On the question of rebinding, sometimes there is no choice. The movers ripped the covers off of my original Munro, Coins of Japan, when I came home from Heidelberg in 1979. I had Alan Grace repair it. He did so by making a new spine, using the original boards, with the fabric from the original spine glued over his replacement spine. You have to look closely to detect the fix.

In another case, I bought an eight volume set of books in Tokyo that had been published 1925-26. The original bindings were 1/4 leather, with the leather decorated with symbols from Japanese ancient coins. One or two volumes were missing their spines completely, and a third was badly damaged. The cardboard slipcases were badly tattered, and some were missing. Grace again did the work, rebuilding the bindings for three books and manufacturing new slip cases for all eight. This time the work is a bit more obvious, because the replacement leather does not have the original decorations, but the whole set is a lot more attractive than it they had been left alone.