The parable of the book tape

So, there had not been a library media assistant for two years before I came into the job (the school board had decided that they weren't necessary, for budgetary reasons, but then later reversed their decision). And that means, among other things, that book repair had been done only on a very irregular basis for the last two years, and sometimes when it was done, it was done inexpertly.

Being addicted not just to books, but to learning, I of course had to do some internet research on book repairs.

Just for the record, my very favorite is called "tipping in a page," wherein you glue along the very edge of a page which has fallen out of a book, stick it back in (carefully!) and then, once this special glue has dried it's like the page never fell out. WOW.

Also just for the record, my least favorite repair at the moment is called hinge repair, wherein you smear glue on a thin little piece of wood, and then try to get the glue into the narrow space where the endpaper and the cover of a book are coming apart from each other. It's messy, it's hard to see what I'm doing, and I'm always afraid that I'm going to get glue where it should not be. But I am firm in my belief that I will cease to hate this repair once I have more practice and feel more confident because I am in fact more competent. And, I make myself do this repair anyway, because I know both from reading about it and now from experience, that it prevents much worse damage (like the book and the cover coming apart completely).

Anyway. Book tape. Besides the cloth book tape I have pictured below, you can get some really thick, super-strong tape called (amazingly enough) book tape, which is thick-ish plastic film with adhesive on one side. And you would think-- or someone would think, because someone actually did this-- that it would be a good idea to use this somewhat expensive, extra-thick tape to tape pages back in if you didn't feel like messing with the glue, because then the pages would stay in place extra-well. But you would be wrong. True, the tape doesn't come undone, but the pages are so much thinner than the tape itself that on at least one of these repairs, I can see that the pages are starting to have crease marks where the edge of the tape is, and will eventually rip off entirely.

So what do I use? I use packing tape-- which is like book tape, but much thinner, so at least I'm not damaging the pages by using something that's way too heavy for them. There exist better products for this job, I'm 100% sure, but this is the best I've got available at the moment. Book tape I use for covers, both hard and soft, which need reinforcement.

(I've pasted a picture below of some cloth book tape. Most tape is sticky on one side these days, but the tape in the picture below needs to have glue put on it before it can be used.)

This is single-stitched book tape, of which a roll was supposed to be ordered with our other book repair supplies, but somehow it didn't get ordered. Which made me sad, but it isn't like I don't have plenty of other things to repair. *sigh*

And why is this the parable of the book tape? Well, every time I pull out either the book tape or the packing tape, I inevitably think about Jesus, saying that you can't mend old clothes with new cloth, which is true, because the new cloth will be so much stronger than the old that it will rip the old cloth. It's like using book tape on a paper page. And he also said that you can't take old cloth and mend something new with it, and this is also true: the old cloth will just rip out, and there is no point in making a mend like that. So I always feel a bit surreal, sitting at the table where I do my repairs, thinking about what would it be like if Jesus had been speaking to a bunch of book conservationists: "Neither do ye take book tape and put it on pages..."