Sunday, 26 April 2015

Japanese Craftsman Masterfully Restores Old Book into Like-New Condition



If you have ever bemoaned that a treasured a book was falling apart, then you will relish seeing how this Japanese craftsman masterfully restored a tattered 1,000-page dictionary near perfect condition. Well, this is an episode of the Japanese show called Shuri, “Bakaseru” means “The Fascinating Craftsman” featured Nobuo Okano, an artisan who specializes in old books. Thus during the ten minutes long segment, the craftsman demonstrates how the well-loved English-Japanese dictionary was brought back to new life. It has had fairly a history and served the owner from his junior high years through his adult life. Now that his daughter is entering college, he wants to pass the book along to her.

Okano starts the restoration by cleaning all of the old glue from the book’s spine and repairing pages of maps included in it. Though they cannot be returned to a untouched condition, they are glued to paper and now have a solid base. Then, he comes the most tedious part of the whole process. Okano unfolds hundreds of bent page corners with a tweezers, separately ironing each of them flat shape. Once that’s he done this part, the book is looking much in a better shape, but there’s still much work to do. The tips of the pages are stained with purple ink, and so he uses a guillotine book cutter to trim those unsightly edges. Moreover constructing a fresh cover is the last step, and he embellished it with the salvaged title piece of the original book. The process ends of episode expressions the happy and thankful customer giving the dictionary to his daughter. If you want see the video below to see just how Okano completed this incredible restore, please click on the below link.

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