Tag: Vintage Paperbacks

Paperback Restoration: Update and A New Tool

Seven years ago (yikes!) I published a post on paperback restoration that was picked up by a number of crafting/DIY sites. The post described how to use an iron to gently heat the glue of a paperback binding to reattach loose pages/sections and to resquare a cocked/warped spine. I stand behind the technique (since friction and heat are the forces that deformed the book it makes sense to use heat to restore it) but I have modified it a bit over the years. I also recently acquired a new tool that works much better than a standard clothes iron.

The “new” tool is a vintage laboratory heating plate acquired on ebay for <$40 (but you might easily turn one up for less at a school or business auction)

Laboratory Heating Plate

The heating surface on this one is about 7″ diagonal (about the length of a paperback spine), it has finer adjustment than an iron and–because of the horizontal orientation–you can use the weight of the book itself to help resquare the spine. It can also be used to cook up book-binding paste.

My original post on ironing a paperback spine is below (with edits).

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I frequently find vintage paperbacks where–due to reading-wear–the glue has separated from the text block and then frozen/dried in a way that prevents the spine from laying flat.

Vintage paperback with adhesive separation

One easy and low-impact way to correct this flaw is to use an iron (or other adjustable heating element) to soften the glue which can then be resquared and allowed to dry in a book press (or under a suitable weight).

Heat carefully applied

I first did this using a paper towel to protect the spine but I have since had better results using a sheet of paper covered with strips of masking tape. The tape backing tends not to adhere to the bookbinding (which can lead to chips and peeling…bigger problems than you are correcting).

The paper/masking tape layer also keeps small beads of hot glue from adhering to your heating element.

Here is the result:

The results

WARNING: Use this technique at your own risk. Results vary with books from different publishers.  Start out on valueless books until you find the right heat levels and I would be very cautious (and use much lower heat) on paperbacks with laminated covers.

Winter Paperback Haul

Behold my haul from the weekend!

A past customer or site-visitor (thank you unknown benefactor) gave my contact info to a woman who wanted to clear out her Dad’s collection of well-maintained 1960s-early 70s paperbacks.

There’s some great stuff in these bins which I’ve just begun to sort, including: Bonfils Rader and Maguire covers, Jim Thompson Dave Goodis and Lawrence Block pbos, lesbiana, and non-book novelties like African-American pin-up calendars, Playboy centerfold jigsaw puzzles and a backlit 3D slide-viewer.

 I feel like a fat squirrel with an acorn stockpile to last through the winter. Watch for these to start appearing in the shop this coming week (and for many new additions to the Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery).

Two of My Favorite Things

Etsy craftsman James Bit offers custom jackets for videogames that can make your copy of Dead Or Alive Xtreme 2 look like a classy vintage Penguin paperback.

He also offers cool 8-Bit inspired floor decals that can put a Zelda-style hidden staircase underneath your library chair.

Link via The Double-Breasted Dust Jacket.

These–together with A.J. Hately’s work that I blogged previously–give me hope that game and digital media addicts won’t forget the aesthetic and tactile appeal of a well-designed book.

Curious Book Reports: The Magic Scalpel

The surface of his life was as clean and shining as new skin…Underneath however, the past opened to throb in his memory, an ugly unhealed scar…

This paperback original by plastic surgeon and self-help guru, Maxwell Maltz caught my attention because of my fascination with gruesome scenes of surgery in books and film. Thomas Pynchon’s nose job in V., and the botched club foot correction in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary are two of my favorites. And the post-WWI photo-documentary Plastic Surgery of the Face by Harold D. Gillies is now horrifyingly accessible on my Kindle.

Robert Graham, the main character in Magic Scalpel, is described in the Mary Sueish mode as a “rugged” plastic surgeon who looks like a “nice young, pleasant prizefighter.” He has a highly successful practice and lives in a luxurious penthouse above his surgical domain. The 1960 portrait of opulence and the will-he-or-won’t-he marriage plot are fairly insipid but the book’s surgical detail is vivid and authentic sounding.

In the early pages of the book, Graham corrects a six-year-old’s hare-lip:

It gaped at him, the rough edges curling back like a second vertical mouth….[His] blade dipped down, paring away muscle from the skin above the mouth and the mucous membrane inside.

and removes a concentration camp tattoo from a Holocaust survivor (only to present her with the marked skin preserved in alcohol).

You can see the author’s body image-based self-improvement streak (that gave rise to his Cronenbergian sounding bestseller Psycho-Cybernetics) in the way the touch of a surgeon’s knife places all the secondary characters on a better life path. Also in the way he draws revealing lines between “the beautiful and the almost beautiful, the ugly and the grotesque and saddest of all, the dull-as-dish-water plain.”

The novel–though it barely moves for most of its brief 160 pages and ends on an odd note with the genius surgeon deprecating his specialty in favor of pure research science–establishes an interesting and surreal contrast between the dated melodramatic tone and the vivid and realistic surgical scenes.

If interested you can buy my copy here.