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Don't Mend It Yet: How to Store, Clean and Protect Old Books Without Destroying What They Are Worth, and the Short List of Repairs That Are Safe to Ma
Paperback
General Antiques & Collectibles
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 4 2026
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.34 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Somebody inherits a shelf of old books. One of them has a cracked hinge, which looks fixable, so it gets fixed. An afternoon, a tube of glue, two bulldog clips, and by teatime the book is worth less than it was at breakfast.
That is not clumsiness. It is arithmetic. The trade pays for original, faults included, because a known fault carries a known deduction while a repair is an unknown, and unknowns are priced far more harshly. Even a skilled professional rebinding can leave a book at around half the price of the same title in a shabby original binding.
So this book is mostly a list of refusals, and it gives you something to do in place of every one of them.
What is actually happening. Why paper made after about 1850 is slowly digesting itself, why the front hinge always fails first, what red rot is and why it is not a fungus, and what those brown foxing spots really are.
What you are doing wrong now, for nothing. The bookcase against the cold outside wall. The loft. The sun you only get in June. The gap on the shelf. The newspaper cutting printing its acid into the page. And the one hand movement that has torn more spines than damp and insects combined.
The environment, in a house and not a museum. The two numbers that matter, the sixty five per cent line where mould begins, and an honest admission that stable beats ideal.
Mould, handled safely and in the right order. Telling live growth from an old stain, drying a book without heat, and why cleaning comes last rather than first.
What actually eats books in Britain, how to read whether the damage is finished or still running, and the truth about the kitchen freezer, where the real figure is a fortnight and not three days.
Cleaning, which is a much shorter list than you would like, and why every major library stopped recommending leather dressing.
Then the repairs. The five interventions that are genuinely safe. The borderline ones and their conditions. The ones that are never yours to make. And tape, which gets a chapter to itself because the stain it leaves ends up larger than the tape was.
Selling it. How to describe damage so the book sells rather than comes back, where a private seller stands under section 13 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979, and what ex-library and book club edition really cost you.
And when to pay somebody. What a conservator charges, how to find an accredited one in the United Kingdom who is not also trying to buy your book, and how to work out whether treatment is worth it, which usually it is not.
Five worksheets, including a room survey and a five question test to run before you touch anything.
Written against the published guidance of the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the British Standards. Information, not advice, and not a conservation service.
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