Dear Jackie!
Jackie wrote:
Most books on bookbinding describe re backing old leather books but it is easy to do it with cloth books as well.
I already had a feedling that anglophone literature on bookbinding is much more pragmatic on questions of every-day problems than German-speaking, meaning: it deals with them, while the later doesn't. Though there are many good German titles (and many of them on my bookshelf), they give you a very good introduction into bookbinding work from the scratch, but they do not cover repair work (or I might have missed THE one).
When looking for an English-speaking title, is there any one you would recommend in particular?
Jackie wrote:
You want to treat it like a half binding but instead of putting leather on the spine you'll use cloth. My instructions assume you have knowledge of half binding.
Indeed I do

, I got the point.
Jackie wrote:
The first thing to do is ... If you've saved the old spine piece you can carefully glue it on as well.
Very good description, Jackie, thanks a lot, I think I understand how you do it. The difficult part, I guess, is finding a piece of cloth that looks like the one that has been used with the original binding.
Quite often I have to deal with a full-paper covering, which I would deal with, deriving from your description, about the same way, just with paper instead of cloth - hell, even more difficult to find the right colour!
Jackie wrote:
How do you do your spines on cloth books? With a tube or card?
Hm, I'm not sure if I get that right - I usually do bindings the
classical German case way. What would be a "tube" then? I'm using craft paper tubes (we call it "Huelse", which means sth. like "jacket" or "sleeve") to stabilize the structure when casing in very heavy book blocks, but I usually have a piece of cardboard as a spine part of the cover, which is connected to the rear side of the block by the craft paper tube. My feeling is that you mean something different.
Again, thanks a lot for the explanation.
Uwe