Hi! I'm following your blog for quite some time and I know you used to do bookbinding too and wanted to ask since I'm now stuck in a horrible dilemma - what do you think of recycled vellum books and covers? Atm new parchment is super expensive (esp the quality one, vellum) and there's no way I could afford it, but used vellum is really cheap, 10 - 20$ for (large sheets) 1800s law documents (loans & bank stuff) if you're lucky on ebay but that means I gotta cut up and scrub an antique :C
Don’t tell anyone I said so, but that sounds perfectly reasonable. At school we bought deeds off eBay to practice parchment repairs because no one would care if we tore them up. You would also be participating in a long tradition of using manuscript waste for bindings. Most of the time they did not bother to clean the ink off, so there are a lot of quite handsome bindings covered in big old choral book pages. You have my blessing.