How 100-year-old books are professionally restored

• Sophia Bogle is a professional book conservationist.
• She shows us how to restore a 120-year-old book.
• This includes deconstructing the book, repainting the cover, soaking and cleaning the pages in water, and reassembling the cover and pages.

The following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: My name is Sophia Bogle. I've been restoring books for over 25 years, and I started my company, Save Your Books, so that anyone can learn archival-book repair. The book I'm restoring today is the Hans Christian Andersen "Fairy Tales" book from the late 1800s, early 1900s.

The first thing that we do in pretty much any full restoration is we have to separate the cover from the text block. The tool that I prefer to use is the book-repair knife. It has a rounded tip and is less likely to do damage that you did not intend as an X-Acto knife would. I'm removing the old tape. It's very acidic, and if I leave it on the book at all, it's going to affect the book later on. When you're removing some of the original material and you know you're going to be replacing it with something, it's good to mark where it was in relationship to the other materials. And so in this case, I've used a pencil and a piece of paper to mark where the original went. I'm using a 100-grit sanding block to clean the edges of these boards off. It makes a nice, clean edge.

A lot of general cleaning can be done using a book-repair knife, and using the book-repair knife to just remove some clumpy bits that are stuck to the end paper. When you're repairing a book, usually all the pages are still connected, and there are some pages that will benefit from this washing technique that I have. It'll help us to get the tape off of the page, in a way that you couldn't do if it was attached to the book still. To wash a page, to get rid of the tape, you just have to put it in fairly hot water. You aren't going to need any additives to clean these pages. It's just hot water. It's surprisingly effective. It can sit in the water for hours. You're also just going to have to be very delicate with the paper, because it's in a more delicate state when it's in the water. I'm using a microspatula to help separate the pages, and I'm also using a ruler to help hold down the other page. You can use a soft brush to help you to brush away the old adhesive.

When you're touching up anything black on a cover, you're going to want to use an archival pen. It's a 0.08-micron pen, and it is archival ink. The smaller the tip, the better, in a way. Do not use a Sharpie. Those will damage and discolor. While I was cleaning, I also noticed that some of the gilt stamping has been removed. When I'm using the word "gilt," gilt refers to gold. So it's gold stamping on the cover. Some people would call it embossing. Originally, this was stamped with hot metal plates, with foil coming down onto the book. The best way to fill in gilt stamping is to use shell gold. I'm using a liner brush, and I have all the control in the world. You're going to make mistakes. You can actually remove the gilt by using a cuticle stick, and then you can clean up your gilt. If you want to match the color of your book and do touch-up on the covers, it's not as hard as you might think. You look at this, this is a greenish brown. The brownish colors that tend to be on these older books, they're muddy looking. And the way to get to that muddy-looking color is to go across the color wheel from the color you think it is and add that other color to make it more muddy looking.

When you find tears on your pages and you want to repair them, I highly recommend using Japanese tissue that's thin and an archival paste, such as what I have here, which is nori paste. It's a rice-starch paste. A really thin tissue is going to be better than a thicker tissue. You don't need very much paste. You get everything ready. You've got your book in the cover, right side up. You're going to be gluing all of those materials. You're going to glue that mull and that little hinge, and you're gluing that decorative end sheet back, and then you're going to close the cover. And then you slip a sheet of wax paper in. And then you put the pressing board in.

When I discovered that there were pages missing from this book, I found a version of the story that connected to where the book started with the pages missing. I used paper that's called antique endleaf. I am using a colored pencil to color the edges of the new pages that I added to the book. I don't want them to pop out. I don't want it to look obvious that I added these new pages. And that's it. That's our book.