Branko Najdanovik has the patience of a saint. He needs it, too, because the 82-year-old Serbia native has been trusted to restore 200-year-old Bibles in the past.
Down a long dirt driveway and inside of a former chicken coop, the Vineland man explains what it takes to restore priceless works — a skill he picked up some 65 years ago.
“As a bookbinder, you’ve got to have patience,” he said.
Even today, he seems at home in his work shop. A space heater warms one corner while the cold steel of machines vital to his work sit in another.
The craftsman makes his way through the shop and pulls out a 1906 edition of the “World and it’s Peoples.” The spine is in ruins and he will be mending it in a many hours-long process.
He has already gone “page by page” and fixed the tattered paper and made two “in-sheets.” These attach the back of the front cover and what is technically the first page of the book.
“Old books are like doctor-patient when they come,” Najdanovik said Wednesday.
Readers interested in seeing the fruits of this delicate labor will have the opportunity to do so tomorrow at a two-hour reception being hosted at Frank Burton & Sons, on West
Broad Street, in Bridgeton.
“It’s rare in Cumberland County, rare in South Jersey and probably rare in the Delaware Valley,” said Art Cox, local historian and friend of Najdanovik.
In 1946, a private bookbinder told Najdanovik about a coming consolidation of the private industry in the field. He left Germany in 1960 for Canada and then emigrated to the United States five years later.
He arrived in California because associates in Canada told him someone there needed a bookbinder.
But Najdanovik does more than bind books. He knows typesetting, stone lithography, leviathan type, printing and marbling.
“You don’t teach yourself this,” he said.
However, since the Vineland shop’s inception in 1978, Branko’s Bookbinding & Print Shop has always been a one-man show. Except for maybe those times during the 1980s when business was busy and he had his son doing work in the shop after school.
Najdanovik has done work for families, private collectors, historical societies and even himself, showing off an empty and intricate photo album.
The tools of his trade are large and small. He picked up a hulking 1881 model cutting machine for $90 in Pennsylvania. It cost him $200 to ship it here in pieces, which he handily assembled upon arrival.
There are larger machines that sort pages and smaller ones that cut holes in them. There’s also the Crock-Pot sitting on his shop table he needs for the glue when making covers.
On any project, he’ll start by inspecting every page then the cover for repairs. An insert to shore up a tattered and flapping spine, then reattaching that spine, often comes next.
His insheets, made from texturized fake leather, will hold the book and cover together.
There are also the jobs where he creates front and back covers for items that arrived at his shop with neither.
First, he lays a sheet of cloth large enough to encompass the publication and two pieces of cardboard that will constitute both covers. The cloth will be cut to size and cardboard bound with a cotton “cheesecloth” webbing to create a spine.
These are all hours-long projects but Najdanovick says he can stop and start at certain points.
“Now watch my hand,” he says with a batch of pages clamped horizontally in a vice. He’s demonstrating how to make the “perfect binding.”
He makes an “L” with his thumb and pointer finger, locks it into the corner of the pages and would then apply his special glue — imported from Germany at $120 a bucket.
He pushes the pages together left — pauses — and then right. It will ensure the glue seeps deep and forms a solid bond.
These days, Najdanovik is only doing personal projects and his son had come back to help wrap up some outstanding books to be bound.
Saturday’s two-hour reception will showcase his work. Readers may stop into Frank Burtons & Sons starting at 10 a.m. Saturday. Light refreshments will be served.
Najdanovik’s reception is part of an exhibit at the store, in place through January, of photographs from 1892 through the present of Bridgeton in the snow. The works of local photographers, including those who founded the Bridgeton Camera Club in 1890, will be on display.
Najdanovik will be taking orders for binding copies of the News’ special publication celebrating Bridgeton’s 325th birthday.
Copies are $120 and Najdanovik can also typeset the recipients name in gold lettering on the book. The copy he bound for Cox as a holiday gift will be on display as an example.
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