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Tried PVA glue vs homemade wheat paste on a 1930s cookbook and the cheap stuff won
Last month a neighbor dropped off her grandma's 1930s cookbook, the spine was cracked and about 12 pages were loose, so I figured it was a good chance to test two things I had been going back and forth on. I did half the loose pages with my usual PVA and half with wheat paste I cooked up on the stove in my little apartment kitchen in Boise, which smelled like breakfast the rest of the day. The PVA dried fast and held fine but it got stiff, and you could feel the pages fighting you when you opened it flat. The wheat paste took overnight to dry and I had to weigh the book down with a stack of cast iron skillets, but the pages lay down soft and the paper didn't pucker at all. About a month in, the PVA pages are still fine but the wheat paste ones move with the paper instead of against it, which matters a lot on old brittle pages. The funny part is the wheat paste cost me maybe 60 cents in flour and the PVA was a $9 bottle, so the cheap thing that made my kitchen a mess did the better job. Now I keep a jar in the fridge and my roommate keeps asking why there's glue next to the butter. Do you all use paste on old paper or just stick with PVA and call it good?
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jamie_price1mo ago
Used to swear by PVA for everything but this makes me wanna try the paste.
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