Student workers and full-time faculty are working to repair, rebind and renew old books in the BYU conservation laboratory.
Repairs can be made by sewing new bindings on old pages, patching up pages with holes, replacing book covers and more.
The purpose of restoring old books is not to make them look new again but to preserve them for future use, Christopher McAfee, head conservator of rare books and manuscripts, said.
"To give you an idea of what we do in a nutshell, we can take a book completely apart, wash the pages, repair the tears, put it back together again and make it look as good as old," McAfee said.
Vicki Heal, a conservator in the lab, explained the rebinding process.
"This is an old case," Heal said. "It's going to be part of a reback. And this case is being repaired, and I will put some cords or laces or linen tapes and then I will reattach the old case to these ones."
Aly Faber, another conservator, sews endsheets onto old books.
"For sewing on endsheets, you've got to sew a bit into the book as well," Faber said.
Faber also sews signatures into books. A signature is a folded sheet of paper that contains multiple pages of a book. Workers fold and bind signatures together to create the final product.
In the conservation lab, books can also be washed. Workers unbind the pages before they get wet, preventing the pages from cockling or wrinkling during the drying process.
Lab conservators do not wear gloves, which are more likely to snag on flakey leather bindings than skin. Since their skin can also damage books, conservators are constantly washing their hands.