Book Restoration

Lovingly restored…

Sympathetic restoration of old and valuable books in cloth or leather.

Traditional Book Restoration

We’ve been lovingly restoring old and valuable books for over 40 years. The quality of our workmanship is first class and the materials we use are the very best. Everything that can be saved will be saved, including old endpapers, headbands, inscriptions, old boards and spines. Types of books we restore include:

Leather books
Sentimental books
Family books
Archives
Albums
Religious books
Large family bibles
Small personal bible
Old leather accounts books
Any book that’s past its best

The restoration process

The usual place for a book to break is along the joint – this is the working part of the book. When this happens the book needs re-backing.

Re-backing is the process of lifting the old cloth or leather, re-binding the back of the book in a matching material, then re-fixing the old material on top. The old spine is then fixed to the new back.

That sounds easy but it takes a little practice, maybe forty years or so! Corners are treated in a similar fashion; if the old spine is missing, the book is re-lettered in a sympathetic way, to match the age and style of the book.