I Restored This 100 Year Old Book

This is one of the most beautiful manuscripts I found recently, but there's a problem with it. Inside it's beautifully illustrated and illuminated with the quatrains of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, beautifully decorated in gold, red and blue. But while the insides of this book are glorious and worthy of that great text, the outside is quite drab, still housed in this very flimsy cloth binding. So today we're going to change that and you're going to come along and see the whole process with me. You'll meet my friend Ted Bennett, a brilliant bookbinder who's going to conceive a new binding to house this manuscript. And then you'll see the whole process, from conception, utterly remarkable, to construction, genuinely the longest I've ever taken, to the final product. And at the end of the video, we'll have a binding worthy of this beautiful manuscript. So the first step was to invite Ted to the office, see what he thought about the manuscript and its current binding, pick the materials that we're going to use and decide on a design for it. So Ted, I've shown you some photos of this, but here's the manuscript in person. What do you think? Initially, it kind of comes across as quite a sort of boring, stationary, utilitarian binding in a sort of cloth with very thin flimsy board. But then when you get in, I have seen the pictures, but the illustrations are absolutely beautiful. And the craftsmanship of actually writing this out is stunning. You can see, if you look into the back edge into the gutter, you can see that this has been sewn before. So this is its second binding. This isn't the original binding of this book. So I hadn't even noticed that the first time around. This is where you get a proper book binder in to look at your books. What will be interesting is when we take the book down and take it into its individual sheets, that this is probably going to be individual leaves rather than folios bound into sections. So we have the opportunity then here to take this book back apart again and then hopefully put it in a new binding worthy of its contents. So now Ted knows what he's dealing with, it's time to choose the leather that will cover the binding. Ted's brought along some different leathers for us to choose. I guess this is our base covering for the binding. Yes, this is sort of a starting point. I think we'll bind this in goatskin, which I think would be a very traditional Morocco as it's known, rather than calf, because we're going to do a design binding and so I think we really want to hit on something with a nice bright colour and stands out. Okay, so what do we have as the options in front of us here? So we've got a very dark blue, which we thought might allow the gold to really stand out from the design. It's a fine goatskin, so it's got a really nice, even grain and very high quality leather. So that's our first option, a very sort of neutral, plain background to put a design on top of. Exactly, it would allow the design to stand out quite nicely off the book. Okay, and then we've got our next option underneath. Yeah, we thought of purple, we're sort of thinking about the manuscript itself and the colours used in the illustrations. So that feels very rich, very Persian, very sort of Arabian night. Yeah, it kind of does match the sort of text and the history of the text. And we've got our final colour here, which I'm liking the look of already. Yeah, sort of nice, deep, deep red. Again, that sort of darker colour is going to allow that tooling to stand out and the design to really jump off. What I love about this as well is we see in the Rubaiyat, in the poem itself, wine comes out a lot, red wine, and this is the beautiful kind of wine dark red. I mean, it always looks so great on the shelf, but particularly amazing when you get the gold coming out of it too. 100%. I think if we're looking at a colour that goes with the text, and is going to look good for the design, I think the red is a really nice choice. Now we have chosen the red leather to cover the binding, we have to work out what design Ted is going to put on top of it. And to help with this, he's mocked up a design for us to work through based on some photos that I sent to him. I've got the design in front of me, and you'll see it on screen now. And Ted, can you talk us through what we've got here and what you've done with the design? So what we've got is we've got a sort of classically Persian sort of motif that's been manipulated slightly to create a sort of floral design. So what we have is a flower with kind of petals on the front and the back, which the lines will be tooled in gold leaf. And then in the centre of each cover, we have this quite interesting looking design. What's that actually going to look like? So the plan for this, the centre of each flower or each design is going to be a heavily gilt piece of black goatskin, which will have areas masked off, maybe using string or something like that to get a natural sort of pattern. I've got some over here. Okay. So this is the same goatskin that we will use for the other black onlays, but it's been heavily gilt in gold leaf. What I've done is created masked areas for a design. That I absolutely love. And I'm not sure that I've seen that on, certainly not on a historic binding before. So this was just genuinely intended as an initial mock-up, but I have to say, I absolutely love it. And I'm not sure I've got any notes. I think as, as, as, as it progresses, we might find that we put a few more dashes of gold and maybe small tools, maybe a few little leaf tools or something in there, but I think we've got a pretty good basis for the design. So I think all that's left to do now is you need to get a hold of the materials and hopefully we can take people along and show you how we go from our blank canvas into this utterly remarkable and incredibly exciting design. Well, it's a very exciting day today because I've heard from Ted and it's time to go over and see him. We're going to hear from him about how the binding process works, how he's got on with it and the problems that he's encountered along the way. And then very excitedly, he's going to show us the finished product. So I've just got to Ted's and I'm walking up the garden path to his bindery now. Hi Ted, how you doing? Nice to see you. Good to see you man. So Ted and I are here in the bindery and the finished book is on this table just behind me. But before we get into that, Ted keeps an archive really of all the work that's gone in to the binding. So we're going to have a look at that first. So inside the package, what we have is basically all of the templates or leather or information that I've kept from the binding process. That way, if I need to look back or check anything, I've always got it. And it's a great reference for the future. So we can look through these remnants, these fragments, these plans, these designs, these bits of cuttings and leather and go through how Ted made the new binding. And the first thing that I've noticed, Ted, is this here, which looks like the old binding that we saw. This is the original cloth binding that the manuscript came out of. And as you can see, it still has its endpapers because we've put new endpapers on and it was cut out and we've also lost the label because that's involved in the new binding. So we had the original endpapers still retained in the old binding. So