I glued up a book with gorilla glue as a joke and now I cant get it apart

Paul Wells · 2026-09-15T12:00:05.227275+00:00

So last Friday I was finishing a rebind on a wrecked copy of a 1970s field guide and I was out of PVA. It was 11pm and I had a buddy over who kept saying you could glue anything with the foaming poly stuff. So we put a thin bead in the spine and clamped it. Next morning the thing had foam pushing out of both boards like a marshmallow and the text block was locked in there solid as a brick. I tried a heat gun, I tried a thin spatula, I even slid dental floss down the joint. Nothing. The glue had expanded into the hinge and foamed up through the endpapers so it looks like the book has a beard. Lesson learned, that stuff has no place anywhere near a spine and I should have just waited a day for the PVA. I wound up cutting the boards off and saving the text block, but the case is toast. Has anyone here ever recovered a foamed glue joint without wrecking the pages, or am I just buying a new copy of the book and calling it a night?

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I glued up a book with gorilla glue as a joke and now I cant get it apart | Bookbinders - Chatter Central