One Small Voice: Mending old books is a labor of love

by Lynn Mandaville

Aside from any day which I can spend with my grandboys, Tuesdays and Fridays are the most satisfying of my days. They are the days I spend a few precious volunteer hours back in a library.

On Tuesdays I spend a couple of prescribed hours doing what to some might seem the mundane task of emptying the courier bins which bring interlibrary materials from the outlying branches to the downtown folk who have requested them on interlibrary loan. 

Though the task is somewhat menial, I know the excitement these items bring people, because it’s like Christmas for them to pull these gifts from the hold shelves, each with the recipient’s own name on them!  And I derive a thrill of my own at seeing the new books that are circulating, the materials that reflect what people have been watching on TV or listening to on the radio, and perhaps noting items that catch my interest for my own perusal on some future day.

Tuesdays can be quite magical when I open those courier bins.

On Fridays, though, I can make my own hours in the farthest back room of the library’s back rooms, where Friends of the Library volunteers do the research and posting of items for sale through Amazon or eBay.  My job is to mend or otherwise give facelifts to books that would otherwise be trashed, or to make books take form that would command a higher price.

While I love both jobs equally, I feel that my early years at the Henika Library in Wayland really provided the basis of the skills I use on Fridays, skills I have honed to make less-desirable books take on new life.

You see, when I began as head librarian, as the position was called in 1985, Henika was an agency of the City of Wayland, and it was woefully underfunded.

It was only after all other budget items were addressed – wages, benefits, insurances, and building upkeep and maintenance – that any leftover funds were assigned to the materials budget.

During those early years the materials budget was a pittance, so bad that one year the library board had to petition the Lakeland Cooperative to waive our membership fees, and that year we purchased nothing for the collection.  Nothing.  Not one book or magazine.  Nada.

To keep the existing collection in shape to circulate, I became adept with a hot glue gun to repair broken spines, and with clear mending tape to repair torn paperback covers, just to keep popular items on the shelves.

Fortunately, the later years were better because Henika became a district library with greater and more stable millage funding.

My skills lay dormant until I told one of my supervisors here in Chandler, AZ, about those “good old days” of library poverty.  She decided that my time would be more valuable to the current cause if I took up my mending again and worked magic on the damaged and doomed books that had been donated to the Friends of the Library.

I seem to have a patience and tenderness toward the books that accumulate at my mending station in the cramped back room where we on-line elves toil away.

I was given a generous freedom in this work since any failures didn’t involve a net loss of anything because I was working with donated books.  I could experiment with new techniques and request new supplies and better glues and tapes to “work my magic,” as it came to be known.

This summer I was faced for the first time with a deadline for my mending.

Someone discovered that we were doing quite a brisk business in college textbooks.  It was early August and classes were starting at the colleges and universities in the Phoenix area, and there were stacks of textbooks in need of TLC before they could be posted for sale.

It was such a smorgasbord of titles facing me.  I wanted to peruse many of them to see what wonders and impossibilities they held.  A short sampling of those textbooks:

·        Linear Algebra Through Geometry

·        Waves: a Berkeley Physics Course

·        State of Deception: the Power of Nazi Propaganda

·        Homeopathic Materia Medica & Repertory

·        Operations Research

·        Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents

·        Mechanical Tolerance Stackup and Analysis

·        Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuits

·        Designing and Planning for the Theater

·        The Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations

·        Handbook of Social Psychology

·        Edgar Allan Poe: The Collected Works

You can see it’s quite a patchwork of studies.

I mended their torn pages and rubbed out the odd symbols and markings from the white insides of their covers.  I oiled and peeled the layers of price labels that had accumulated from years of being resold, then resold again and again, in college bookstores or Goodwill outlets.  I glued their broken spines from where past students had cracked them so they would lie open for hour upon hour of study.

The time I spend becomes validated when another volunteer packs up one of my books for shipment and she notices my mending slip attached to the order, and she tells me that the engineering book I brought back from the dead just sold for $120.

Aside from the textbooks of this school year, I’ve had some amazing saves in the past four years.

I repaired a small paperback a couple of years back.  It was a quite rare soul food cookbook written by the Black comedian and social activist Dick Gregory in the early 1970s.  Originally printed and sold for $1.25, the Friends were able to sell it for over $70 because I had mended its spine.

I’ve also passed on mending a book.  It was a first edition of the autobiography of the Civil War Union General George B. McClellan, signed by the author.  I feared that interfering in any way with this unique gem – me not being a trained restorer of rare books – could only serve to lessen or destroy its value rather than increase it.

I frequently reinsert the thin and fragile pages of collectible comic books and graphic novels, books that these days fetch remarkable prices if I can successfully mend them,

And this past week I’ve been working on some of the most awe-inspiring and beautiful coffee table books you’ve ever seen.  Huge and heavy, these books can have terrible spine damage and torn pages.  They’re wieldy to handle because of their weight and dimensions, but oh, the satisfaction of seeing them returned to their proper glory with their magnificent full-color illustrations or maps or photography or fine art.

I’m not ashamed of my abiding love of books that exist at every level of human expression. 

Whether I’m mending a current best-seller, or a children’s picture book, or a rare or out-of-print book, each one that comes under my hand I treat with the utmost respect, even reverence.

These are the treasure chests that hold all of mankind’s collected thoughts, ideas, dreams and ideologies.

They are the products of the minds of great thinkers and the minds’ eyes of great artists.

This is my labor of love.