Falling to pieces August 1, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, photography.Tags: books, engineering, pictures
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Yesterday, I posted a picture of a textbook I use as a reference. The picture showed pages detaching from the glue binding. Sadly, the problem is worse than it appears:
I’m beginning to think a lot of textbook manufacturers aren’t really using glue but maybe teflon in their binding. Or something along those lines. My husband has an older edition of this book that’s held up better than this one. I would like to replace it with an ebook, but my brain has a hard time handling technical information on a computer screen. Paper seems to be best.
Better find the duct tape.
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It’s fixable if you want to put the time into it.
Tear off the covers and the coversheets. Reglue the backing with some new tape or mesh. Glue on the cover sheet front, then back. Bob’s your uncle. As I said though, it takes a bit of time. :)
Duct tape also works.
Yeah…I might look at that. Depends on if I can find a cheap replacement on amazon or not. It does sound like a major pain, especially for a book this big.
In HS, Mr. Hjelle ordered new Bio books, and sent them back a month later because they had mistakenly sent the college version of the text (it was a college text), which was designed to fall apart more quickly than the version for high schools. Planned destruction. Remember those books? With the black panther on the cover? I weighed it; it weighed 11 lbs. :)
I clearly remember him standing up in front of the class after calling them, ranting about how obnoxious it was as well as unfair to college students. I do remember the books…especially that they were heavy. :-D
I have one of those panther books still.
Oooh! Collector’s item!
Sorry about your book. I have some inherited text books that are 90-100 years old with spines still intact. (My high school books from the 1950s, likewise, are intact.) As someone once said, “They just don’t make ‘em the way they used to!”
I have a German Bible that’s well over 100 years old and THAT is in better shape than the book in the picture. And I’m pretty sure it was through a lot more…
I found some book binding tape at a specialty paper store – it’s really strong stuff. Not sure if you want to stick that to your precious old book, but if you’re just looking to fix it, that stuff is awesome. We use it on the kids’ books all the time.