Four Poems by Rimbaud

One of the many things that drives my wife nuts is my habit of straightening pictures wherever I go, however absolutely parallel they might appear to less observant (or, as she puts it, picky). Even in other people's homes, though I do try and restrain myself until the owners are out of the room before doing them a favour and correcting their picture alignment.

So you can imagine my distress when I opened this slim volume, Four Poems by Rimbaud: the Problem of Translation, and discovered that the binder had guillotined the top edge skew whiff. Luckily, the binding was falling off anyway so it is a good candidate for the bookbinding equivalent of picture-straightening. At the same time, the great gobs of hothtinflexibleglue can be removed from the spine, so it will be a conservation mission of mercy too.
The book was published by my uncle Charles Rosner, founder of the Sylvan Press. It was among my father's books, so clearly Uncle Charles had not sold it, probably because of the binding defect, which must have taken a chunk out of his profit margin on an edition of just 1,000. The guilty party was the Alcuin Press.
It is a rather lovely book otherwise, printed on handmade paper with deckle edges. A superior production for the austerity Britain of 1948, though one suspects that handmade paper was easier to come by from pre-war stocks than new machine-made paper.
Snipping an eighth of an inch off will make the top margin perilously small, so a good deal of care will be needed.

A worry about rebinding books like this is that I might be destroying their value. Fortunately, there is a copy on Abe Books at the princely sum of £6.75 so I think I can swallow the loss. On the other hand, an American bookseller has a copy on sale at nearly fifty bucks - it is a complete mystery why antiquarian books are so much more valuable the other side of the pond.