Ted, what did we do with new endpapers for the book? So we made new endpapers for the book, which involved a folio of a matching handmade paper that was a nice complementary colour to the text. And then on that, we put a decorative gilt paper, which I can show you here. And that just fits the Rubaiyat and Persian poetry down to a T. And then this in front of us, Ted, this is like, have you drawn this? This is a pencil sketch. Yeah, so this is the actual design to scale that I then work from when putting it onto the book. What you had, what you'd seen originally, was the digital design that gave us an idea of what it would look like. But this is actually the scale. So I can work out how thick lines need to be, the positioning of the lettering and the positioning of where the tooling and our design will go on each board. So before you're putting anything on the book, are you testing it and measuring it up on this drawing first? This has been a very tricky design to execute because it's quite so precise. So there has been a huge amount of double checking, triple checking. And there's loads of bits of card that have different distances on. So I could double check from front to back board to make sure that our design is the same each side. And this means that having this here means that when things are finally finished on the binding, everything's the right shape. Everything's the right size. Everything hopefully goes in the right place. It should all be perfect if it looks like that on the book. And Ted, we've got the lettering, which you said everything needs to be precise. And it looks here like you had to do some different tests to get the way it's spaced right. So how did the lettering for the front cover end up working? So for this binding, the lettering was done with brass type in a type holder. And they're quite big letters, so they did have to be broken into multiple type holders. But it's relatively simple. Each letter is individually placed into the type holder. And then what we do is we work out the spacing we want between the letters. And that's what these tests are to make sure that we have enough space in between each letter to make the text look balanced, to make the lettering look balanced. So this one here, you can just see in pencil, you've done a little question mark. So you're just wondering whether that spacing between the H and the A is right? Exactly. We're just wondering whether maybe that needed one more space to get the balance of the word correct. And then once they are in position and correctly spaced, this would all be tightened up and heated on the stove. And then from the stove, they'd be put into the book hot. Perhaps the thing I was most excited about were these sort of centrepieces of kind of flowers in the cover that you were going to do in this quite unique way with gold. Can you talk us through how that came about? So as you can see, what we've done is we've started with some really, really thin goatskin, about 0.2 of a millimetre. And what we do is I've laid some string on them in a sort of random pattern. And then I gilt over the top of the string with gold leaf and then brushed away the pieces of string. And what you get is a mast effect that is completely random and unique. So now we've looked at exactly the process of making it. I don't think I can wait any longer. Shall we put the archive away and open up the box that you made for it and see what's inside? Yeah, let's do that. So we've got the binding down in front of us. So I'm going to put you up here and we're going to open the box. For me, for the first time. For the first time. This is extraordinarily exciting to see how we went from this flimsy bit of card to whatever Ted's done for me in here. Wow, that is extraordinary. I can't believe how good that looks. And I'm just going to bring you up here so you can see what I'm looking at. Because the first thing I noticed, which I think is absolutely wonderful, is this is the title label that was originally on the front cover of the binding. And that's been preserved here in the box. So we're not just preserving the title label, but also the name of the artist is going to be with that forever. And that is the only note of her name on the text. And so it really needed to stay with the binding. So what I've done is I've left the recess within the lid, velvet lid pad, and then we've sunken that below. And so it can stay with the text. I absolutely, that was a total surprise to me. I had no idea you were going to do that. And then we've got that perfectly spaced lettering at the bottom here. These amazing designs, which when you see them in real life versus the digital image or your sketch there, it makes such a big difference. They have much more texture in real life than they do on the screen. And so I think, yeah, you have to see it to get that grain of the leather and that gilt of the gold. And this work is just so extraordinarily fine and precise. I'm actually blown away by it. And then Ted, so if you turn the book over, we can see that design repeated on the back cover. And then, wow, that really is exquisite. It's been a labour of love, like the marking up to get everything. Because obviously that's parallel to this. That's parallel to this. That has to be parallel to this. This must be parallel. It took me five hours to put the line, the blind lines on. That's not tooling them. That was another four hours of work. Genuinely, the longest I've ever taken to make sure something was spot on. So I think if one of these lines had been wonky, you would have seen it would be the only thing you'd see, unfortunately, because, I mean, this gets really, really nerdy. But if you look in the corners, you see that little bit of blue? Yeah. Little bit of blue. That's how precise this binding is. And another thing that I'm just noticing now as we look through it is when I first saw the design, I really liked it. Yeah. But I did think, where's the blue coming from? And then you see it in the case here with the title label opposite. And that is utterly rightly preserving part of the original design and her work in the binding. The concept of a design binding should be that the design and the text work in harmony. Rather than being a separate entity, the binding and the text, what we have is a sort of harmonious relationship. And as we go in from our binding and our leather on the outside, we get to a gilt paper. And then our paper complements the transition. And it's all about bringing you into the text and into the book. And so when you get to this first page and see the beautiful illuminations on the side, it's not a shock. You've come in from something beautiful to find more beauty inside. And here we are at the back end of the book. As we go through the last couple of pages, you have a binder's note. And this explains exactly to another binder how the binding was bound in case it needed to be taken down or repaired in the future. So it's a great reference and with a date as well, to let you know when the binding was put on this book. Because that now too is part of its story. And we think sometimes of these things as being the work's completed and the job's done. But there we have an appreciation of the fact that this book is now going to keep on going and keep living for centuries longer. And when someone picks this book up in 50, 100, 200 years time, they can see exactly what's been done to it and the provenance of it.