Just So Stories of vintage book restoration

Welcome to The Kipling Project, the digi-journal of my newest hobby project. Who am I? Shelby Loebker, giant nerd, full-time book lover, and occasional wearer of pants. I’m a writer and editor working on the last year of my B.F.A.

What am I doing? I’m diving into book restoration, because I was recently lucky enough to stumble upon some old, and hopefully rare or at least somewhat collectible, books.

Here’s how it went down:

My family is really involved with the local public library, and were volunteering to help organize a new annex. They went through all of the old books in storage, many of which were thrown away, while others were sold in book sales or simply returned to storage. Basically they got first pick at the cream of the crop, meaning I got first pick at the cream of the crop.

I didn’t plan on getting anything valuable or particularly life changing — I don’t know anything about antiques or restoration — but as things went along, they found too many books that I couldn’t let be thrown away (and also just wanted to have).

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So here we are.

Thanks for asking.