Once upon a time I lent books to people I was not familiar with how they’d treat something they had just borrowed. Naively I expected them to handle something that was not their own with care... and I got my treasured volume of Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story) back full of stains and spots, the dust jacket torn and ‘patched’ with sellotape (and I even had to count myself lucky. The inside was not damaged at all, I heard the same person gave back books with marmalade stains to another friend).
Since then I’ve got myself another copy in better condition, but this copy, my copy, the one I read first sat on my shelve. A festering thorn in my mind and eye whenever I looked at it. So it’s time to get this old love a new case and get rid of those constant sources of irritation.
I’m not sure about the design yet. I’d love to go for the originally described look but you have no idea how hard it is to find a copper coloured cloth (I might end up making some myself from copper coloured silk after all) but I have one with a dark coppery/ chocolate tone and nice sheen. Despite being nowhere near a decision what design to go for I already checked options for an endband. The book is not sewn in signatures so at least the sewing will be easy enough with no tie downs at all.
gilding and colouring edges gone wrong, that’s what you get from being lazy
(pictures and description under the cut)
So I was learning how to gild edges with genuine leaf gold and picked the probably worst paper to work with. There were a lot of things going wrong to begin with. We sanded the edges from hand, but also with a belt sander, which actually a brilliant idea... if you are familiar using one, which was not.
So from sanding hollows and angles into the edge to polishing the gold too soon/ too late/ too lightly/ too firmly, I’m pretty sure I picked up every mistake and problem I could run into.
This blotchy and speckled looking edge was the best result I got in a row of much worse results, so I kept it.
There was also some smudging on the fore edge from gilding the head edge that still needed cleaning up (meaning sanding... I hate sanding the fore-edge because you have to do it by hand. There’s supposed to be a way using a cutting machine, but I don’t really know how to do that)
On a whim I decided, why not colouring the other edges to make it look a bit more exciting?
As I mentioned I’m lazy with sanding the edge, knowing the voluminous paper I had here I didn’t put as much effort and time in as I should have and this was the result
You can clearly see where I didn’t sand the edge smooth enough at the sides. The darker one here was the side I had on my side of the press so it was not as easy to apply pressure there. Not that one should apply more pressure in one direction than the other in the first place, but well...
(This is a picture from when I pressed the book in a second time for polishing (which one shouldn’t do either, but it was already fucked up anyway), not from the actual sanding and colouring process, hence the lack of paper to protect the press!)
Because it looked already uneven and sort of grunge I tried a wavy brush pattern which turns out to offer a nice moiré effect that I had not anticipated.
I ended up sanding the bottom edge even less and got ‘a not as smooth as I like but nicely coloured’ edge that has a nice sheen and touch after waxing and polishing it.
Tooling the gilded edge was surprisingly easy. I just printed a pattern I liked to fit the edge, placed it and traced the lines. The pattern wasn’t wide enough to cover all the messy parts of the edge and didn’t feel confident to add to the patter in a fitting pattern free hand so I just sort of blended in with some dots.
The cover-up had worked partially, I guess more uneven/ haphazard pattern might have been better than straight lines, but in general I’m pleased of how it turned out. The paper was shining off rather stark white and I toned it down a bit by smearing graphit from a pencil rub off on it.
