How to Know if a Book Can Be Repaired

Series Summary

Science Fiction author and cultural-political satirist Ray Bradbury wrote, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Censorship can come in many different forms, both active and passive. Book burning is a practice that began in the late Renaissance during the Spanish Inquisition and resurfaced again during the reign of National Socialism and other totalitarian regimes during the twentieth century. It is one of the most blatant and forceful acts of censorship found in culture. However, it is not the most prevalent. Books, if they are not read and taken care of will eventually destroy themselves. The physical neglect of books, although subtle and often times unintentional, is the most pervasive form of cultural censorship. In order to stop this and maintain the backbone of our culture, our literature, it is important that we learn how to take care of books and repair the bindings before they are lost forever.

In this free video series, watch as Gary Zier teaches how to bind a book. Learn about the different kind of books that can be repaired, different book binding techniques, what book binding supplies are needed, how to examine a book, how to apply masking tape for book binding, how to prepare a book to be drilled, how to drill a book, how to sew a book, how to repair the book spine, how to repair book corners, and other book binding tools. Whether its textbooks that you want to save or classic literature that you want to re-salvage and maintain, book binding and repair is an important skill for protecting the written word so that books can survive throughout the following generations. To quote the great Zack De La Rocha, "You don't got to burn the books, you just remove 'em." Let's stop cultural decay and start taking the power back with this free video series from Expert Village.

Video Transcript

"Today I am going to show you how to bind books. These books that we are going to be binding are basically books that get a lot of use and pages are falling out, maybe the back of the book itself is starting to rip. It's not really for books that are very valuable and maybe like a collectible. What I am going to show you today is basically a way to strengthen the book and to let it really last a lifetime and you will be able to get a lot of use out of it. Here are some examples of some books that we want to fix today. We see that these are not necessarily high value books but they are books that get a lot of use in our family and you see that the back starts to come off the spine and we see also here this is like an atlas. You see if we open it up, we see that it is separating from the original pages over here. So these are all the type of things that we are going to fix and we are basically going to strengthen the book to make it really not necessarily look like new, but we are going to be using tape and string. It will definitely look nice and clean but it will look something like this which is a children's book. We see that we put tape on the corners to protect them. All the damage that we saw before on the spine of the book, we actually sewed strings down the middle of the book and we made it very hard for pages to fall out so this is really going to give the book a lot of support. This will be in our family for many many years, a book like this."