Repairing Frayed Cover Edges - Handling Dos and Don'ts
- Memoirs and Notable Quotations -
Memoirs
This palm-size book of travel stories and poetry (The Open Road: A
Little Book for Wayfarers by E. V. Lucas) was given to me by an old
boyfriend to take along on a trip to Thailand. He found it in a used
bookshop and wrote his inscription to me on the opening page beneath one
to a previous owner dated 1925. Its binding had already fallen apart, so
he tied it together with a black ribbon from a perfume bottle. Because I
received it this way, I wouldn't want to fix the binding--the ribbon has
as much meaning to me as the book itself (he had also given me the
perfume). But from my toting it around and frequent handling, some of
the pages are beginning to look grimy. I'd love to give it a light
cleaning, not so it looks bright and new, but just so the words become
clear again. --Christa Bourg
After my grandmother's funeral, we returned to her house. Others were
interested in her jewelry and silverware. I was the only one who
treasured her old kitchen utensils. I was also the only grandchild who
could read her Yiddish books. She was born in the 1890s and came to
Canada from Poland in 1934. With no more than a few years of schooling,
she ran a paint and wallpaper business and raised four sons. My mother
found a few Yiddish books tucked away in a kitchen cupboard and gave
them to me. To my astonishment, one of them was a Yiddish translation of
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Printed on cheap paper, the pages are
brown and brittle, the signatures are loose, the cover is falling apart.
Repairing it would be an act of loving-kindness, an homage to my
grandmother, a secret between us, for only she and I know about this
book. To care for it is to care for her. --Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Notable Quotations
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. --Marcel Proust
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us that we know the topography of its blots and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins. --Charles Lamb
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. --Thomas Carlyle
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