Do you have a product that would remove or diminish rust stains on paper from metal paperclips? Would one of your erasers help? If so, which one?

Rusty Clipper

Depends on what type of paper…how thick, what kind of finish etc…

Generally rust doesn’t seep as far as ink, so you can get away with a little light surface abrasion. Any of my Inkredibles will work, the white/coarse one is more abrasive and the black one less so. If it is a large dark stain you may want to start with the coarse grade for a smidgen then move to the finer grains after the worst is gone.

If it is highly calendared like onion skin, only the lightest touch will do the trick. If it is bristol finish card stock you can put more torque behind it, but then the rust will not have gone too deep.

There are also different finishes of book paper…very open pored paper responds easily but late 19th c. very smooth surface is more delicate (it depends on how much cloth is in the paper) something with a cardstock back and a printed paper surface is much more delicate as the printed paper is thin and you can’t apply the coarse inkredible for more than a few swipes before you have to switch to fine.

I’m normally a book collector, but recently succumbed to a temptation and purchased the first comic appearance of Donald Duck. This is a huge book for a comic (9 1/2 X 12 3/4), and has a fair amount of surface grime, made more obvious by a prior attempt by a prior owner to remove a pencil signature. The cover is on pulp-ish, non-glossy paper. What would you use for gentle surface cleaning? A document cleaning pad?

Duck and Cover

Since it has an ink printed surface you are correct in avoiding anything abrasive. Your choices are:
Absorene which is like a clean grease free silly putty, which also crumbles and allows you to roll the bits around collecting up surface dirt.

Document cleaning pads which will scatted tiny eraser granules over the surface for you to gently rub in.

Or ground up erasers of varying kinds: art gum or white vinyl. If you want to experiment you can use a cheese or nutmeg grater (avoid pink rubber erasers will just dry out when ground up.)

All of these perform the same function ADHESION, getting the dirt to adhere to the granule surface so you can blow it off; Absorene is just the ‘stickiest’. You can repeat this as often as you like as long as you don’t apply too much pressure to the grains and actually ‘scrub’ against the inks.

I recently purchased a book off the net (one supposedly in “fine” condition . . . ha), and when it arrived, I discovered it had 3 splats of dried blood on the fore-edge. It’s gross, but I want to keep the book. Any suggestions?

Bloody Shame

Go to the hardware store and buy a sanding sponge, these are found near the sandpaper, and come in various sizes and grits. They are mostly used for sanding spackle and dry wall. With this you can ‘erase’ the surface of the fore-edge, especially good for general fore-edge grime. This won’t work on faux deckle of course.

Any bleaching agent will drain the red out and turn it brown or perhaps yellow. If the drops are small enough, perhaps hydogen peroxide on a q-tip? Since you can’t wash it, the proteins will never completely go away so the best you can do is make them less noticeable.

Dear Bibliobull:
I forgot to remove the batteries from toys that I had in storage. I can see that the batteries have leaked and the contact points have corroded. The toy doesn’t work. Can these toys be fixed or is it a waste of time to even think about it?

Dead Batteries

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Dear Dead:
Any corrosion on the contacts may indeed prevent the item from working. You must remove all the corrosion from the contacts even if you can’t see it.

If there is only light corrosion on the contacts…a darkening or discoloration, use an applicator such as cotton swabs with VINEGAR. if the dark spot persists, try an emery board nail file to remove the dark patches.

For corrosion your can clearly see, i.e. white patches use a BAKING SODA solution. Alternate applying the solution with a bit of cloth or cotton cosmetic rounds, with something stiff some people recommend ink erasers and fine steel wool..i like the emery board. If the contacts are unreachable by finger tips, glue a piece of fine sandpaper around the end of a bamboo skewer or chop stick.

When no more corrosion is visible, clean the contacts with alcohol.

If the contact is corroded through it could probably be replaced
but one would need one of similar size and a soldering iron.

