A Re-Bound Book

The best book ever written about J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle Earth, published in 1983. After several years, my copy developed a brittle back and started losing pages. I tried to buy a new copy, but it had never been reprinted in the US. Rather than try to locate a book dealer in the UK, I decided to repair my copy.

Here is my re-bound book. Even though the back is glued, not sewn, you can see that it lies flat when open. That's because I was careful to make the new back flexible and keep it separate from the spine.

Because this was my first attempt at book-binding, I did make one mistake: When I attached the new end papers, they got stuck to the hinges. I'm not alone in making this mistake: Almost all hard-back books have their end papers glued to their hinges. Nonetheless, if I had it to do over, I'd make sure not to let that happen.

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