I meet Barry Bailey at his bookstore in Riel Business Park to see if it's possible for him to repair my grandmother's 112-year-old Bible.
Bailey, who is a video producer and event planner, also sells used books by appointment and online. As a hobby, he repairs and rebinds old books.
When I found Grandma's Bible on my mother's shelf a quarter century ago, a fluttering of ochre-coloured newspaper clippings fell out from among the pages. My grandmother and mother had saved every official piece of paper that announced the births and deaths of my family members. The oldest piece, a baptismal certificate for my uncle, dated back to 1919. A war office notification of his death in Holland in 1945 was in the Bible too.
I decided to carry on the tradition, beginning that day, with my mother's death announcement, which I placed between the tissue-thin pages of Grandma's Bible. The book had clearly been well read. My grandmother must surely have read The Lord is My Shepherd dozens or perhaps hundreds of times, because the book automatically opened to that page.
The leather cover was crumbling and cracking and all those pieces of paper stuffed by three generations of women into the book, caused the binding to break. Unfortunately I used Scotch tape to try to hold the thing together, and tape is bad for books because it becomes brittle and discolours the paper.
Bailey's face tells me the story. Fixing Grandma's Bible isn't that easy.
"It's not a valuable book. There are hundreds just like it but it's important to you and it's a good project for me," he says. "I cannot restore it to look exactly as it looked before, but I can repair it and perhaps retain as much of the original book as possible."
Entering the shop is like teleporting into the past, passing from the new parking lot of the modern strip mall, to a quieter comfort of soft lights and a big, old greyhound named Sam, who greets me with a friendly sniff.
A funny déjà vu juxtaposition of time and place fills my mind as I watch Bailey take apart the book. He looks like a cobbler because he's garbed in a heavy canvas apron and his work table boasts pieces of coloured leather along with unusual, very old tools such as presses and special book-stitching machines.
In this old curious shop, the air itself is filled with the magic nostalgia of facts and fables that may only be found in leather-covered atlases, crinkled-paper history tomes and ancient novels. My nose twitches because of all the paper smells: thick paper, yellowed sheets of paper, ivory-coloured parchment and wrinkled pieces of tissue paper.
Then there are the inks, which also tell a scented story. Even the colours in this shop seem old because the books, which have perhaps been touched and read hundreds of times, have navy, burgundy and age-darkened green covers. My fingers itch with the need to hold each book and then to leisurely study and read.
That sense of leisurely purpose is clear in the way Bailey assesses the books he repairs.
"(With) every book repair, I have to sit and think it through and decide ahead of time what I'm going to do. Your Bible doesn't need to be sewn, but it is starting to come apart at the hinges," Bailey says as he explains that he cannot put a time limit on how long a book repair will take.
"The technique is not dependent on the value of the book, but what does the book warrant and what's the best repair to achieve what you want," he says.
The original leather cover on my Bible extended about half an inch beyond the edges of the book, but it was tattered and torn. Bailey trims it so that it will now be flush with the pages and he sews a neat edge to help keep the remaining leather intact.
"Your Bible is like 99 per cent of Bibles. It would only have value to others if for example, it had a family history that was important – not yours or mine – but say, John A. Macdonald's family, or Father Lacombe's Bible. It would also have value if it were extremely old – like 15th century old," he says.
New paper comes in many different colours, so Bailey tries to match the repairs to the original book. He cuts a thin strip of Japanese Tengu-jo paper and soaks it in paste. Then with the cover removed, and the pages opened, he picks up the paper strip and carefully uses it to weld the book back together.
"This is the thinnest paper I've got and you only get one chance with this stuff because once it's wet, it is really fragile and breaks. Later, I'll use a fine brush to paint some of the paper black to match the cover, " he says, adding that fixing my Bible is time-consuming because at every stage he has to let the paste dry.
He uses an old iron weight to keep the pages stable while the glue sets.
In the beginning
Bailey dates his book-collecting days back to his childhood in Edmonton, when his mother used to take him downtown shopping on Saturdays.
"She used to take me to Woolworth's and there was a place down in the basement where they had books and comics and I would go there while she shopped. The first book I remember reading, that I loved, was Farley Mowat's The Dog Who Wouldn't Be," he says.
As an adult Bailey began collecting every Mowat book he could find, including many signed copies. He collected Arthur Conan Doyle books and anything Canadian that struck his fancy, from history to geography.
"It just crept up on me. But just as I got into the book business there was a dramatic change because of the Internet, which put most used bookstores out of business," he said.
So Bailey specialized in signed copies of books.
At the same time he became fascinated with how old books were bound and that led him to Telluride, Colo., where he took five levels of hands-on courses at the American Academy of Book Binding. At his last session in April, Bailey rebuilt an Arthur Conan Doyle book, which required learning how to work with leather, how to sew different stitches and how to apply gold leaf.
"I had to soak the boards (covers) to get the paper off. Then each page had to be ripped out and I had to rebuild the spine. In the old books they used animal glue, which doesn't last well and the bugs love it. I had to scrape and clean the spine. I pasted Japanese paper onto each page edge, like a paper Band-Aid and I learned how to apply gold leaf calligraphy. Gold leaf is like pixie dust. It costs $75 a sheet," he explains.
He marvels at the age-old trade of book binding, which he found to be much more extensive than he ever imagined. Whenever he travels he visits old bookstores and he purchases old-fashioned presses and tools to help him with his hobby.
"Back in the day, each part of the book would have been made by a specialist and they were all artisans. I wanted to learn fine-leather bookbinding but I was unaware just how complex it could be. I didn't know how much patience it required. It's time consuming. It's labour intensive. But I love it. For me it's pleasure because I love books," he says.
Bailey is quick to point out the limitations of the work he does on my Bible.
"It's not museum-style conservation, where you do as little as you can, to preserve the integrity of the book. It's not restoration, where you retain as much of the original paper and threads and natural materials as you can. It's a repair so you can get it back and use it again, or put it back in your library," he says.
The repairs he made are almost impossible to see and yet it would be wrong to say that the book is as good as new. It's still aged and cracked and worn from use but to me it's better than it would have been in 1901 because there's so much family history behind it.
"Hopefully, it should last for another generation," Bailey says, picking the book up by one cover and giving it a gentle shake to demonstrate the strength of the new binding that he made.
"Go ahead and put your papers back into it," he says. "It's a family archive."
