#i've spent like an hour digging through websearches and i'm honestly not sure how to go about this

[writewhatyouwanttoread]

Hi guys! The bookbinding continues 😁 my mother's beloved copy of Jane Eyre was falling apart so I redid the casing for her.

The casing is leather since that's my best guess as to what the original was (unless it was a "pleather" sort of deal but the book went through a house fire so it's hard for me to tell). I don't have the equipment to do proper shoulders like the original had plus the pages were too fragile from their severe dehydration to be messing with the spine like that so the leather crimps a little awkwardly when it's opened but I'm imagining that some pressing around with my bone folder while opening it repeatedly will get it into shape. Leather's pretty good at remembering what you tell it.

Two of the signatures had come loose from the original spine stiffener so I restitched those back in place and pulled off all the loose pieces of the old spine stiffener. Then redid the spine cloth and stiffener to recase it.

I was going to stamp the leather for the title and then do foil in the embossing like on the original casing butthe leather ended up being too thin for me to be confident I'd be able to moderate my force enough to not punch through it (I tested it a bunch on some scraps and couldn't get any real consistency since the leather is only like .2-.4mm thick).

Now the fun part of this: I have no idea when this book was printed. There's not a single date in here except the date at the end of the preface and I'm quite certain the book isn't from 1847. My great- grandmother is the one who originally purchased this copy, however, I don't think she had it an insanely long time prior to passing it along to my grandmother who then passed it along to my mother. It's at least 50yrs old but could be more. Publisher was "Books, INC." in the USA, New York.

Anyone have any idea how to find more info on this particular print so I can get a more accurate age?

Update: dug around into the publisher and they weren't called "books inc" until 1946 but the fire it went through was around that time so it was likely at least printed between 1946-1947