Biblio Bull-

Dear Bibliobull -

I special ordered a title for customer from Amazon, new as stated and not cheap. It arrived with a library pocket neatly placed inside cover no other markings. Thankfully the customer was happy to get the book and didn’t care about the library pocket. But I am wondering why would the publisher put one in?

High pocket

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Dear Pockets -

Some copies of books are preprocessed for libraries. When the library orders it from a jobber it would come with all the cards and pockets already for circulatio, saving the library lots of time and getting the book into circulation quicker.. These days usually non trade editions – the kind that aren’t cheap…but there was a time when it was much more regularly done. You didn’t say the title, but i get the feeling this is a book that will be primarily sold to libraries perhaps they didn’t have any pocketless copies left? or pulled one by accident without the cards inside I’d say it may have been a leftover from the processing service. I am not even certain that they still send the actual CARDS with preprocessed books, perhaps it is new old stock.

Biblio Bull-

Dear BiblioBull

Have a customer with some oversized laminated postcards. They had been kept in a cellar, and were covered in a black mold. Being laminated though, she managed to clean them completely, but cannot get rid of the smell. Can anyone offer a neutralizing agent, or some home remedy?

Moldey Card Smells.

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Dear Cardey -

Where they not laminated I would recommend my Book Deodorizer which would absorb odor and moisture molecules from cardstock. However the lamination would respond to some unscented fabric refresher applied with a lightly sprayed cloth.

The active ingredient in Febreze or other such brand is cyclodextrin, a modified starch which is harmless. The inactive ingredient is Ethyl alcohol, which will kill any residual mold. The ph value is pH (1% solution): 4.0-5.0 which is acidic but the lamination will protect the actual cards.

Wipe the cards individually and then spread them out to dry.

Biblio Bull-

Those shiny dust jackets that have a coating are easy to clean. I use Windex wipes. But what about the jackets that have no coating? Those get the grimmest and could use cleaning but I am uncertain how to proceed.

Thanks.

High Gloss

To remove dirt from a matte finish surface try ‘adsorbing’, getting the surface dirt to adhere to something besides the paper. This method will not interfere with the inks. Absorene, document cleaning pads and/or ground eraser particulates are all good tools.

Bring the cheese grater out of the cupboard and grind up some art gum or Magic Rub eraser. Sprinkle the particles onto the dust jacket surface, then lightly rub/roll the pieces back and forth over the dirty parts, applying just enough pressure to cause some friction. Blow or brush the particles off the surface. Repeat with clean particles, for stubborn spots just use a white vinyl eraser straight on the spot.

I bought a store where the previous owner used a “store stamp” in each of your books.
It seems common for advertising purposes and for indicating non-returnable status.
Should I continue doing it?

Stampy Town books.

There is a special circle in hell for people who use rubber stamps in books.

What you are doing is reducing the value of of your own stock, and alienating any serious book buyer. There is no reason to deface books in this manner in this day and age, not for any reason. You want to advertise? give them a bookmark. If you don’t want to buy a book back, then don’t. If you can’t remember which titles are bad for your inventory (the fact that you can’t is scary enough), then use a innocuous mark on the fore-edge. It has been good enough for major publishers to mark remainders for 70 years, I can’t think of why it’s not good enough for a lowly paperback bookseller.

What other retail or reseller would ever be able to get away with marking up their inventory before you buy it? How long would a thrift store last if they wrote their name on the back of every shirt and dress?

You want to put your name on a book, WRITE ONE.

Be kind to your books and your customers, keep your stamps to yourself.

I have books from the 1800′s, I’m trying to decide which is worse: to have a missing endpaper or to have it replaced. What do you think? How do I replace the missing ones?

Oddly at an End

Replacing an endpaper or even all the endpapers is not a crime. Endpapers have always been replaceable, that is until the fetishists took over the collecting game. The endpaper is the final piece the binder applies that covers up all the unattactive parts of the fine work he has just done. Back when people collected books for their content, recasing a book and giving it new endpapers was commonplace.

