A spine that would not stay round

A client brought in an 1890s octavo whose spine had been rebacked twice already, the second time with a hide glue so heavy it had gone glassy. Rounding held for an hour and then relaxed every time. The fault was not the backing at all — the sections had been trimmed unevenly at some earlier rebinding, so the swell was pooling in the last third of the text block.

The fix was slow and dull: knock the whole thing down, re-sew on three cords with a lighter thread, and let the swell distribute where it wanted to. Two days of work to undo twenty minutes of someone else's hurry.

Most repairs are archaeology. You spend the first day finding out what the last binder was thinking.

On buying paper you cannot afford

I keep a single sheet of a mould-made flax paper pinned above the press. It cost more than the press did. I have never cut it and probably never will, but every time I am tempted to accept a cheap machine-made stock for an endpaper, I look up at it and remember what a folded sheet is supposed to feel like under the thumb.

The practical lesson is smaller than it sounds. Endpapers take more abuse than any other part of a book, and they are the cheapest place to be generous. A better sheet there costs pennies per volume and survives a decade of opening.

Three tools I stopped using

• A bone folder with a rounded point — it burnished where I wanted a crease. Replaced with a Teflon folder cut square.
• A plough I never learned to sharpen properly. The trimming is now done with a knife and a straightedge, more slowly and more accurately.
• PVA in a wide-mouth jar. It skins over between jobs and the skin ends up in the work. Small bottles, decanted, replaced weekly.

Every one of these was a tool I bought because a book said I needed it, not because a job asked for it.

Humidity, and the argument I lost

For two winters I insisted the bindery did not need a hygrometer. Then a run of quarter-leather cases cockled in a single dry week and I spent a Saturday flattening boards that should never have moved. The meter cost less than the leather I wasted. It now sits where I can see it from the sewing frame, and I have not argued with it since.