, or else the glue will dry
up harder than before. The separated sections must be piled up
carefully to prevent pages being soiled by the damp glue.

All plates or single leaves "pasted on" must be removed. These can
usually be detached by carefully tearing apart, but if too securely
pasted they must be soaked off in water, unless of course the plates
have been painted with water-colour. If the plates must be soaked off,
the leaf and attached plate should be put into a pan of slightly warm
water and left to soak until they float apart, then with a soft brush
any remaining glue or paste can be easily removed while in the water.
Care must be taken not to soak modern books printed on what is called
"Art Paper," as this paper will hardly stand ordinary handling, and is
absolutely ruined if wetted. The growing use of this paper in
important books is one of the greatest troubles the bookbinder has to
face. The highly loaded and glazed surface of some of the heavy plate
papers easily flakes off, so that any guard pasted on these plates is
apt to come away, taking with it the surface of the paper. Moreover,
should the plates chance to be fingered or in any way soiled, nothing
can remove the marks; and should a corner get turned down, the paper
breaks and the corner will fall off. It is the opinion of experts that
this heavily loaded Art Paper will not last a reasonable time, and,
apart from other considerations, this should be ample reason for not
using it in books that are expected to have a permanent value.
Printers like this paper, because it enables them to obtain brilliant
impressions from blocks produced by cheap processes.

In "cased" books, sewn by machinery, the head and tail of the sheets
will often be found to be split up as far as the "kettle" stitches. If
such a book is to be expensively bound, it will require mending
throughout in these places, or the glue may soak into the torn ends,
and make the book open stiffly.

Some books are put together with staples of tinned iron wire, which
rapidly rust and disfigure the book by circular brown marks. Such
marks will usually have to be cut out and the places carefully mended.
This process is lengthy, and consequently so costly, that it is
generally cheaper, when possible, to obtain an unbound copy of the
book from the publishers, than to waste time repairing the damage done
by the cloth binder.

Generally speaking, the sections of a book cased in cloth by modern
meth