Author, educator and book restorer Sophia Bogle has nerves of steel: one slip of the hand and a century-old first edition book could be ruined. Come inside her workshop as she breaks down the amazing deconstruction, revitalization, and reassembly that goes into her history preserving speciality.See more from Sophia Bogle: https://saveyourbooks.com/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJBBIfCt16lMtRiauQL964QDirector: Charlie JordanDirector of Photography: Paul RamseyEditor: Richard TrammellExpert: Sophia BogleCreative Producer: Wendi JonassenLine Producer: Joseph BuscemiAssociate Producer: Brandon WhiteProduction Manager: D. Eric MartinezProduction Coordinator: Fernando DavilaCamera Operator: John GurneyAssistant Camera: Drew CannulettSound Mixer: Chad SaddlerPost Production Supervisor: Alexa DeutschPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAssistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00 [scraping]
00:02 [scraping]
00:04 [snipping]
00:05 One slip of the hand, and this 100-year-old
00:08 first edition book could be ruined forever.
00:11 [sigh]
00:12 That's why restoring a book like this
00:14 takes immense patience and precision.
00:16 I used to take the books apart a little bit
00:18 in front of my clients until
00:20 their faces would just be like,
00:22 "They don't need to know.
00:23 Nobody needs to know what I'm doing,
00:25 but you guys get to know."
00:26 Meet Sophia Bogle,
00:27 book restorer, educator, and author,
00:30 who has dedicated her life
00:31 to preserving our stories.
00:33 I have probably restored thousands of books.
00:35 I don't actually know the number.
00:38 [music]
00:41 Some of the most important things
00:42 in book restoration,
00:43 some of the steps involved,
00:45 are deconstruction, opening the spine,
00:48 scraping the old spine,
00:50 doing color matching.
00:52 For the text block, there's page washing,
00:54 if needed, page repair,
00:56 and then reconstructing the book.
00:59 Not every book is the same.
01:00 It's one of the main reasons that makes this
01:03 such a difficult specialty
01:04 to become really good at.
01:05 Here I have the first edition
01:08 of The Lost Princess of Oz,
01:10 and it's in terrible shape.
01:12 Very dirty on the front cover.
01:14 The spine is breaking.
01:17 Pages are torn up.
01:19 So normally a restoration like this
01:21 could take between 8 and 12 hours.
01:25 One of the first things is to separate
01:27 the text block from the cover.
01:32 There are other book repair knives out there.
01:34 This one I designed to be like a fingertip.
01:37 [slicing]
01:45 It does sometimes feel like book surgery,
01:48 sometimes more than others,
01:49 especially those tight joint,
01:52 tight back leather books.
01:53 Those are nerve-wracking.
01:55 Talk about surgery.
01:56 You have to cut into the leather
01:59 around the little panels,
02:00 dye the leather, and make that match
02:02 so that everything is as invisible as possible.
02:06 Having done all that, this is the result.
02:11 Some pages need to be washed.
02:13 Other pages might just need a few repairs.
02:16 This kind of tear right here
02:18 is a beveled or a scarf tear.
02:20 It just means it has two overlapping areas.
02:23 Those are the best kind
02:25 because you can just put some paste in there.
02:27 I've got my rice starch paste.
02:29 I'm literally just going to paint these two together.
02:33 [pasting]
02:39 Now we're going to use the shadow tracer,
02:43 a piece of black paper,
02:45 and then something clear and plastic over it.
02:49 We're tracing the shape with some water
02:52 so that we can tear it out.
02:55 I'm going to put it on this side.
02:59 [pasting]
03:08 Starting to look better.
03:10 There we go.
03:11 So that's a good start.
03:12 I might actually do that again to make that thicker,
03:15 but for now that's good.
03:17 That can just be trimmed to fit.
03:21 And then that's fitted in there.
03:24 While a lot of Sofia's work centers around her desk,
03:27 her workshop is full of unique tools for restoration.
03:31 All right, so this is my bindery.
03:33 Over here I've got my old sewing frame,
03:37 which uses these old-fashioned keys.
03:40 Then over here I've got the more modern version.
03:43 This is the Jeff Peechee no-key system.
03:46 It's kind of cool, have both kinds.
03:48 This is a job backer, and it's pretty old, from the 1800s.
03:52 You put the book in here, and then you squish it.
03:55 And then you can work on it with a hammer or a saw,
03:59 which really freaks people out.
04:01 This is the gold-finishing stove,
04:03 and my apprentice used to call this the bear trap
04:06 because it looks like it could just close up on your hand at any moment.
04:09 This is something that you need to do leather restoration work.
04:13 This is all done by hand.
04:15 You hold on, and then you do the tooling.
04:18 This is an example of the gold leaf.
04:21 I just keep little scraps of it in here.
04:23 It's really hard to work with because it's so delicate.
04:26 So here I've got my Quick Print stamping machine,
04:29 and I've got a lot of weird little doodaddy things
04:33 that you can stamp with, as well as a lot of fonts.
