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A lot of people will want to send us in photographs, if there’s a physical distance involved, and they don’t particularly want to arrive here with it. But that doesn’t really work, we really need to see the book. Generally, if you buy a book at auction — if you’ve bought, let’s say, a 200-year-old leather-bound book and it has had some use, generally you’ll find that the spine has been cracked. So, in books that come into us like that, I would say 70 per cent of them will need to be re-backed. So essentially what we’re going to do is we’re going to slit the front board, slit the backboard, take the spine off, and if it’s fragmented, it comes off in fragments, you just have to lay them out, remake a new calf spine for it and remount the existing spine, because it’s all about retention, retaining as much of the original binding as we can, and that can be very, very time consuming. Especially if the books were tight-back. Bookbinding went through a period of tight-back binding where the leather was glued directly onto the spine. While it looked very nice, really and truly it wasn’t the most functional way to bind a book. So, we tube them now, we put a hollow tube in the spine so that the spine is always protected, and the strength is still there.
A lot of people buy books for the value, but a lot of people buy books for the book. I like books. I read a lot of books. I like books, I like well-bound books for the visual aspect of them, and a lot of people, you’ll find, will buy books and will treasure them as books, not just as a possible investment but actually as a tangible book. It’s not a Kindle, it’s a real thing that somebody 200 years ago has pared the leather for it and has made this book. So, there’s that connection. Sometimes you’ll see a really old book coming in and you have to be aware of the different processes that took place 300 years ago or 350 years ago to make this book, so there’s a little joy in that. And I think for people that own those books, surely some of them have a similar sentiment for it, that there’s a love for it.