Books still to collect: 81

Monday 19 December 2011

Better The Dancing Devil You Know

There is a craft practised by librarians throughout the land, bloggers, of which I know little.  I’m talking about book-binding, that practice of discarding the old boards from a book and mounting the pages in a new cover.  I assume that this is done to books that have worn and knackered boards or are otherwise unusable.  Take a look at these two library re-bound books that have just arrived:  

Neither have the original illustrated boards; one has green cloth boards and the other has light brown ones.  If you look closely, you may notice that one of these books is a different shape and size from the other.  It appears that while the first one has been re-bound in boards that are of similar size to the original, the other one has been re-bound in boards that are shorter and wider.  The pages have been cropped to fit the new binding, resulting in a strange hybrid large hardback that is somewhere between the size of a normal large hardback and small hardback.  The moral of this story, bloggers, is that when you are buying an ex-library book, make sure it hasn’t been bastardised the way these ones have.  Just a shame the story isn’t as interesting as the boards the book was bound in eh, bloggers?

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