00:00 [scraping]
00:02 [scraping]
00:04 [snipping]
00:05 One slip of the hand, and this 100-year-old
00:08 first edition book could be ruined forever.
00:11 [sigh]
00:12 That's why restoring a book like this
00:14 takes immense patience and precision.
00:16 I used to take the books apart a little bit
00:18 in front of my clients until
00:20 their faces would just be like,
00:22 "They don't need to know.
00:23 Nobody needs to know what I'm doing,
00:25 but you guys get to know."
00:26 Meet Sophia Bogle,
00:27 book restorer, educator, and author,
00:30 who has dedicated her life
00:31 to preserving our stories.
00:33 I have probably restored thousands of books.
00:35 I don't actually know the number.
00:38 [music]
00:41 Some of the most important things
00:42 in book restoration,
00:43 some of the steps involved,
00:45 are deconstruction, opening the spine,
00:48 scraping the old spine,
00:50 doing color matching.
00:52 For the text block, there's page washing,
00:54 if needed, page repair,
00:56 and then reconstructing the book.
00:59 Not every book is the same.
01:00 It's one of the main reasons that makes this
01:03 such a difficult specialty
01:04 to become really good at.
01:05 Here I have the first edition
01:08 of The Lost Princess of Oz,
01:10 and it's in terrible shape.
01:12 Very dirty on the front cover.
01:14 The spine is breaking.
01:17 Pages are torn up.
01:19 So normally a restoration like this
01:21 could take between 8 and 12 hours.
01:25 One of the first things is to separate
01:27 the text block from the cover.
01:32 There are other book repair knives out there.
01:34 This one I designed to be like a fingertip.
01:37 [slicing]
01:45 It does sometimes feel like book surgery,
01:48 sometimes more than others,
01:49 especially those tight joint,
01:52 tight back leather books.
01:53 Those are nerve-wracking.
01:55 Talk about surgery.
01:56 You have to cut into the leather
01:59 around the little panels,
02:00 dye the leather, and make that match
02:02 so that everything is as invisible as possible.
02:06 Having done all that, this is the result.
02:11 Some pages need to be washed.
02:13 Other pages might just need a few repairs.
02:16 This kind of tear right here
02:18 is a beveled or a scarf tear.
02:20 It just means it has two overlapping areas.
02:23 Those are the best kind
02:25 because you can just put some paste in there.
02:27 I've got my rice starch paste.
02:29 I'm literally just going to paint these two together.
02:33 [pasting]
02:39 Now we're going to use the shadow tracer,
02:43 a piece of black paper,
02:45 and then something clear and plastic over it.
02:49 We're tracing the shape with some water
02:52 so that we can tear it out.
02:55 I'm going to put it on this side.
02:59 [pasting]
03:08 Starting to look better.
03:10 There we go.
03:11 So that's a good start.
03:12 I might actually do that again to make that thicker,
03:15 but for now that's good.
03:17 That can just be trimmed to fit.
03:21 And then that's fitted in there.
03:24 While a lot of Sofia's work centers around her desk,
03:27 her workshop is full of unique tools for restoration.
03:31 All right, so this is my bindery.
03:33 Over here I've got my old sewing frame,
03:37 which uses these old-fashioned keys.
03:40 Then over here I've got the more modern version.
03:43 This is the Jeff Peechee no-key system.
03:46 It's kind of cool, have both kinds.
03:48 This is a job backer, and it's pretty old, from the 1800s.
03:52 You put the book in here, and then you squish it.
03:55 And then you can work on it with a hammer or a saw,
03:59 which really freaks people out.
04:01 This is the gold-finishing stove,
04:03 and my apprentice used to call this the bear trap
04:06 because it looks like it could just close up on your hand at any moment.
04:09 This is something that you need to do leather restoration work.
04:13 This is all done by hand.
04:15 You hold on, and then you do the tooling.
04:18 This is an example of the gold leaf.
04:21 I just keep little scraps of it in here.
04:23 It's really hard to work with because it's so delicate.
04:26 So here I've got my Quick Print stamping machine,
04:29 and I've got a lot of weird little doodaddy things
04:33 that you can stamp with, as well as a lot of fonts.
04:38 And this is a whole 'nother thing,
04:41 where anything you can put into a black-and-white design,
04:44 you can have made into a die.
04:47 You know, here's Toto.
04:50 This is how it operates.
04:52 You put your little device in here,
04:54 and then bring it back down,
04:57 and you squish it.
04:59 The impression that it makes is called the kiss, which I just love.
05:03 Let's see how that turned out.
05:05 So then over here is my nipping press.
