Monday, April 25, 2011

Day One: Pelham, Or, The Adventures of a Gentleman

In the beginning, I found this book in a box in Gramma Joyce's house.  It is called Pelham; Or, The Adventures of a Gentleman, and it was printed in 1828.
Here is my proof that that is in fact its title.
This is what it looked like after I removed the cover and started stripping away the 200 year old glue and shiz from the spine.  It took me about 12000 years to finish and it made me want to die, and I didn't do a very good job.
This is what the pages looked like after I cut out all the sewing and separated it all back out into signatures.
This is when I tried to take a close up so you could see how h-ing torn up the paper got while I was trying to pull the pages apart amidst the remnants of 200 year old glue.  My only solace is that my teacher came and looked at my book and said that it wasn't my fault--they just used a shizzing shizload of glue 200 years ago and really soft paper.  The good and bad side to this is that I am going to get a LOT of experience at repairing paper tears!  Woo!!  Tomorrow we are learning how to wash the paper, and then repair it, and then sew it all back together.  GOOD TIMES.

4 comments:

Karen said...

Thanks for showing us what you are doing! Bless Grandma for having a pre-1850s book! Hurrah!

Becca said...

Washing paper reminds me of...that's right...TITANIC!

Maybe I should have saved that comment for tomorrow's post.

wsb said...

I love this.

Jennifer Ricks said...

SO AMAZING.