ANyone else considering cerloxing their dilapitated recipe books? I've always said that

M

Marg CDN

Well-known member
recipe books should have been bound by cerloxing to begin with but now need the nerve to cut mine apart to save them. It seems like a lot of work and certainly destroys the integrity of a paperbound book but am wondering if anyone else has done this.

 
Aha, got it. Actually, dh did this for me on a book that was spiral bound at the top with recipes

 
Sorry. I should say that cerloxing is the plastic coils that we see on business presentations, etc.

I would do it myself as I have a whack of coils to use. It's a lot of work as the machine will do only about 15 pages at a time.

I'm a bit reluctant with the hardbound books but they are falling apart and that makes them difficult to use anyway. I love a recipe book that lays flat.

 
While you have it apart - consider scanning the pages

and storing them to PDF files so that if does deteriorate more you can reprint the decaying pages.

We've got one of those do-it-all printers at work and one feature is that it will scan the document to PDF and email it as an attachment.

I've done this with documents and handwritten items that I wanted to save.

 
Marg, while I haven't done this

I do work in publishing and work with the cerloxing on a daily basis. I would caution you to check the gutters in your book before tearing it apart to verify that you have enough room to punch and bind. There is a chance that there would not be enough room and you would be punching into the left text line of the page.

Amazing I've never even thought about doing this with some of my books that are falling apart. I'm not sure I would do it though because I'm a snob about book bindings and how they look on my bookshelves. I have a couple of dear books that have fallen apart (because of faulty work and materials from the original publisher) and I was looking into re-binding them. I purchased a book on it but that's about as far as I got.

Anyone ever try rebinding books that have fallen apart?

 
It was the 'integrity' part that is holding me back. For example, I have 3 Marcella Hazan, hard

bound. Then I have 2 paperback duplicates that I kept in my other kitchen. I find them next-to-useless as far as ease of use is concerned.

The margins are fine, big enough even after I cut off a bit of the glue edge. But would I be happy not seeing Marcella sitting on my cookbookshelves.

(would that be 1 word, 2 words or of necessity, 3 words??)

Marcella gets reduced to a skinny, no-name, plastic strip!

 
Thanks Traca, in fact that may be the solution to keeping the books intact, if I can

scan without doing more damage.

I suppose there is no real copyright infringement if I don't distribute it.

 
One of my favorite TV Chef/cookbooks that I love wrote in the first of her

books that I have:

"Now take this book and use it. Really use it. Splatter it with gooey stuff and bend the pages and make personal notes next to the recipes. If I came into your house, it would flatter me more to see any book a mess lying on the countertop than all pristine perched on a shelf. So enjoy yourself and share you joy with those around you."

I loved that and so when one of my favorite, most used cookbooks started to fall apart I took it to Kinko's and had it put back together with the coil binding they do for $5.00 and use the heck out of it.

Edited to add and give credit to the Chef...Caprial Pence

 
Yes, but it's not a hard cover. It's a heavy paper cover. I'll get hubby

to take a picture of it and post. If yours is a hard cover you could scan the front and back onto a heavy paper.

 
Yes, thanks Orchid. That one is perfect. Our machine does the plastic coils but this type of book

is perfect for binding.

Not sure if one could actually force it to use the metal coils now that I think about it.

I agree, they are so easy to access with coils.

Thanks again.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top