Adventures in Book-Breaking

Herein lies my adventures in book-breaking. May God forgive me for my transgressions.

Removing the cover was pretty simple, just slice through the end pages. The 'body' of the book had a thin brown sheet of some sort of thin light paper affixed to it, presumably to shield the cloth or whatever it is from friction with the back cover. The brown piece of paper came off rather easily. The little ribbons visible at the top and bottom of the pages are thin strips glued to the backing.

In order to remove these cloth fixtures I think I need to melt the glue.

Removing the ribbons I assume required a heat source, as tugging at them cold made some progress towards their removal, but not a significant amount. To acquire heat, I turned my stove on, placed a knife on the burner, waited maybe a minute, then went and pressed the knife to the ribbon. They put up much less of a fight than before.

To remove the larger backing cloth, I tried the same heat-application method. This didn't have a useful effect, either the glue wasn't melted enough, or more likely, I couldn't get to a good spot to hold the fabric from to separate it.

My solution was violent. I slowly (and to the best of my efforts, cleanly) tore the end page that was still attached to the bulk of the book from the rest of it. The effect of this is that the cloth certainly appears more accessible.

With just one of the end pages completely removed, the heat application method ended up being quite useful for removing the cloth backing.

With the cloth gone, I could see a diagonal strip of dark rectangles printed near the top of the book, and a large dark region near the bottom.

The heated butter knife was great at removing the glue once the cloth strip was gone. The damage to the book (from the knife) was fairly minimal. After scraping away some of the glue from the dark rectangle, text became visible. Each of the signatures had printed on its spine "— Tirapegui/Villarroel - vel 7 —", where the numbers ranged from 1 to 11. For some undetermined reason, the signature in the 10 spot lacked the em-dashes.

The binding wire became visible at this point. It looks like a thin version of dental floss. There appear to be 10 places where the stitching crosses the width of the book.

At some point, I grew tired of bending over a book with a hot butter knife in glue fumes to scrape away millimeters at a time, so I removed the glue from the signature labeled '11', and most of the glue from '10'. At this point, I cut the binding wires, in order to loose signature 11.

At last, I had a solitary signature. Oddly enough, the printing on the spine came off in the process, but at this point I doubt that will happen to most of the other signatures. This signature has 32 pages (16 leafs, 8 sheets). Opening up to the halfway point, one can strain their eyes to see the thin string holding the pages together. On the spine these strands are obscured by a layer of glue and other paper refuse.

Naturally, I cut the strings. There were two strings at each point where I cut (five such points). Separating the sheets was not as easy as I had hoped for the first sheet I removed (the middle one), but the others came out relatively painlessly. The holes for the strings grew as I separated the pages, but I don't know what I could have done better. Once the sheets were separated, they would not fit at all as tightly as they were had I not separated them.

At this point, I'm not sure how I want to proceed. This was an experiment with no obvious goals other than to figure out how it felt to deconstruct a book. I'm not sure what I've learned.