Looking for advice on restorative bookbinding!
I recently learned about fanbinding and custom bookbinding, and I've decided it would be a super neat thing to learn how to do. Since i've never done anything like it before besides like, those little books we'd make in elementary school with folded printer paper and a staple gun, I'm looking for outside advice!
I got a very nice sci-fi book from my dad, but calling it well-loved is an understatement.
It's torn completely in half, but in my (limited) experience it's still salvageable. Like, as a book, it's still usable, i can and do read it i'm just careful with the outermost pages of each chunk.
I'd like to try my hand at rebinding this book, just as a beginner side project, since it's here and I already own it and nobody will read it except me, so who cares if the binding job is sloppy or crooked?
Each half is mostly solid, although the cover pieces and outer pages are only hanging on by threads.
The paper of the spine is pretty cracked, but the two cover pieces are in pretty good condition except for nicks and fraying around the edges.
the second chunk has a hole in the top page, but it only takes out like two words and i'm ninety percent sure i can extrapolate the blanks from the context if/when i patch that page.
It's about 860 pages long not counting the non-story ones like title pages, about the author, etc. I know there's a limit for how many pages certain binding styles can handle.
it's also printed on like, i don't know the name for it but it's that really thin yellowish paper that a ton of those old paperbacks are printed in (is pulp fiction the right word?)
Since it's a paperback, it doesn't have endpapers per se. Whatever cover I made and attached, would I need endpapers to glue to the inner cover? Would it be better to sacrifice the existing first and last pages to be endpapers (which i don't mind doing since the first has a story snippet and the last is blank), or better to glue dedicated endpapers to the text block at the same time I glue the two chunks together?
I don't really have a preference on hardback or paperback cover, I think hardbacks are easier for beginners to make?
I'd like to preserve the cover or at least the design of it somehow, so one of my ideas is to scan the cover and spine and print them out bigger onto a larger piece of paper if I decide to go with a hardback cover.
The second chunk has the paper of the spine on it (also hanging on by a thread). I'm not sure if I should scrape off the leftover spine paper/glue that's on the spines of the text blocks before I glue on a cover, or if it'll be fine to glue a fresh cover on top of it (after separating the graphic paper of the spine).
In terms of materials, I actually own a bottle of acid free archival quality book glue (I bought it ages ago in hopes of patching another book that tore in half from use), I have plenty of scrapbooking paper and cotton fabric left over from other projects, and I think my local makerspace has a dedicated bookbinding press!
It's a neat story, but the physical book itself has no sentimental value to me or my dad, so if I can't fix it I'll just buy a fresh copy and sacrifice this one as material for other paper crafts. I just thought it'd be a fun place to start learning how to bookbind, rather than trying to format and print and shape a fresh text block from scratch.
If you need more info about this project, please ask and I'm happy to share it. Any advice is appreciated, and thank you in advance!
