Had a chat with a retired binder at the library who changed how I think about glue

This older guy was repairing a beat-up encyclopedia and I asked him what he used. He said he's been using the same wheat paste recipe for 40 years and never buys PVA anymore. I thought he was just old school but he showed me how reversible it is compared to modern stuff. Made me wonder if I've been over-engineering my repairs with expensive adhesives. Anyone else ever switch to traditional methods and regret it or not regret it?

2 comments

2 Comments

paul23323d ago

The reversibility thing is actually huge if you ever need to undo work for digitization projects. Wheat paste basically lets you steam the paper off years later without tearing it, whereas PVA turns into a permanent plastic bond. There's a conservation lab at the university near me that switched back to starch based pastes for rare books because they kept damaging the paper trying to reverse old PVA repairs. The trade off is that wheat paste takes more skill to apply right without warping the paper, but once you get that down it's hard to go back.

jade_hernandez23d ago

Had to reverse a batch of old PVA repairs on some architectural drawings once and it was a nightmare. The plasticized glue had seeped into the fibers so deep that steaming just made a tacky mess. Switched to wheat paste after that and never looked back, the learning curve on warping is real but you get a feel for the moisture pretty quick.