One of my favorite ecofrugal pastimes is reading aloud to my husband, often while he's working on stuff around the house. During the past month or so, I've been reading him Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, a 30-year old volume that's already been read, re-read and consulted many times. (Miss Manners is one of my personal household gods, who in this household all reside on the bookshelves, where they can be consulted in any kind of difficulty.) I'd already noticed that several pages and clumps of pages were becoming dangerously loose, and this final reading—which involved many openings and closings of the book, as well as sometimes splaying it flat on the table or propping it open against a coffee mug—was more than the volume could handle. First individual pages and then whole sections detached themselves, leaving me with not one bound book but a bunch of little individual booklets and a few loose pages.
I've managed to patch up damaged books before, but all my previous repairs have been much smaller, such as repairing a torn page or reattaching a loose cover with clear tape. In this case, I wasn't sure what was left of the book had enough structural integrity to be put back together. But I vaguely remembered reading about a book-repair technique described by Amy Dacyczyn (another of my household gods) in her Complete Tightwad Gazette, and I figured I had nothing to lose by attempting it before sending off to Amazon.com for a new copy.
The approach the Frugal Zealot (Amy Dacyczyn's nickname for herself inside the e-book) describes is virtually supposed for reattaching the quilt (or two separate covers) to an otherwise intact e-book. It works like this:
1) Cut a rectangle out of brown paper (together with a grocery bag) it really is slightly longer than the backbone of the ebook, and barely greater than twice as big. (The ebook says to allow a further 1/2 inch, but this is an approximation.)
2) Roll this paper proper right into a tube and glue together the overlapping edges. (That's what the extra half of inch is for.) Once it's dry, reduce it to precisely the period of the spine.
Three) Remove any antique backing from the backbone of the e-book. Apply white glue alongside the backbone and allow it dry.
Four) Glue the non-overlapped facet of the tube to the spine and easy it down.
Five) At this factor, the decent method is to attach a strip of cardboard to the uncovered facet of the tube, then glue a strip of
I decided this had a chance of working with my damaged book if I carefully reassembled all the pages, squared them up precisely, and clamped the book together to hold them in place before attempting to attach the tube. With a bit of pressing and smoothing, we were able to get the tube to stick, as shown above. Once it was dry, I used two lengths of black duct tape to secure the tube to the covers, with only 1/4 to 1/2 inch of overlap (since the covers weren't the part most in danger of coming loose).
