Book repair kit

Ann Morgan Dodge <ann_dodge [at] brown__edu> writes

>I am curious to know if others know anything about this. I am not
>willing to spend $125 to find out if it is as bad as I think it
>might be. If you don't receive their catalogue, the Signals URL is
><URL:http://www.signals.com> Enter reading as the keyword, the kit
>is on the third page.
>
>The Holiday issue of the Signals catalogue features a "Booklover's
>Repair Kit" (page 13) ...

An article in the Financial Times, London edition, December 2/3,
Weekend Section, page XIV, includes an interview with its inventor,
Estelle Ellis. She discovered that: "Tools to mend ailing beloved
books were available only to librarians and specialists, not to the
lay reader. This injustice rankled the core of her democratic soul".
Her interviewer tested the kit. "We thumbed the lucky crystal...
flipped through [the instruction book] searching for the procedure
to re-attach a severed flyleaf... and went to work. " 'There is no
right or wrong way' Ellis clucked"... "'it's absolute fun and it's
easy'". When questioned as to whether the interviewer had done it
right she replied "I suppose so, I haven't done it. We're learning
as we're going along... I haven't had time".

The kit is available on the internet from Amazon and Borders, inter
alia.

I wonder if this indefatigable woman proposes further kits for those
who to date have been undemocratically denied the right to practise
other black arts at their kitchen table. The restructuring of
third-world debt, for example, or assembling nuclear warheads. I am
of course being unfair and elitist: no doubt she was widely (and
wildly) misquoted by the journalist. I had just never thought before
reading this that conservation training was a subtle way of
oppressing the masses and depriving them of their democratic rights.
And the lucky crystal may be just what I need...

Rosemary Yallop


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 14:32
                Distributed: Thursday, December 7, 2000
                       Message Id: cdl-14-32-001
                                  ***