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- Here you can see how it looks like the pages and the binding have been repaired. It looks like they had been re-glued together at one point.
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- This is the spine of the Appeal in Favor by Lydia Child. You can see the original leather spine has almost completely fallen off.
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- This is an example of stitching in An Appeal in Favor by Lydia Child.
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- A closer look at stitching.
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- Another example of stitching in Heman Melville’s The Whale, more wildly known as Moby Dick.
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- This is an example of the original leather binding. The ridges in the binding are from the rope used to tie the pages of the book together.
Since Loganne and Brittany chose to cover 19th century books the bibliography of the books differs from the bibliography of books of today. They looked at books that had the original leather binding and could see evidence of stab stitching. In older books, the ridges you see in the spine binding, are from the pieces of thread used in stab stitching as shown in the last picture. There weren’t any obvious chain-lines, even with shining a light to the pages. A few had areas where you could see little pieces of thread from when paper was still made from torn pieces of fabric. They even found one book, An Appeal in Favor by Lydia Child, whose original leather binding on the spine has almost completely fallen off (as shown above in the second picture).
Images on this page curtesy of Special Collections, Moffett Library, Midwestern State University. Photographs taken by Loganne Featherstone and Brittany Williams.