Ching Li and the Dragons by Alice Woodbury Howard

About 70% of my work here is to restore older leather bound books, as my master tends to work on less labor intensive ones. (!! Is he using me!?! Yo, Master! You aren't retired yet, dude!) So, this is the first cloth bound book I’ve featured here since starting this blog. I'm not saying all the cloth bound books aren't complicated, in fact, they are often more complicated to restore than others if all the original pieces need to be preserved and invisibly repaired. But this particular book isn't one of them. It's Ching Li and the Dragons by Alice Woodbury Howard, published by Macmillan Co., (1931). My job is to create a brand new case with the original front graphic inlaid onto the front cover and repair torn pages. The client wants the insignia on the front endsheet to be preserved, so I have to lift it up and put it back to the original position on the new endsheet. Looks like it was a gift from her grandma when she was a child. Children's books are like cookbooks and Bibles, - people want to keep them in their family tradition by bequeathing them to the next generation. But, boy, the pages of this book! Someone has torn the hell out of them! (No, it's not her dog, though we often get clients saying "My dog ate my book!". Seriously... Bad Dog!!)
 // For the completed work of this book, go to my latter post: Ching Li and the Dragons, complete