• 1st get a file drawer and some manila folders
• 2nd collect endapers from damaged and dead books, this may take a while, perhaps the rest of your life.
• 3rd file them by height; (you can put the colored, patterned and clay pages in other folders by COLOR HUE)
• 4th when you have a book missing an endpaper you can go to your files and have a good shot at replacing it. This includes cutting down larger endpapers to fit smaller books, so don’t forget to cannibalize all those agricultural reports and congressional records!

In an extreme case you can go shopping and buy a cheap book with the proper vintage endpaper and then sacrifice it to the book gods so that the other book may live.

When you have a missing front free endpaper that you can’t replace: try moving the rear free endpaper to the front, you will need to flip it around but it works spectacularly for replacing feps on books where the continued erasing of prices has ragged the top right corner of the fep.

When matching endpapers from book to book: You need a WINDOW – a light bulb just doesn’t cut it. Hold a mostly blank page from the injured book up to the light and check the chain marks and the fiber content. This helps you get within a few decades of the correct vintage. Then try to match the texture of a loose endpaper to that one.

You can experiment with bleaching the ink off a page that has say 2 or 3 lines on it, but you will never be happy with the result. By the time you remove the ink you will also be removing any patina and foxing the paper has in it and it will never really match. But these pages are useful for cutdowns.

BTW there IS a company out there who makes CLAY PAPER like the kind found in late 19thc publishers bindings. (it used to be Artext but i am not sure now) it’s still ugly as sin and a horror show to work with, (every scratch shows up) but if you really need it you can get it thru art supply houses. The backing paper is snow white so you need to paste on vintage paper over it for the fep but then it becomes noticeable thick, I don’t advise using it unless you are a masochist.

My book wiggles. . . . it is brand new and very expensive, I haven’t even read it yet!

Why is it doing this and how do I stop it?

Got the wiggles.

Unfortunately you have a BAD BOOK. It is not your fault, it was born this way.

Due to cost cutting measures many publishers have skipped a step in manufacturing, and are only attaching the text blocks to the case, using the endpapers. THIS IS BAD, it is also cheap and mean. With moderate to heavy use your book will have a short lifespan and spend the rest of its days sagging from its own weight, ESPECIALLY if it is a large book as I suspect it is.

Normally there should be a piece of cheesecloth like substance (called mull or super) that binds the text block to the case, this will provides structural support and the open weave has a large surface for the glues to adhere. Sadly this is lacking in your book. If your book is not going to get a lot of use, say it’s a shelf copy of a reference book, you can tighten the hinge by adding a small amount of glue to the inside of the joint, using the video instructions below.

However if your book is going to continue to be opened and closed as it should be, you will have to ADD a small strip or tube of mull or a cheese-cloth like fabric to the inside of the hollowback before you add more adhesive.

• Cut the fabric about twice the width of the spine and slightly longer than the book.
• Insert it into the hollowback against the spine, making sure it covers the inside of both hinges where it will do the most good.
• Insert the same length of wax paper or stiff plastic into the hollow as well, this strip should be wide enough to cover the inside of the BACKSTRIP(cloth part) and protect it from errant glue. To keep it out of the way, cut it very long, loop it around the back of the book and tape it to itself.
• Using the video example, use a long skinny stick covered with a layer of adhesive, (thinned white glue will do) and run a line of glue inside the joint on both sides. Make sure the fabric is IN the crease. You may want to do one side at a time. Remember you can always add more adhesive, but you CANNOT REMOVE IT.
• Close the book and make sure the hinges is aligned correctly, and leave under weight over night.
• The next day, open the book and check the hollowback and see if the joint is tight.
• Remove the wax paper and trim the excess fabric from the top and bottom.

Now write a scathing letter to the publisher and accuse them of anything vile you can think of. They are beyond low.