Upper West Side Book Conservator Preserves the Past, Volume by Volume

By Bonnie Eissner

Stepping into Jennifer Jestin’s book conservation workshop in her prewar Upper West Side apartment is like stepping back in time. Her craft had its heyday in the Middle Ages before the invention of the printing press.

A worktable fills most of the rectangular room. Atop it sit her clients’ treasured hardbound books in different states of repair. A wooden vise-like contraption, known as a finishing press, holds one book that’s waiting for its backing. Other books — ranging from antiques to a science textbook — in various states of rehabilitation lie in neat stacks under weights.

Since starting her business in the 1980s, Jestin has rescued hundreds of books. People from across the country — Texas, California, the Midwest — and even overseas reach out to her about saving all kinds of volumes — cookbooks, Bibles, dictionaries, children’s books. She once restored a medieval Haggadah.

At the far end of the worktable, past scissors, skinny metal spatulas, and slim curved pieces of bone, known as bone folders, used for repairing hinges and pages and other aspects of restoration, lie three books that have been rebound in fresh leather.

One is a small volume from the 18th century, and the other two are large volumes of handwritten fraternity records. One of the record books sits inside a handsome, salmon-colored clamshell box, an extra layer of protection for the coveted link to the past.

The covers of all three books were either missing or too damaged to save, Jestin explained one Saturday morning as, dressed in a red work apron, she opened her sunlit studio to a rare visitor. “If the covers had been salvageable, that’s what I would have liked to have done,” she said. That’s why she calls herself a book conservator, not a bookbinder.

Her services aren’t cheap, and she counsels people that if a book is still in print, it may not be worth the investment. “I’m more for books you can’t find anymore, or they come from grandmothers, grandfathers, and you’re not going to see them again,” she said. “Sometimes it feels as though it’s industrial in a way that’s completely out of step with now.”

For a while, she worried that the ubiquity of computers and e-books would make her craft obsolete. But the opposite has happened.

“I’m not sure whether it’s that people suddenly say, ‘Oh no, actually we’d like to save what we have,’ or that they are attached to something organic,” she said. “I mean, books are organic.”

She continued, “What I love about them is that they’re like us. They age like us. They get brown spots, and they get brittle, and eventually they turn to dust. And that’s just like us. So they are our life companions, and they travel with us. And I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that people want to save them.”

Her own fondness for books drew her to her craft.

She was visiting a used bookstore on the Upper West Side in the early 1980s, when the book dealer asked her if she knew anyone who restored books. “And I thought,” she said, “that’s an interesting idea.”

She found a book conservator at Columbia University, Laura Young, with whom she studied for about three years. Jestin took classes at Columbia’s Rare Book School, which is now at the University of Virginia, and worked as an intern conservator at the Frick Collection for several years before striking out on her own.

As Manhattan has become more expensive, many of the book conservators she knows have moved out of the city. But she has managed to sustain herself on the Upper West Side. “I certainly have grown to love the neighborhood,” she said. “It’s a great place to live.”  

Despite her modest marketing, clients continue to find her, including institutional ones. She spent about 10 years restoring the rare books of Rockefeller University.

Her services span from re-securing covers to repairing covers and pages, or signatures, resewing books, and, in rare cases, creating new bindings. Some projects take months to complete, while others are finished in days.

The work is painstaking and involves patience. “You have to like to do things on an intricate level,” Jestin said. “So the pacing of it is a little contrary to life in a big city.”

Although Jestin spends her days with objects, her business has taught her about people.

“One nice thing I have discovered from this craft is how trusting people are and how good they are,” she said. After an exchange over email about restoring a precious book, the person will mail it to her and even pay her before she returns the revived volume.

“I love that people will just send me things and trust me, and I trust them,” she said. “It always makes me think that we have such good natures at heart, in spite of what you hear, in spite of all the horrible things we’re always reading about.”

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