Books of a Feather Read Online Free PDF Page B

cupboards and drawers and counters built along three walls.
    I had missed this room while we were living in Dharma. Oh, I’d had full use of my old mentor Abraham’s workshop nearby and I’d done a small amount of book repair work while I was there, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t mine. I wondered now if some of my recent angst had been brought on by the need to get back to full-time bookbinding work. I did love my job.
    After laying out my tools on the table, I walked over to the small sink in the corner and began to mix up my first batch of glue. Not that I was obsessive or anything, but it was vitally important to have the right glue for the right job. For this one, I preferred a mixture of sixty percent polyvinyl acetate to forty percent methyl cellulose. Others recommended a fifty/fifty ratio, but I liked the consistency of my sixty/forty blend better. I knew some book artists who favored PVA on its own, but I contended that adding methyl cellulose gave the glue more flexibility and allowed a bookbinder more time to alter and fine-tune her work. And once it dried completely, the combo was an even stronger adhesive than just the PVA on its own.
    Clearly, I could be a real nerd on the subject of glue. I’d watched students nod off in the middle of my impromptu glue seminars. But this stuff was important. I liked to say that my reputation as a bookbinder was only as strong as the glue I used to bind my books together.
    I said clever things like that all the time but rarely found an appreciative audience.
    These days anyone could purchase PVA already mixed in gallon containers. It was cheap and easy, so it just made sense. But when it came to methyl cellulose, I preferred to concoct my own. I could have bought it premixed as well, but where was the fun in that?
    I found a clean pint container and poured in a few tablespoons of methyl cellulose powder. To this I added hot water and whisked it steadily for about five minutes. Once it was smooth and lump free, I added one cup of cold water and whisked again until the substance was clear and viscous. I wanted the consistency to be goopy but still pourable and easy to spread with a brush.
    I left the concoction sitting on the sink counter to congealfurther while I surveyed the books again. As I’d already determined, the most badly damaged was
The Grapes of Wrath
. Half of the text block had broken away from the spine, so the pages would have to be taken apart and resewn. The front cover was almost completely severed from the spine except for a few strands of linen cloth holding it together. All of the gilding on the spine had been rubbed off and the cloth here was tattered and split at every corner. One spot on the back cover had been worn down so badly that I could see the aged, heavy board beneath the cloth.
    Genevieve had found comparable copies of this edition of
The Grapes of Wrath
selling online for forty-five thousand dollars. It would take a lot of work to bring this version up to that level, but I relished the challenge. For now I set the book aside and moved on to the next one.
    Removing the dust jacket from the copy of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, I took a closer look at the rip along the fold. It was a little worse than I’d first thought when I found it on the shelf. Both sides of the tear had curled and darkened to a brownish yellow. I spread the dust jacket facedown on the table and studied it some more.
    If I were a librarian simply trying to keep this book in circulation, I would follow the age-old bookbinder’s maxim that a repair should simply keep the damage from spreading. If that was all I cared about, I would slap on a piece of acid-free document repair tape, slip the book into a clear plastic archival book cover, and call it a done deal.
    But because this book was so valuable—a first edition signed by the author, after all—I approached it from a book conservationist’s angle. I wanted to not