Today featured fairly small, but important, prepping work on the donor back cover. Before any mending and reattaching of the cover wrap can be done I needed to clean away any old dried glue and paper that have become attached to the inside spine of the donor back cover. I was able to keep the spine attached to this donor cover, which will make attaching it later easier and more secure.

Using my X-Acto knife I carefully scraped away any crusty glue (and foreign paper), taking care to only scrape or lift away such build up and never slicing (as that could risk cutting the cover wrap I will be using). Scraping down the spine like this will help with attaching it the interior pages later, as it will allow the adhesive to bond directly with the wraps paper fibres and not just on some old glue (which might later crumble and compromise the repair). I will repeat this scraping process later on the interior of book as well (as there are some parts of the original wraps spine still attached).