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Found out my 1970s paperback was held together with horse hooves and I just stared at the wall for ten minutes
I was rebinding a beat up copy of a Louis L'Amour paperback from 1971 that I grabbed at a yard sale in Boise for a quarter. The spine was shot so I started pulling it apart and the old glue was this amber color that smelled weirdly sweet. A guy at my local bindery meetup mentioned that back then a lot of cheap publishers used hide glue made from animal parts, and I guess horse hooves were a common source. I went home and looked it up and apparently it was a whole thing until synthetics took over in the 80s. So here I am with a heat gun trying not to cook whatever is left of some poor horse from 50 years ago. Anyone else run into animal glue on old paperbacks, and is there a trick to getting it off without wrecking the signatures?
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