Reviving Heidi

Tearing down

The first step in my revival effort was to take the book apart. The cover had already torn along the top. As I progressed through the tearing down process it became evident that the book's covers were put on against the grain. When it absorbed moisture at some point during its life the covers curled and tore away from the spine.

The cover before moisture is introduced. See the tear along the spine? Watch what happens in subsequent pictures when I add moisture to the cover...can you figure out how this tear got there? I thought so.

The first thing I wanted to do was try and lift off the paste down sheets. These are the sheets of paper on the inside front and back covers which are glued directly onto the cover. I brushed paste (cornstarch + hot water = paste) onto the inside cover and put saran wrap around everything to keep the area moist.

Note how dark the page on the right is after adding paste. When the page is uniformly dark the paste has seeped in enough for me to be able to peel the page off the cover. You can see the paste down starting to lift off the cover along the bottom.

The front cover curls after adding moisture to the inside to get the paste downs off.

Next I need to remove the old glue from the spine. Again fresh paste is applied to the spine and wrapped in saran wrap. Unfortunately I didn't do a very good job of keeping the spine wet. A few pages got water stains which will hopefully come out in the wash later on.

These are not great shots, but do give some information. At the top is the spine with paste plus saran wrap. Then there's the spine liner (note the curl away from the spine? This is bad news) and finally the cover with the paste down (the green sheet) removed. The red bits are discolouration from the old glue or perhaps the mull. (Mull is a piece of fabric used to strengthen the spine--it's more like mesh than fabric.)

I'm not sure what kind of glue was used on the spine, but it was very difficult to get off. In addition to it being a tough glue, the spine was convex, which made it difficult to scrape. The process here is to loosen the old glue with paste and then gently scrape it off using a dull knife. I started with a butter knife and progressed to a dull exacto knife. Not a fun job. This must have taken me at least five applications of paste to get most of the old glue off (waiting 10 minutes in between each application of paste before scraping).

Carefully each sheet is pulled off the text block and washed. More about washing Heidi.