 edition was missing the spine cover entirely, so we had to duplicate the spine titling, but do that without breaking the bank. We could have scanned the 1912 spine, converted the scanned image into a graphics file, then tried some computer magic, and finally sent the file off via email to have a stamping die made that would be an exact match to the original, but the value of this book just did not warrant that level of expense. Instead we used a graphics program and match the font size and style as close as possible, then printed the title out on acid free paper. This title was then trimmed to size and applied over the new cloth spine, then hand colored and aged to look 100 years old. We did have a little trouble getting the gold color to look just right on the dark blue background, so eventually it was printed and hand colored to get it just right.

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Jane's Fighting Ships Restoration