As the only senior conservation technician charged with maintaining the general collections, I cannot devote that much time to one book when I might have as many as 25 other books also waiting to be treated. In this case, such an approach would be too labor intensive and time consuming. Now, in a perfect world where I have all the time and patience I could want, I might remove the staples, mend any damage to the signatures in the process, sew the book back together, and then make a new cover. As you can see in the images below, there are staples running through a significant portion of the signatures of this book. It’s even easier once you’ve taken the cover off and can look directly at the spine of the textblock. It’s not until you open the book up and look at the gutter of one of the signatures that you might be able to see whether the book is stapled or not. At first glance, you can’t immediately tell the difference between a stapled book and a sewn book.
As luck would have it, one of these books recently came across my bench in need of a new cover. On rarer occasions, a book will be stapled together. When you look at how books are generally made, you’ll find that a majority of them are either sewn with thread, glued together as individual sheets, or occasionally bound with a combination of sewing and commercial glue.
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