You Can’t Pass Down a Kindle: Inside the Work of a Toronto Book Conservator

In a Scarborough workshop, bookbinder and conservator Andrew Huot repairs the books people can’t simply replace — family Bibles, cookbooks, archives and objects carrying generations of history. His work is slow, exacting and increasingly unusual in a world built for speed.

There are plenty of books that make no sense to repair.

A paperback with a broken spine can usually be replaced for less than the cost of an hour of specialist work. Modern books roll off production lines by the thousands. If one falls apart, another copy can often be at your door tomorrow.

Andrew Huot knows this.

As a bookbinder and conservator working in Scarborough, Ontario, he is not in the business of competing with mass-produced books. The objects that arrive at his workshop tend to be there for another reason.

They matter.

A family Bible. A mother’s cookbook. A book filled with handwritten notes. Something a grandparent held, used and eventually passed down.

“A Kindle, an electronic file really doesn't hold any kind of personal significance,” Andrew says. “But having something that your parents or your grandparents thumbed through, wrote down marginalia or put your family history in there — I think that’s really an important thing.”

It is a simple distinction, but one that sits at the centre of his work.

Digitization can preserve words. It can make information accessible to millions of people. But the information contained in a book is not always the only thing worth preserving.

Sometimes the object is part of the story.

A book can be valuable without being valuable

Many of the books Andrew works on would never attract the attention of a rare-book dealer.

That isn’t the point.

“For individuals, primarily, it’s really about things that are important to their families and their history,” he says.

Inscriptions matter. Marginalia matters. The wear on a cover can matter. A book might contain names, dates or handwritten family history that exist nowhere else.

That changes the calculation.

Andrew is upfront that conservation can cost more than simply buying another copy. The economics only make sense when replacing the object would mean losing something that cannot be bought again.

“People really bring things to me because it’s an important part of their family and their history,” he says. “It’s a connection with the past.”

Often, the goal is not to make a book look new. It is to make it stable enough to survive and usable enough that another generation can handle it.

That distinction — between restoration as replacement and conservation as preservation — affects almost every decision Andrew makes.

The job is knowing when not to fix something

One client arrived with a badly damaged family Bible and an idea.

They wanted to buy pieces from other Bibles and use them to rebuild their own.

Technically, pieces could have been combined. But for Andrew, something about the approach felt wrong.

He describes the proposed result as a kind of “Frankenstein object”: a book reconstructed from unrelated parts simply to make it whole again.

“We try to honour the object,” he says. “I’m not going to change it significantly without a really good reason.”

That is where conservation becomes more than manual skill.

Andrew works within a professional code of ethics. With each project he has to consider the longevity of the object, what intervention it can safely withstand, what the owner wants and what they can afford.

Sometimes the plan changes halfway through. Materials react differently than expected. An old repair reveals a new problem. A treatment that seemed possible at the beginning no longer makes sense once the book is opened up.

The answer is not always to do more.

Sometimes good conservation means knowing when to stop.

There is no five-minute repair

The other misconception Andrew encounters is speed.

“One of the things people don’t understand about conservation is that it takes a long time,” he says. “It’s kind of a slow, laborious process.”

That puts his workshop somewhat at odds with the way the rest of the economy increasingly works.

Consumers are used to next-day delivery, automated production and near-instant replacement. Book conservation moves at the speed of materials.

Andrew may begin with photographs sent by a client. If the project looks viable, the book comes into the shop for a closer examination.

He looks for damage, previous repairs and materials added over the years. Scotch tape and masking tape are common offenders. Adhesives can stiffen paper and accelerate deterioration, making a home repair from decades earlier part of the problem he now has to solve.

The book is photographed before work begins. Then comes the process of taking it apart carefully enough to understand what is happening without creating additional damage.

Materials are lifted. Paper is repaired. Weak areas are reinforced.

Tape may have to be removed painstakingly.

There are periods when something needs to dry or settle before another stage can begin. Andrew moves between projects while he waits.

“The conservation process is really mostly done with hands and simple hand tools,” he says. “It’s not really like I can put it in the machine and have it pop out five minutes later.”

Watching him work makes that obvious.

Thin Japanese paper can be used to strengthen damaged areas without obscuring text. Fibres may be humidified before they are manipulated so they do not break. Wheat starch paste — an adhesive with a history stretching back centuries — is still useful precisely because conservators understand how it behaves.

Where material is missing, Andrew may create a fill from strong Japanese paper, colouring and shaping it to sit alongside the original.

None of this looks particularly dramatic.

That is part of the appeal.

A small repair can involve an extraordinary amount of attention.

From printmaking to preservation

Andrew did not begin his career planning to restore family books.

In college, he studied photography and printmaking. A friend suggested they take a workshop in artist books.

Over one weekend they wrote text, printed it using letterpress, created imagery and bound everything together.

Andrew was hooked.

Bookmaking combined many of the things he already enjoyed about photography and printmaking: materials, craft, process and physical making. But a book also offered something different.

Unlike a painting hanging on a wall, a book asks to be handled. Pages have to be turned. The viewer determines the pace. Andrew describes that relationship as more intimate — almost a conversation between the object and the person holding it.

He began making artist books and taking more classes.

Then damaged books started appearing.

Friends and relatives knew he did bookbinding, so they began asking the inevitable question: can you fix this?

Andrew volunteered with people doing book repair, attended conferences and pursued further training. He went on to work in university and research libraries across the United States before eventually establishing his own private practice for individuals and institutions.

That career took him through the US before bringing him back to Canada.

Starting again in Toronto

Returning home did not mean simply picking up where he had left off.

Andrew had moved his business before and knew what rebuilding meant: new clients, new relationships and a new professional community.

In Atlanta, Georgia, he had been one of relatively few people doing this kind of specialist work. In Canada, he found an established bookbinding and conservation tradition.

That has advantages. It also means competition.

People who have worked with the same conservator for years are not necessarily searching for somebody new.

Then there are the basic economics of running a specialist workshop in Toronto.

Space is expensive, particularly when the work requires room for equipment as well as benches and storage. Many specialist materials are not readily available in Canada and have to come from the United States, adding shipping and duties to already expensive supplies.

“One of the challenges of being in this business here in Canada is the lack of materials,” Andrew says.

His response has been to remain a generalist.

Alongside conservation and repair, he does hand bookbinding, makes protective boxes, binds things such as family histories and theses, and teaches.

It is a mix of activities that reflects something important about small specialist businesses: the visible craft is only part of the job.

There is sourcing. Ordering. Paperwork. Teaching. Client communication. Quoting. Waiting. And somewhere among all of it, hours at the bench.

Why repair something when you can replace it?

There is an obvious question hanging over all of this.

Why keep doing it?

Not simply why Andrew keeps doing it, but why anyone still pays to conserve a physical book when millions of texts can be accessed instantly on a screen.

The answer is sitting in the books themselves.

Andrew sees more institutional work coming from archives and collections, but he also sees continued interest in physical books and in handwork itself.

After spending much of their lives using computers, he says people increasingly enjoy the chance to switch them off and make something with their hands.

And people continue to arrive at his shop carrying damaged objects they cannot bring themselves to throw away.

Every book, Andrew says, comes with a story.

Someone remembers who owned it. Where it came from. Who wrote in it. Why it stayed in the family.

For Andrew, one of the most satisfying moments comes at the very end — when the repaired book goes back across the counter.

After hours of cleaning, lifting, repairing, reinforcing, drying and reassembling, an object that had become too fragile to use can be handled again.

Owners no longer have to worry that opening the cover will cause more damage.

They can share it.

And, eventually, they can pass it on.

That is a difficult thing to reproduce on a screen.