Last Steps of Drying Wet Books

Video Transcript

"The very last step that you have once you're drying a book is for the final shaping of the book. This is when all of the pages are dry, before you want to do this. You can have a little bit of dampness still in the covers because those are the hardest things to dry but you want your pages to be dry by now. So what you are going to do is have a flat surface, you are going to put your absorbent paper towels just between the covers and the first page and the last page and the back cover. And then you are going to place something heavy on top. First you want to make sure that your spine is lined up properly, you want to make sure that your pages are lined up so you don't have your cover askew while it is going to dry. Once everything is lined up how you want it to be, you're going to place something heavy on top of it. If you just happen to have something like a piggy bank where it has a flat bottom, you don't want anything with a curved bottom placed on top. The closer you can get to the actual size of the book, the better for the most even drying and pressing. The weight is going to help keep the covers of your book flat, but the only thing you do not want to use is another book to place on top of it. Whatever you use to weight down your book, you want to make sure that it is impermeable, so glass or stone, ceramic, something which isn't going to absorb any water and let there be any damp spots. And once you have this set up like this you are just going to let it stay here until it is perfectly dry, you don't need to check the papers, you don't need to check the book at all, it's good to go until it is perfectly dry."