Name: 古書修復家、100年前の歴史の保存に携わる仕事 | Obsessed | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-21T09:25:18.000Z
Duration: 10 min 19 s
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One slip of the hand, and this 100-year-old first-edition book could be ruined forever.

That's why restoring a book like this takes immense patience and precision.

Adverbs of degree

I used to take the books apart a little bit in front of my clients until their faces would just be like, they don't need to know.

Nobody needs to know what I'm doing, but you guys get to know.

Meet Sophia Bogle, book restorer, educator, and author, who has dedicated her life to preserving our stories.

I have probably restored thousands of books.

Some of the most important things in book restoration, some of the steps involved, are deconstruction, opening the spine, scraping the old spine, doing color matching.

For the text block, there's page washing, if needed, page repair, and then reconstructing the book.

It's one of the main reasons that makes this such a difficult specialty to become really good at.

Here I have the first edition of The Lost Princess of Oz, and it's in terrible shape.

So normally a restoration like this could take between 8 and 12 hours.

One of the first things is to separate the text block from the cover.

There are other book repair knives out there.

This one I designed to be like a fingertip.

It does sometimes feel like book surgery.

Sometimes more than others, especially those tight-joint, tight-back leather books.

To talk about surgery, you have to cut into the leather around the little panels, dye the leather, and make that match so that everything is as invisible as possible.

Having done all that, this is the result.

Other pages might just need a few repairs.

This kind of tear right here is a beveled or a scarf tear.

It just means it has two overlapping areas, and those are the best kind because you can just put some paste in there.

I'm literally just going to paint these two together.

So now we're going to use the shadow tracer, a piece of black paper, and then something clear and plastic over it.

We're tracing the shape with some water so that we can tear it out.

I might actually do that again to make that thicker, but for now, that's good.

And that can just be trimmed to fit, and then let's get it in there.

While a lot of Sophia's work centers around her desk, her workshop is full of unique tools for restoration.

All right, so this is my bindery, and over here I've got my old sewing frame, which uses these old-fashioned keys.

And then over here, I've got kind of the more modern version.

This is a job backer, and it's pretty old, from the 1800s.

You put the book in here, and then you squish it.

And then you can work on it with a hammer or a saw, which really freaks people out.

This is the gold-finishing stove, and my apprentice used to call this the bear trap because it looks like it could just close up on your hand at any moment.

This is something that you need to do leather restoration work.

You put the gold on, and then you do the tooling, and this is an example of the gold leaf.

It's really hard to work with because it's so delicate.

So here I've got my Quick Print stamping machine, and I've got a lot of weird little doodaddy things that you can stamp with, as well as a lot of fonts.

And this is a whole nother thing, where anything you can put into a black-and-white design, you can have made into a tie.

You put your little device in here, bring it back down, and you squish it.

The impression that it makes is called the kiss, which I just love.

These were originally made to make copies.

These days, everybody who's a bookbinder would want one of these because you can put your book in here and press it, and it works really well.

Sometimes in the restoration process, pages themselves need to be removed from the book and washed.

I'm going to test before we begin, and the way to do that is to take cotton swab, get that wet.

You put a drop of water, and you just stare at it.

One of the things that we do to help keep the pages together is we have this holitex, which is a spun polyester paper, and I'm just trying to submerge it.

I should get a little floaty duck or something.

This knack for invisible artistry has been years in the learning and part of a lifetime love of literature.

I was at the University of Minnesota getting my English degree.

I got a student job at the library bindery.

It was quite the transformational experience.

I knew I wanted to do something with books, and I walked in here and I discovered that books were taken apart and put back together.

And there was one person over in the corner throwing books into buckets of water and sewing and all the beautiful things, and I was like, oh, that's the job I want.

Sophia's been doing that job for over 30 years, saving history one book at a time.

What I want to do is I want to get at this cover spine liner by cutting here, getting that open, and same thing over here.

And then I can start to remove this old paper, which is fairly acidic.

When it's more acidic, it falls apart quicker.

And just clean up the last little bit of that section.

Restoring the book's spine is an important step in the process, but some spines pose particularly unique challenges.

So this one was truly one of the most difficult.

And for such a special, unique book, literally one of these books was made in the world.

The original spine was just gone and they had restored it with this suede.

So my challenge was removing this, oh, it took so long, with a knife and just scraping really carefully and just trying to get that off of there.

I mean, I get chills, really, because this is Frank Baum's copy for his mother.

And there's a wonderful inscription on the first page.

So it's just really fun to be part of that story, too.

Regardless of what steps are required to return a book to its former glory, the final step is always putting the book back together or recasing.

I've got the hinge that will be tucked in there.

I'm actually noticing right now that the Japanese tissue that I put on there is extending too far.

I can lift this up further or I can tear some of this off.

And I'm going to go for the tear some of this off version and just get some of that.

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古書修復家、100年前の歴史の保存に携わる仕事 | Obsessed | WIRED Japan

literally

process

vital

delicate