Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:20:08 -0400
From: Ted White <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: wtf? [WSFA] trying again - damn yahoo anyway
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

  On 8/23/2010 9:57 PM, Tamar Lindsay wrote:

>  --- On Mon, 8/23/10, mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>
> > Tamar Lindsay wrote:
> >
[...]
> >
> >> C)  How to make and bake your own clay tablet or writing in the
> >> Sumerian age.
> >
> > That would be hard. On the other hand, I'd *love* one on how to
> > rebind a book whose *cheap* glue is falling apart....
>
>  "Somewhere on the net" I read that you can buy the right kind of glue
>  to do that.  You have to clamp the pages really tightly so the glue
>  won't suck up between them by capillary action and give you a solid
>  block of reconstituted wood, and then you brush the glue on just the
>  edges you want to be glued, and stick the spine back on. I haven't
>  ever done it; never found the glue.
>
>  I did once see glue made for making your own tear-off notepads, but
>  obviously it wasn't meant for long-term book binding.

The glue used for binding (paperback) books has to have a flexible
aspect -- it can't set hard and solid -- so I expect it once might have
been rubber-based but now is plastic-based.  But in any case, the notion
of the paper possibly sucking the glue up via capillary action,
resulting in "a solid block of reconstituted wood" is *very* unlikely,
since no glue is that thin or watery. The pages are clamped together for
the much better reason of producing a tight, even binding.  (Loosely
held pages would, once glued, bulge at the spine.)

--Ted White