04:38 And this is a whole 'nother thing,
04:41 where anything you can put into a black-and-white design,
04:44 you can have made into a die.
04:47 You know, here's Toto.
04:50 This is how it operates.
04:52 You put your little device in here,
04:54 and then bring it back down,
04:57 and you squish it.
04:59 The impression that it makes is called the kiss, which I just love.
05:03 Let's see how that turned out.
05:05 So then over here is my nipping press.
05:09 These were originally made to make copies.
05:13 These days, everybody who's a bookbinder would want one of these
05:17 because you can put your book in here and press it,
05:20 and it works really well.
05:22 Sometimes in the restoration process,
05:25 pages themselves need to be removed from the book and washed.
05:29 Some of them are very dirty.
05:31 This one has some blue ink on it.
05:33 I'm going to test before we begin,
05:36 and the way to do that is to take cotton swab,
05:39 get that wet.
05:41 You put a drop of water, and you just stare at it.
05:45 I can see that's already starting to go.
05:48 One of the things that we do to help keep the pages together
05:51 is we have this Holitex, which is a spun polyester paper.
05:56 I'm just trying to submerge it.
05:59 It's like it's taking a little bath.
06:01 I should get a little floaty duck or something.
06:03 Then you can take just a clean brush.
06:06 So that's basically it.
06:09 (narrator) This knack for invisible artistry
06:12 has been years in the learning
06:14 and part of a lifetime love of literature.
06:16 I was at the University of Minnesota
06:18 getting my English degree.
06:20 I got a student job at the library bindery.
06:23 It was quite the transformational experience.
06:25 I knew I wanted to do something with books,
06:28 and I walked in here and I discovered that books
06:30 were taken apart and put back together.
06:32 There was one person over in the corner
06:34 throwing books into buckets of water and sewing
06:37 all the beautiful things, and I was like,
06:39 oh, that's the job I want.
06:41 (narrator) Sophia's been doing that job for over 30 years,
06:44 saving history one book at a time.
06:46 What I want to do is I want to get at this cover spine liner
06:50 by cutting here, getting that open,
06:54 and same thing over here.
06:57 And then I can start to remove this old paper,
07:03 which is fairly acidic
07:06 when it's more acidic, it falls apart quicker.
07:10 And just clean up the last little bit of that section.
07:16 [blows]
07:18 (narrator) Restoring the book's spine
07:20 is an important step in the process,
07:22 but some spines pose particularly unique challenges.
07:25 So this one was truly one of the most difficult,
07:29 and for such a special, unique book.
07:32 Literally one of these books was made in the world.
07:35 The original spine was just gone,
07:37 and they had restored it with this suede.
07:40 So my challenge was removing this, oh, it took so long,
07:43 with a knife and just scraping really carefully
07:46 and just trying to get that off of there,
07:49 and it came out like this.
07:51 I mean, I get chills really,
07:53 because this is Frank Baum's copy for his mother,
07:56 and there's a wonderful inscription on the first page.
07:59 So it's just really fun to be part of that story too.
08:02 (narrator) Regardless of what steps are required
08:05 to return a book to its former glory,
08:07 the final step is always putting the book back together,
08:10 or recasing.
08:12 I've got the hinge that will be tucked in there.
08:15 I'm actually noticing right now that the Japanese tissue
08:18 that I put on there is extending too far,
08:20 and I have 2 options.
08:22 I can lift this up further, or I can tear some of this off,
08:25 and I'm going to go for the tear some of this off version
08:29 and tear some of that.
08:32 The edge of the mold makes a nice edge to tear it against,
08:35 so super easy.
08:37 But meanwhile, this is the most fun part.
08:39 I don't think I've even told you about this.
08:41 You can write things on the spine of the book.
08:44 This book restored by Sophia, September 2023.
08:51 And then my signatures, I always put 3 dots on.
08:55 I do love the fact that there's the story in the book,
08:59 there's the story of the restoration of the book,
09:01 there's the story of who has owned the book,
09:03 and now I'm just in there just a little bit more.
09:06 I'm taking the PVA.
09:09 And you just don't want any glue on the spine.
09:20 The spine needs to not be attached to the other spine
09:24 because this is all going to get tucked in now.
09:28 It's getting there.
09:30 And I'm just going to go ahead and put this in to protect it.
09:34 And now it needs to go up in the press.
09:37 It's really important that the book goes in square
09:39 and that the pin of this is over the area that you need it to be over.
09:45 There we go.
09:46 So I'm going to leave this in here overnight.
09:48 By tomorrow it'll be finished and ready to go home.
09:51 No matter how many books she's restored,
09:53 Sophia takes the work of book restoration as a vital responsibility.
09:57 I'm preserving cultural history.
09:59 It's really important.
10:01 So many books are being thrown away.
10:03 I want more people to collect books, to think about that,
10:06 like what can you collect, what can you put on your shelves,
10:08 and take care of and take stewardship of
10:12 so that they'll make it to the next generations.
10:14 [MUSIC PLAYING]