02 November 2016

Opening a new book


This is the method I was taught as a youngster.  Irrelevant nowadays?  I don't know.

Via Nag on the Lake.

9 comments:

  1. It seems still to work on "real" books but I've had mixed results with trade paperbacks. The spines of those with inserts (e.g. a section of color illustrations in an otherwise b&w book) always seem to break at the point of the insert.

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  2. i did not know there was a special method. you always some thing new here!

    I-)

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  3. Really depends on the binding and how everything is glued.

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  4. mmm, and didn't books at some point in the not-so-distant past have signatures bound in such a way that the first reader needed to cut the edges carefully? i seem to recall a victorian "book knife" at an antiques shop, and i'm sure i have read references to "uncut leaves" in a book...

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    Replies
    1. Yup. I had to cut the pages of a monograph I referenced as part of my undergraduate research. It was printed in 1929.

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  5. I learned about this as a youth and always practiced it since, especially with hardcovers or with particularly thick paperbacks. Over the years, I had a lot of paperbacks that fell apart from being read too much.

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  6. some pictorials to clarify the text:

    https://s3-media1.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/yvFSOkrnJqUtcWjSXmY52g/o.jpg

    http://aaknopf.tumblr.com/post/22718061076/iheartclassics-yes-i-know-most-of-you-just

    http://stephenslighthouse.com/2010/09/01/how-to-open-a-book-and-library-hand/ How to open a book and ‘library hand’

    I-)

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