Another African Tree

A second African tree. The shrubbery has worked as has the sky, except that a two tone sky was a mistake. The shrubbery was done by painting dark green shapes on the warp. The sky was done by treating the warp as a true stitched double cloth with the dark blue uppermost. It needs handfinishing.

I have been continuing with book repairs and spent this morning on the Victorian encyclopaedia's library binding. In between, while waiting for the PVA to dry, I completed a small repair job for me.

This is a paperback Penguin published in 1952. I must have bought it about then. It fell apart, so it is now a hardback. The process is
- strip off the covers and, if they can be re-used, trim the ragged edges and lay aside.
- scrape down the spine. Sand it if needed, Cut four saw-cuts across the spine, spacing them evenly. The cuts must be deep enough to hold two thicknesses of stout linen thread
- take a length of the linen thread and do figure-of-eights in and out of the saw cuts. This is all done with the textblock clamped in a press.
- Paste the spine with PVA, then apply scrim to the whole of the spine and one inch on either side. Paste two layers of kraft paper on top of that and, when dry, you have a textblock ready to be cased in.
- I added some nice marbled paper as endpapers and did the covers in green book cloth. When it was all done, I added the original front and back and spine covers. And there you are. Good for another 60 years.