Book Repair: Anno's Counting Book

My sister had this book called Anno's Counting Book that was completely falling apart and she asked me if it was worth fixing. Absolutely! It was a book that was removed from the Harold B. Lee Library in the 50s. The entire project took about an hour to fix.

All the signatures were loose and/or separated and needed to be resewn together, which wasn't a huge deal.


The book is a counting book and went up to the number 12, but since it was missing 12, and I thought that 11 was a weird number to end at, I got rid of 11 and had the book end at 10. I had to peel off the back endsheet of the book so that I could replace it with the last page of 10; I was going to pull off the front endsheet but it wasn't going to come off without being destroyed, and I didn't have an existing portion of the book that would work for a coversheet. So I decided to sew the remaining signatures directly into the book.


This is a side view of sewing the signatures together. And this is the back of page 11 that was going to be glued down as the new back endsheets. The spine is not glued or else the pages will not open. The endsheets are what keep the book secure.

And here's a view of the gutter with secured pages. Hooray!