05:09 These were originally made to make copies.
05:13 These days, everybody who's a bookbinder would want one of these
05:17 because you can put your book in here and press it,
05:20 and it works really well.
05:22 Sometimes in the restoration process,
05:25 pages themselves need to be removed from the book and washed.
05:29 Some of them are very dirty.
05:31 This one has some blue ink on it.
05:33 I'm going to test before we begin,
05:36 and the way to do that is to take cotton swab,
05:39 get that wet.
05:41 You put a drop of water, and you just stare at it.
05:45 I can see that's already starting to go.
05:48 One of the things that we do to help keep the pages together
05:51 is we have this Holitex, which is a spun polyester paper.
05:56 I'm just trying to submerge it.
05:59 It's like it's taking a little bath.
06:01 I should get a little floaty duck or something.
06:03 Then you can take just a clean brush.
06:06 So that's basically it.
06:09 (narrator) This knack for invisible artistry
06:12 has been years in the learning
06:14 and part of a lifetime love of literature.
06:16 I was at the University of Minnesota
06:18 getting my English degree.
06:20 I got a student job at the library bindery.
06:23 It was quite the transformational experience.
06:25 I knew I wanted to do something with books,
06:28 and I walked in here and I discovered that books
06:30 were taken apart and put back together.
06:32 There was one person over in the corner
06:34 throwing books into buckets of water and sewing
06:37 all the beautiful things, and I was like,
06:39 oh, that's the job I want.
06:41 (narrator) Sophia's been doing that job for over 30 years,
06:44 saving history one book at a time.
06:46 What I want to do is I want to get at this cover spine liner
06:50 by cutting here, getting that open,
06:54 and same thing over here.
06:57 And then I can start to remove this old paper,
07:03 which is fairly acidic
07:06 when it's more acidic, it falls apart quicker.
07:10 And just clean up the last little bit of that section.
07:16 [blows]
07:18 (narrator) Restoring the book's spine
07:20 is an important step in the process,
07:22 but some spines pose particularly unique challenges.
07:25 So this one was truly one of the most difficult,
07:29 and for such a special, unique book.
07:32 Literally one of these books was made in the world.
07:35 The original spine was just gone,
07:37 and they had restored it with this suede.
07:40 So my challenge was removing this, oh, it took so long,
07:43 with a knife and just scraping really carefully
07:46 and just trying to get that off of there,
07:49 and it came out like this.
07:51 I mean, I get chills really,
07:53 because this is Frank Baum's copy for his mother,
07:56 and there's a wonderful inscription on the first page.
07:59 So it's just really fun to be part of that story too.
08:02 (narrator) Regardless of what steps are required
08:05 to return a book to its former glory,
08:07 the final step is always putting the book back together,
08:10 or recasing.
08:12 I've got the hinge that will be tucked in there.
08:15 I'm actually noticing right now that the Japanese tissue
08:18 that I put on there is extending too far,
08:20 and I have 2 options.
08:22 I can lift this up further, or I can tear some of this off,
08:25 and I'm going to go for the tear some of this off version
08:29 and tear some of that.
08:32 The edge of the mold makes a nice edge to tear it against,
08:35 so super easy.
08:37 But meanwhile, this is the most fun part.
08:39 I don't think I've even told you about this.
08:41 You can write things on the spine of the book.
08:44 This book restored by Sophia, September 2023.
08:51 And then my signatures, I always put 3 dots on.
08:55 I do love the fact that there's the story in the book,
08:59 there's the story of the restoration of the book,
09:01 there's the story of who has owned the book,
09:03 and now I'm just in there just a little bit more.
09:06 I'm taking the PVA.
09:09 And you just don't want any glue on the spine.
09:20 The spine needs to not be attached to the other spine
09:24 because this is all going to get tucked in now.
09:28 It's getting there.
09:30 And I'm just going to go ahead and put this in to protect it.
09:34 And now it needs to go up in the press.
09:37 It's really important that the book goes in square
09:39 and that the pin of this is over the area that you need it to be over.
09:45 There we go.
09:46 So I'm going to leave this in here overnight.
09:48 By tomorrow it'll be finished and ready to go home.
09:51 No matter how many books she's restored,
09:53 Sophia takes the work of book restoration as a vital responsibility.
09:57 I'm preserving cultural history.
09:59 It's really important.
10:01 So many books are being thrown away.
10:03 I want more people to collect books, to think about that,
10:06 like what can you collect, what can you put on your shelves,
10:08 and take care of and take stewardship of
10:12 so that they'll make it to the next generations.
10:14 [MUSIC PLAYING]
Comments