Blissetts has showed off its antique book repair service with a repair to an 1852 edition of Shakespeare, made to exactly match the original.

The edition, containing works including Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and all three parts of King Henry IV, had suffered badly over time, with its spine cracked, faded, and torn.

Blissetts, which holds a Royal Warrant as bookbinder, took on the project to replace the spine, precisely recreating its artwork.

Managing director Chris Blissett told Printweek that the firm ordered in new tooling specially to fit the patterns the company found on the spine.

“The lettering as recreated using brass type, then the other [tool] was a brass blocking tool, which we had to recreate from the artwork and then ordered in,” he said.

The new spine was built with specialist leather, blind-tooled, and foiled, before hidden tail bands were hand-sewn in too.

The specialist book repair team is one of three divisions at Blissetts, and makes up around an eighth of its turnover.

Its printing and binding operations are significantly larger, employing the rest of the company’s 22 staff, with the firm’s workhorse a Xerox iGen5 digital press.

Alongside a number of Horizon, Duplo and Multigraf machines in its commercial print finishing department, the Brentford firm’s binding department also lists Mekatronics, Buffalo and Bennett and Star among a long list of binding kit.

Blissett said: “We’re pretty unrivalled in that we print and bind in-house, and have the real age-old skills like this combined with the most modern printing technology and all our automated finishing kit in our bindery, so we have a real mix of old with new.”