Cover Reconstruction II

In the "Cover Reconstruction I" section, we demonstrate a partial reconstruction of a book's cover. For that process, we retain the original cover boards and the cloth covering them. The only part that is replaced is the deteriorated cloth on the spine. If, however, the cover boards are damaged and/or the cloth badly stained, we can replace them with new boards and cloth. This amounts to completely rebinding the book. This is illustrated below.

The book shown above has a warped and stained cover; both the boards and cloth are in bad shape. The cloth is a porous linen material which we will replace with a coated linen-like material of a similar color.

We first separate the book block from the cover by cutting through the end sheets and super cloth. The book block will need new end sheets and spine cloth; this process is illustrated in pages 2 and 3 of the recasing sequence.

Rather than discard the title information from the original cover, we cut around this patch of the old cloth and peel it loose from the old boards. We can likewise save the spine title and later affix these remnants of the old cover to the new cloth cover.

We can calculate the size and thickness of new boards by measuring the old ones or by tracing around them on clean binders board. We similarly determine the size of the new cloth for the cover. The other material we will need is felt cloth or a similar type of spine stiffener. Once we measure, cut and assemble these supplies, we can construct a new book cover.