MARK WAITE / PVTJohn Salacan repairs the leather cover of a 200-year-old book. Advertisement

Books are almost getting to be a thing of the past in the age of the computer.

If someone did have a business restoring books, it would seem to be more appropriate in a university town or a big city than on the west end of Wilson Road in Pahrump.

Yet at an addition to his garage, New Jersey transplant John Salacan and his wife, Ukranian immigrant Asya Ivanova, meticulously restore books, which are mostly family heirlooms.

A native of Weehawken, N.J., who attended Seton Hall University, Salacan said he studied book restoration at the Center for Book Art in New York City which teaches students how to restore books, bind them, print books on old-fashioned letter presses and make books as works of art.

Salacan said he attended the school at the suggestion of a woman who worked in the book restoration department at the world-renowned Morgan Library.

Salacan and Ivanova moved to Pahrump three years ago after Salacan said business dried up in the wake of the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

"There's not a lot of people doing it and some of the older families are dying out. You can find them all over the United States, but I don't know if there's 100 of them," Salacan said.

The fees for book-binding and restoration work usually run from $50 to $150. A prospective customer called while an interview was under way.

"It's a matter of whether it's worth it to you or not -- if it's something that has emotional value or family value or some monetary value," Salacan told the caller. Otherwise, he suggested, "Go on line and see what you can buy."

Most of the books he receives for restoration are Bibles, followed by family cookbooks, then children's books and collector's books.

"These things all have a family identity, so to speak, and so it's an heirloom to them and they want to preserve it for their future generations. It always comes down to that," Salacan said.

The requests included a gigantic old Bible held together with metal clasps. There was another request to restore a scrapbook from a doctor, highlighting his child's tennis game.

Salacan showed an example of a 200-year-old book he restored, putting in a brand new linen spine he predicted will last forever.

Another project required restoring a leather-covered book damaged in a fire. He had to restore the gold work.

"I got everything from big, huge Bibles to little tiny ones, just about anything and sometimes maps. I've had to restore maps with some paper restoration," Salacan said.

One of his oddest projects was restoring an 1890 Russian version of "The Brothers Grimm" fairy tales with etchings. Salacan said every page had to be restored and glued together into signatures.

Another project included framing a holy book from Southeast Asia that consisted of scrolls about 10 feet long. Salacan had to make a bamboo frame and sandwich the scrolls into it.

Salacan markets his business on the Internet and other places. He said a lot of book-binders and restoration workers moved out of the cities where living is more expensive. Many of his customers come from Las Vegas, he said.

"I get them from there and kind of all over the West. I also still have all my regular customers back east, in this bookstore I used to work in, The Complete Traveller on 35th and Madison Avenue, a fabulous bookstore. They still send me customers," Salacan said.

While many people, particularly the younger generation, look up information through google searches on the Internet, Salacan said that limits the search for knowledge.

"When you go online, you go to Google or anything, it's all straight line. You have to know what you're looking up. You can't have serendipity for browsing, not in the same way as you can when you flip open a book, you get caught on other things, flipping the pages. You learn other things," Salacan said.

But he added, "Unfortunately, I think books, in a sense, are pretty much on their way out."

Salacan gave two talks for the Friends of the Library on the history of books. He said books came into existence about 5,000 years ago in Babylonia and Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq.

"They were tablets, clay tablets. They weren't just little things, sometimes you'd have a whole book and they'd put all the tablets in a basket," Salacan.

The Egyptians began using papyrus to write about things like the king's conquests, he said.

"They started using cloth on books in about 1823. Before that they used leather and paper. Sometime around then they were doing paper also, like paperbacks," Salacan said.

His oldest restored book dated to 1590, one of the books published in the first 100 years of printing called incunabula.

Ivanova was busy sewing up a book completely fallen apart while Salacan explained his trade.

"It's much, much more complicated than people think," Ivanova said.

"It's very satisfying because you take something that could be lost forever and turn it into something that could last 200 years," she said.