One day this past Spring, Julia gave me the glorious news of my approaching grandmother-hood, thus inspiring me to repair the crayoned, torn, beat-up Beatrix Potter Books from my childhood.
Interior Repair
As you can see below, a repair was in order for The Tale of Two Bad Mice, with its flaking cover and mutilated pages (mea culpa).
To replace the missing pages, mostly images, I looked up the book on Internet and easily found the complete text and images here.
After some tests, I printed the images recto-verso on sturdy paper I had lying around.
Next, I sliced off the remainder of the torn pages, and attached the new ones using special binding tape purchased at an art store. I used the same procedure to repair other pages, and the back cover.
Spine Repair
Both The Tale of Two Bad Mice and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin had seriously damaged spines. But since The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies was in such poor condition that it wasn't worth keeping, I recycled its spine for reconstruction work.
I printed new partial or complete book titles for the spines, glued them on the recycled spine cardboard, then glued that piece to the book spine.
However, I went too fast on The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. Q: Can you spot the error in the photo below?
A: With a 50% chance of getting it right, I of course put the new spine on the wrong way, so had to redo it.
Another error was using a Hubert-supplied clamp on The Tale of Two Bad Mice after gluing on the new spine (pictured above). Clamping turned out to be the wrong technique and resulted in a frightenly flattened spine. Even after a major re-repair, involving more spine reconstruction, and a gentler technique using rubber bands instead of a clamp to hold the drying spine, the book will never be the same. But if grandbaby takes after me, he'll probably crayon and rip the pages anyway.
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