Although very similar, the repair, restoration or conservation of books are in point of fact very distinct and separate operations.

The most simple operation is the repair. A repair could be loose covers or broken spines. Sometimes there may be loose or torn pages. A repair is made using materials which best fit the particular situation.

Preservation of a book so that it retains its original characteristics is called restoration. Here the original materials are retained: cloth or paper wrappers cleaned up and fitted onto new boards, signatures may be resewn, torn pages hinged onto lightweight Japanese papers.

The most complicated of these procedures is conservation, where the aim is stabilization of original text block. The concept is the book as object and the focus is to maintain its value as an artifact. Here a book may be completely disbound: covers and endpapers removed, old adhesives removed, the sewing undone.

The Campbell-Logan Bindery has done much conservation work for libraries, including those of the Walker Art Center, Library of Congress, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and St. John's University, the University of Minnesota, numerous collectors and antiquarian book dealers.

Recognizing the need to offer a binding that is neither conventional library binding nor single item conservation treatment, Campbell-Logan Bindery has introduced a binding designed to beused for permanent research collections. We call this binding AlphaBind™. AlphaBind is suitable for material too significant or too complex for conventional library binding. More...