Max Marbles is probably the only guy in Salem who can judge a book by its cover. He can tell you at 20 feet how old a book is, within ten years. He can guess – with alarming accuracy – what kind of a book it may be. And he can pass the final judgment on that book: whether or not it is worth saving.

“Nothing looks classier than a fresh-cut book that has earned its wings as a venerable object of time,” Marbles said.

Marbles, 59, one of the nation’s premier bookbinders, also understands that he may well be one of the only people working in the book trade who stands to profit as books make the transition to digital form and physical books become not mass-marketed products, but sacred objects in personal libraries.

Marbles sits at a work station in his studio in a corner of the Mission Mill Museum in Salem. Today, the bookbinder is completing some simple repairs to the spine of a pregnancy journal from the late 1950s. A few hinges are broken, a few pages are loose, and a corner of the book had come undone, but for the most part the book is still a perfect personal artifact – the kind of volume that is priceless to its owner.

“One time someone asked me not to read the contents of a book I was working on,” Marbles says, adding a pause for effect. “It took me two hours to read that book!”

All joking aside, his job does bring him face-to-face with documents far more personal than anything found in a library. With every book, he becomes privy to stories that might otherwise be lost to the passage of time.

In turn, he adds an estimated 125 years to the life of any book he repairs. In a society that is quickly morphing from a throwaway society to repairing one, that makes him something of a miracle worker.

He’s spent a lifetime learning how to work those miracles.

In his late 20s, Marbles, a self-proclaimed hippie, was working in a factory and hating his life. He quit after six months, telling his boss he was “going to Mexico to drink beer.” After four months, he was destitute and back in Oregon.

He soon found himself living in a self-made teepee on the McKenzie River, eking out a living creating journals that he sold at the Portland Saturday Market.

Marbles had a natural talent for making paper, and especially, for marbling – a centuries-old process that is often kept secret by the artists who practice it. But he was, and still is, a searcher. So he went to England in the early 1980s to study under Daphne Beaumont-Wright, a student of William Matthews, one of the legendary bookbinders of the world.

He eventually opened shop at the Mission Mill Museum in 1988, in a place, he says, where “people have as much veneration for the past as [he does].”

All of the books Marbles repairs hold personal value to their owners, but some trends connect them. The books he sees most often are family bibles, cookbooks smeared with “the food of three cooks’ lifetimes,” and children’s books – a genre that is showing up again and again in the workshop.

“Older people want the stories their parents read to them when they were children,” Marbles says, pulling out one such volume, Puggery Wee and the Story of the Three Elephants, first published in 1902.

Despite his penchant for the past, Marbles is no Luddite. He builds websites for fun, dabbles in digital photography, fosters an interest in community radio and even maintains a Twitter presence.

But he can’t help but feel satisfied, and perhaps even a little smug, when he looks back over a lifetime in which he has played the game his way and won out in the end.

“These days, my craft does very well for me,” Marbles says, gingerly thumbing through a book. “All those other failed hippies have desk jobs.”

To save a book, Marbles disassembles it, depending on what kind of shape it is in. He mends each of its pages, gathers those pages into sections, and sews them back together. Then he rebuilds the spine and mends the cover. The entire process occurs in strict fidelity to the original book’s look and purpose.

Bookbinding happens on what Marbles calls “book time” – each project dictates his own schedule, with a fee generated according to Marbles’ own time-honored experience in the trade.

“You came in wearing Clarks – I’d say that’s a $200 project,” Marbles jokes. “But no, really, I’ve gotten really good at charging the right amount.”

Once, a woman came in, tears streaming down her face. There had been a quick marriage in the family, and then, a quick divorce. The now ex-wife had already added her entire family to the tree in her ex-husband’s century-old family Bible.

“You can’t make a book look new again – it’s dishonest to fool people,” Marbles says. “But this was a special case.”

So he used some bleach and sanding paper and removed the nulled nuptials from the page.

For another project, Marbles worked on a Bible an officer had carried while being blown out of the water by Japanese bombers – twice. It was covered in oil, which the bookbinder delicately washed off.

“It’s a real privilege to work on something that is so precious to families,” Marbles said. “These are the books that people carry through their lives.”