Five things to do to look after your books

Most of the books we work on are at least 100 years old, and many are much older. Books are really robust and can last for many hundreds of years, but they do need looking after. Here's five tips to help you keep your cherished books for future generations.

Keep them away from the sun

Direct sunlight can cause several problems with books.

Firstly, the UV in the sun can cause the pigments in the cloth or leather to fade. This leads to your books having faded spines but original colour fronts and backs.

Secondly, it can cause the books to warp. If one side of the cover board is wetter or drier than the other, then the board will curl away from the damper side. This is because the fibres in the damper side are larger and so that side is wider than the other. The board has no choice but to curl. Direct sun will dry out one side.

You can correct this by putting the book under a heavy weight but sometimes the damage can be permanent

Finally, the UV light can cause materials such as the cloth and the glue to degrade and ultimately fail.

Try not to open the book flat

Some books, such as music books, are designed to have 'lay-flat sewing' so that they don't close half-way through playing a piece of music - a very useful feature for us musicians! However, opening the book flat for most books will put strain on the hinges and the glue on the spine, potentially causing damage that can only be repaired by pulling the book apart.

Don't be tempted to use sellotape!

Sellotape is a trade name for sticky tape which is an amazing material, invented in 1930 and first appearing in the UK in 1937. However, it damages paper in a number of ways. Older sellotape becomes part of the paper and the glue dissolves the actual paper but leaves the ink and you end up with a brown transparent material where the paper used to be. This can't be removed without losing the ink.

More modern sellotape is much more sticky and, even with careful use of a paring knife, it tends to remove the surface of the paper, again losing the ink.

There are good commercial repair tapes available such as Tyvek repair tape from Preservation Equipment Limited which you can use instead. (https://www.preservationequipment.com/tyvek-book-repair-tape-easy-bind)

Sellotape in an 18th Century copy of Culpeper Herbal and subsequent damage even after washing the page.

Keep any leather hydrated

Leather books look wonderful lined up on a shelf but they do need some maintenance. Make sure that they are kept supple by using something like Marney's Leather Dressing or just a commercial leather dressing for sofas etc. In older leather books, the hinge is normally two or three thin cords working with the leather spine. If the leather starts to go dry it will fail and once that happens, the cords can't easily hold the cover on. The most common repair to family bibles is where the covers have come off for this very reason.

Don't put too many extra sheets into the book

When repairing books we often come across newspaper articles tucked inside the pages, kept by the family which are a lovely link back to the generations before who used the book. However, too many inserts like this makes the book block thicker than the spine which puts strain on the spine which will eventually fail. Flowers from a cherished bouquet are also a common find but these would be better stored in a keep-sake box rather than inside the pages of a book.

Books become heirlooms and are links with the past. They will last hundreds of years and it is amazing to think that the words you are reading in an 1860 cookery book are the same words that were read by somebody who might remember Queen Victoria's coronation. Avoiding these few simple things will help keep the books fresh for future generations.