Restoring Dumas

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, April 10, 2008
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It's no secret I love old books. Years ago, I used to drop in on the Detering Book Gallery every weekend, where I'd gain admittance to the upper room where antiquarian volumes were stored. With NPR playing in the background, I browsed for hours, and usually went home with a book or two. Once in London, we found a bookshop selling antiquarian titles to decorators by the foot, so I bought a foot of books (which the seller was kind enough to allow me to choose by title, though most clients went by color).

But I've only taken on one restoration project. In the days before eBay, I found a classified listing an almost-complete, numbered set of the English edition of the works of Alexandre Dumas. The seller wants about $200, because the covers were in terrible condition. I bought them expecting trashed reading copies (or worse). Instead, they were beautiful. All the original plates were intact, and the marbled boards were nearly so. All that needed replacement was the three-quarter calf binding.



The cost of restoration was more than ten times the cost of acquiring the set (which might explain why I've never done it again), but I have no regrets. Most of these books are either out of print or quite difficult to find, and each is a delight to read.

I remember returning to grad school one semester, and Dan Stern asking everyone to list what they'd read over the summer. It was an impressive mix of obscure, high-brow literature until my turn came. I'd just finished Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (#29, pictured above), but was a little ashamed to admit it. I owned up, and made a little apology on behalf of antiquarian reading. I don't know whether anyone was convinced -- and you know what? I didn't care. I had to get back to my reading.