I do make house calls on occasion and last month I went to the Central State Hospital to help get their archives in order. The collections needed a little help as the staff planned to re-house everything for better storage and since they don't have an archivist or a conservator on staff I was happy to help.
There were many panoramic photographs of graduating classes from the nursing school. Panoramic photographs have a tendency to roll themselves into very tight tubes if they are not stored properly. It is possible to slowly and gently humidify the photos, and when they've relaxed significantly, you can flatten them under blotters and weights.
Using a clear container for your humidity chamber is ideal so you can see what is going on and don't forget about what you have in the chamber. It is a long process, but then you can work on other things while the panoramas take their time.
These photos only needed a little bit of mending. I had brought tissue and methyl cellulose and as it turns out, laptops make nice handy weights, when it is time to dry a mend.
It was a long day, but it is fun to get out and see other collections, help other people and think on your feet!
This is a great example of what iron gall ink can do to paper. Can you see through the loss in the signature to the following page?
It is also a great example of the difference in the stability of the two inks, the iron gall ink which was the predominant writing ink for many, many centuries. And carbon black printing ink which was used in the days of movable type.
Iron gall ink is an acidic ink which worked really well when scribes were writing on parchment. Parchment is a relatively thick and tough writing surface and the acid would sink into the parchment and make a very permanent, dark mark Depending on how the ink was made (recipes abound) the ink could be more or less acidic. This didn't matter so much as long as the writing or drawing was on parchment, but then the world switched to paper as the predominant writing surface and the ink proved too aggressive.
Iron gall ink is of significant importance to the conservation community because of its prevalence in archival documents, manuscripts and works of art. The ink corrosion website is one site that documents history and research related to this topic.
Many different recipes were used over the years, and the stability of the ink varies according to the writing surface, storage conditions and handling. Most book and paper conservators will have to make treatment decisions based on the condition of the iron gall ink they're dealing with. In some instances, the ink is stable, and sometimes it has eaten through the paper. There's the permanence of the written word and then there's permanence of the ink.
I didn't post last week because I was at Rare Book School, taking the course "The American Book in the Industrial Era 1820-1940". What a week! We covered quite a time span, from the days of handmade paper, handmade type and hand bound books, right through the mechanization of the whole publishing process.
One of the really great things about Rare Book School is their teaching collection. It is one thing to read about the different types of paper, printing processes etc. but having examples on hand makes such a difference.
The plate on the right is a steel engraving, while the plate on the left is commonly called a wood engraving, even though it is actually a relief printing process. They're both made by hand. This particular wood engraving was used for an illustrated newspaper (see the sample just above it), while the steel engraving was probably for a book.
And then there's Lucille...Rare Book School has approximately 400 copies, that span over 30 years of publishing. For this class we looked at a little over 20 copies to get a sense of how the book changed in cover design but the publisher regularly re-used the same plates to print the text.
There were enough books to hand around so each student could make their own discovery about different editions or issues. Intense and fun!
This is a group of diplomas and a certificate that I recently treated. The certificate on top is paper while the others are parchment. The paper document is from 1939, while the parchment documents are 1921, 1918, 1916 and 1915. They are not too far apart in age, have been boxed together as part of the same collection and underwent the same treatment for similar issues, but what a difference in aging.
Things change, especially in libraries. Books that were acquired in 1963 for the general collections have matured into rare books. The gorgeous publisher's cloth bindings, the scarcity of these titles in their original cover and their significance as milestones in their subject area are all factors in the transition to special collections.
Which means it is time to get the barcode stickers off the front cover. It can be done, but not all stickers stick the same. You've got to be ready for things to go smoothly like the two dark green books that had the same type of sticker, (the plastic carrier lifted nicely as did the residual adhesive when I applied a vinyl eraser) or not so smoothly as with the other book that had a different type of sticker (the paper carrier lifted quite readily, but the residual adhesive did not agree with the vinyl eraser). You've got to be ready to adapt your original plan, have another type of eraser on hand, or maybe a scalpel with a curved blade, not the straight blade. And if that doesn't work then be ready to try the hot air pencil, (maybe rolling the adhesive off with a metal spatula or maybe with an eraser) all the while paying close attention to the cloth of the book to make sure you are just lifting the sticker and residual adhesive and not scuffing the cloth or decoration and making a bigger mess.
This is a group of diplomas and a certificate that I recently treated. The certificate on top is paper while the others are parchment. The paper document is from 1939, while the parchment documents are 1921, 1918, 1916 and 1915. They are not too far apart in age, have been boxed together as part of the same collection and underwent the same treatment for similar issues, but what a difference in aging.
Things change, especially in libraries. Books that were acquired in 1963 for the general collections have matured into rare books. The gorgeous publisher's cloth bindings, the scarcity of these titles in their original cover and their significance as milestones in their subject area are all factors in the transition to special collections.
