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Comment by MaxLeiter | Hacker News Reader

I once (very very slightly) tore a page of one of the original copies. I’ve never seen a librarian be so speechless. The good news is my class was just learning about restoring paper and you can’t tell it ever happened. The few seconds after it happened were some of the scariest in my life though.

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I’ve never seen a librarian be so speechless.

It comes with the job.

> I’ve never seen a librarian be so speechless.

Before pointing and screaming ala Donald Sutherland in Bodysnatchers '78, I assume?

HN has some of the best little anecdotes.

How did you fix it?

It's not hard to repair these sorts of things with a little glue.

There's this cool product called invisible tape, colloquially "scotch tape" but really that's a brand name. Get it all lined up just right and nobody will know the difference!

That’s… almost literally the worst tape product you could use (outside of obviously awful ideas like Duct Tape).

In fact repairing use of scotch tape has its own whole section in most treatises on document restoration

I am legitimately surprised that many people did not realize I was making a joke. I mean, priceless artifact, repaired with literally the thing people use as a metaphor for a "flimsy fix"

Just don’t. It’s a sure way to ruin any book.

I've seen this done to badly deteriorated paper with japanese tissue tape, eg https://www.preservationequipment.com/Catalogue/Conservation... and it did a pretty incredible job. There's a video on the left of that page that shows the process, worth a look.

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