How to Spot Outside Flaws of Rare Books

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Molly Mackey with Expert Village. Now we’re going to talk about describing the outer book flaws, very important again. We have, this is a split spine here, we want to actually measure it and you want to put the actual size in your description so if you have something like this you’re going to want to say an inch and a quarter tear to spine cloth would be the appropriate way to describe it. Sometimes you have just little pieces missing, these are called chips so you want to say chipping to the bottom edge spine. Next something very common to a lot of hardback books, it doesn’t seem like a very important thing but it is to a collector there again, so if your ends, the tips of the edges of the book are curled under, this is called bump and it happens a lot to the bottom of the spine too, where you get a little bit of a bump through here and it’s from repeated shelf use so you want to describe that as “outer edges bumped” and they will know what it means. Another common problem is something that we call spinal lean, that’s when books are stored improperly, and they develop a lean to the spine, they just don’t sit square on the shelf. A lot of times it will be severe, sometimes just a little bit. When this happens you want to describe it as “slightly cocked” or “slightly leaned” to spine and again, it’s a very important because it affects the binding of a book so a collector will probably not want something too much, with too much lean so it’s important to describe that flaw. "