How to DIY the aged book centerpieces on the cheap

PJBHL5 · August 2012

If you're against aging books purposefully, look away! Go find a website with pictures of cute kitties and puppies. You won't want to read this. LOL

So we bought a few more books at an antique shop the other day. We love the look of the very old books with the tattered pages, discolored cover, ripped binding, etc... but I refuse to pay $20 a book (what many are priced as at antique shops) when we need 3-4 per table, for 10-11 tables ($880 on books, before you even consider flowers, vases, table numbers, etc? No thanks).

So we started buying books based on their price ($1 works for me!), size (based on the stack they will belong to), and color (being sure they fit with the style we want) and started caring less about hew old they looked. But then it just looked like I'd raided my bookshelf for random stuff and threw it on a table. So I started aging the books on my own.

Todays project:
Here ist he before. It's a small-ish like-new condition $1 book about mountain climbing in england. Love the color but it's a little too vibrant for our style.
http://distilleryimage8.s3.amazonaws.com/51037928e55f11e19c6622000a1e89ba_7.jpg

Here's the after:
http://distilleryimage5.s3.amazonaws.com/6d79f9cae57211e1b0f41231381418eb_7.jpg

What I did was brewed up a pot of coffee (i'm sure it tasted like crap b/c I don't drink coffee nor do I know how to use our machine, so i'm pretty sure i only successfully heated up brown water, but whatever, it worked), then used a paint brush to brush it onto the cover. I then took a finger tip full of wet coffee grounds and rubbed them into the cover. It didn't stain it much b/c the cover was in such great shape, so I set it outside to dry. You could probably skip this part for now if you wanted to, but you could see if it would work for your book.

Then I poured the coffee into a pyrex dish and opened the book completely. I bent the binding as much as I could to break down the fibers, then laid the pages into the coffee, letting the soak. You have o spread open the pages throughout otherwise it won't get wet. The pages (if they are in great condition) are well sealed against moisture. After they were good and soaked, i held it over the sink and using a serrated knife I distressed the egdes of the pages. I held the knifes blade perpendicular to the direction of the pages and scraped the edes. This left tiny ruts through the edges of the pages, leaving them looking older and tattered. I then brushed more coffee onto them and scrubbed the edges with coffee grounds.

At about this point, my book cover fell completely off. Whoops.
So I laid the pages out to dry and took to aging the cover. I used medium grit sand paper to weather the entire cover lightly, and the edges more significantly (also along the binding). Once that was done, I set it outside to dry out too.

Once everything was dry, I glued the binding back to the pages and we were all set