Mending

Her hair was grey with red streaks, pulled back into a short messy ponytail, the shorter front hair framing her face and flopping forward occasionally.  She was bending over boxes, piling things on the too-narrow conference room table, digging into satchels, and generally presenting a frazzled, disorganized front.  But her smile was puckish, and I liked her scattered style.  I was there for free because I volunteer for NMLA, so I stepped in to help pass out materials, photocopy handouts, and generally make myself useful.  This meant I missed some of the introductory material, but it was mainly stuff I already knew:  her name and credentials, the way a book is put together, the terminology.  I have been working in libraries since 1981, and along the way you pick up some things.  Text block, check; gutter, check; leaf, check.  However, there were a lot of terms that I found very bizarre.  I would never think to call paste and tape adhesives, for example, and she had a tendency to refer to the complete book as an artifact (as in: "this artifact is poorly constructed.")  Terms like "fail" and "loss," fluttered from her like so many moths (which could be the source of the said "fail.")

To me a loss is not a hole in a page (er, "leaf"). 

But, there is a certain pleasure in the technical vocabulary.  I want to talk like that.  It's almost poetic:  find your adhesives, your cutting tools, your internally plasticized protective pouches.  Conserve those artifacts.  Hinge in those pages or tip them in, using the brush that has just the right amount of adhesive.  You swirl the brush in the glue, (er, adhesive), and you lightly strike against the edge of the page, (er, leaf), leaving beads of adhesive all down the edge.  Bop, bop, bop, I write in my notes, watching her demo this process.  It's a miniscule amount of glue, but after break she picks up the book and dangles it by the tipped-in page.  I am gobsmacked.

Each job is both unique and the same.  You look at your book and you decide:  is it worth the time and precision of the task to repair it?  CAN it be repaired?  What should I do first?  We learn that ten is the magic number for tipping in:  any more and you risk a total fail.  A TOTAL FAIL!  Complete and utter failure! You step the pages, 3 or 4 at a time, a millimeter of edge showing for each leaf, and you cover that edge in a thin layer of adhesive.  After that, you line the leaves up and pinch them together, sheathing them in wax paper and weighting them down.  In twenty minutes, you pick up the set of leaves and prepare to tip them in:  bop, bop, bop with the adhesive-filled brush, leaving a thin line of glue beads.

Before you tip in a leaf, you need to prepare its edge.  It should be a little "toothy" (aka, feathered), so you don't use the scalpel or scissors for your cutting tool.  You figure out how much paper you need to remove, because the tipped in page will stick out if you don't trim at the gutter but you don't want to trim too much.  You set a straight edge at the edge of the table.  You line the leaf along the straight edge, with the millimeter of excess hanging over the straight edge.  You pick up your abrasive (aka, sand paper file) and, in a brisk sweeping motion down and across the straight edge, you file off the edge of the leaf.  It's magic.

As I played with my new dangerous poetic tools, I thought about what I was doing.  I was mending, I was evaluating, I was repairing.  I was not curing anything though.  The goal was to be good enough, to give a little more life to the damaged artifact, let it circulate a little more.  In the end, there would be more failures, which I would be unable to repair.  And the book would be weeded, its life at an end.

So, it's a stop-gap, as so many activities are.  You decide it's worth doing, and you do it to the best of your ability, with the best of your focus.  Our conservator/teacher says she repairs the library books that she checks out, and she wonders if anyone notices.  But, that's not really the point.  She sees suffering, and she heals where she can.  It's a choice, and in the end, the choosing and the doing are what are important.

After 30 years
Of working with abused books,
I've learned how to heal.