Good Deeds from Conservation

Summer can be a good time to reach out and do those special projects that have been on the back burner. One of those projects for us was the Art Oversized collection housed in a small room that struggles with environmental conditions. When there I would upload temperature and humidity information from the data logger and I noticed how the books were shelved.  During these summer terms we often have students working every day with longer shifts. Last summer we were fortunate to have a student working with us who was interested in conservation and wants to have a career in the field. So I thought this would be good practical experience in basic conservation outreach, getting a lot of bang out of a little muscle and sweat.

Oversized material poses a challenge when it comes to shelving. We are fortunate to have shelves that are designed for these types of large items. But how should they be organized and kept safe?

  

Large heavy books were located on top shelves which made them difficult and potentially dangerous to retrieve, and large thin portfolios were unable to lie flat.

  

Over time disfiguration can occur when a book is slouched or forced into an awkward position.

So to begin the process I approached the curator and proposed that over a course of a few days the student and I could come in and clean and tidy up in order to return the books to a more fitting posture and refresh the very small space.  The offer was well received as the staff there has no time to address such a project.

We brought in a small vacuum, a book truck, face masks, gloves, ear plugs, lab coats, a spray bottle and lots of paper towels. The books and shelves were quite dusty so we needed to do a good amount of cleaning. Working as a team was the best way to go. I had done this type of project when I was a student, along with a co-worker, and we ended up making a lot progress and having quite a good time. 

  

We started at the top of one end of the shelving and worked our way down and over. One person would do an initial vacuum over the books and shelf and then would hand the books to the other person who would put them on the book truck. The books would then be vacuumed more thoroughly moving the nozzle across the surface and around the edges in a forward motion. Our colleagues at the University of Washington created this nice video on cleaning if you are interested in more details on cleaning books: http://www.lib.washington.edu/preservation/preservation_services/clean

The other person would mist a bit of water over the bare shelf to minimize the dust from spreading, and wipe it dry removing the dirt and dust. Books were then returned to the shelf. We did have flexibility to slightly alter the location of the books, so when very large heavy books were on a top shelf we could relocate them to a lower shelf. We were also able to reunite sets of books that had gotten separated.

We were careful to take breaks and not spend too many hours in a single visit.

So over a course of a few days, working for just a few hours a day, we were able to transform the space into a more functional and pleasant area. The books are easier to find and danger from heavy books falling from a top shelf was removed. Our efforts were appreciated by both the staff and the books! Summer is slowly approaching so it’s not too early to start thinking about your good deed project! Maybe one for “Preservation Week”. http://www.ala.org/alcts/confevents/preswk   

Variety Pack

The conservation lab receives items needing treatment in a variety of ways. For general circulating collections we rely on a user based system. The circulation staff is trained to recognize damaged material when the books are returned from the patron. This affords us a wide range of material that comes to us for repair. In any given day we receive the damaged items that are getting checked out within the library system.


Above is the current lineup of material to be repaired. Among the items received for repair this week are the very common 20th and 21st century books needing basic spine repairs. But as you can see we also get older paperbacks and publisher cloth bindings.


Here we have a selection of popular novels along with paperbacks and a quarter leather binding, which we will look at closer later.


We also receive items that we have previously treated, but which have failed. Here is a pamphlet where the sewing has come undone.


Also, it is not unusual to see repairs that have been done by our patrons. Here electrical tape was used to hold the spine together. Little did they know that there is a conservation lab here to take care of these problems.


This book has a pretty spine.


Here is the front of the quarter leather binding.


This has an interesting board attachment. The book is sewn on tapes which are laced into the boards. It is a tight back and has clearly gotten a lot of use.


This is the title page.


This gentleman seems to be having a good time! The book is brittle so it will go through a review process to determine if we still want to keep it in its physical format or migrate the contents to a digital format. The decision is up to the bibliographer of the subject field.

So like any conservation lab receiving a variety of materials, it is always interesting to see what might be on the shelves next!

By Deborah Howe

Dangerous Trades

Dangerous Trades; the historical, social, and legal aspects of industrial occupations as affecting health, by a number of experts recently arrived in the lab for repair.

When I pulled it off the shelf I could see its spine was torn, a signature poked out from the foredge, suggesting a broken thread, and the textblock overall was pretty loose. As I opened the book to further assess the job at hand, I noticed a heading that included the word "bookbinder". Curiosity made me pause at the entry and think about it. In what way was bookbinding a dangerous trade?

Bookbinding, along with many trades, changed from primarily handwork to largely mechanized production over time. According to this book, the location of bookbinding workshops was often characterized by poor ventilation, and the "unwholesome conditions of labour".*

Bookbinding, the fabrication of a book, is somewhat distinct from the conservation work we practice here in the lab. Our task is primarily to repair the bindings that contain texts, repair the text itself (pages of paper or vellum, for example), or create enclosures to house the item. Whether we rebind or repair a volume, our knowledge of bookbinding technique informs our treatment choices. Our conservation bench work is largely considered on an individual basis, each book having idiosyncratic problems. This work tends not to involve complicated mechanized machinery or generate a great deal of dust. We have a fume hood as needed and good overall ventilation.

This volume, published in 1902 London, addresses trades in Great Britain. It covers a variety of subjects including child labor; mortality of occupations; specific materials used, including lead, arsenic, and mercury; as well as a number of sections pertaining to dust, where it appears bookbinding's chief occupational hazard lay.

In the book's tenth chapter, John Tatham, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P., of the General Register Office in London, writes about the hazards of dust in a variety of occupations. He covers among other trades, stone-quarriers, printers, filemakers, gunsmiths, chimney sweeps and soot merchants, hatters, and musicians. In all his findings he compares these occupations with that of the agriculturalist, which appears to be perhaps an overall healthier occupation than many of the trades he covers.

His brief section on bookbinders states that they, "die very rapidly from pulmonary consumption" and that "their mortality figure from that disease...[is] more than three times as high as that of agriculturalists." An explanation for this is also alluded to, as Tatham quotes a certain Dr. Ogle, who informs us that both bookbinders and printers work in "unhealthy conditions, in ill-ventilated rooms." Tatham goes on to discuss other illnesses for bookbinders, and even mentions suicide, occurring at elevated rates as compared to agriculturalists. He does mention improvements in the environmental conditions in many of the trades he addresses, between the time of Dr. Ogle’s study in 1881 and this essay. There was a further note that "since 1871 the mortality of bookbinders has steadily decreased." **

As I glanced over the majority of the occupations covered in this section (and on the above table) I understood why most of them might appear here, with the exception of musician. Some readers of this post may know or easily deduce a reason, but others may also wonder about musician as a "dust-producing" occupation. Upon further reading, it appears that musician shows up on this chart because the author combines cases of phthisis (referring to tubercular phthisis or tuberculosis) with other respiratory diseases (some of those the result of dust exposure). He again quotes Dr. Ogle who says of musicians, "many of whom are of intemperate habits, and exposed by their mode of life to cold and want." This suggests that lack of income may be one possible reason for the general ill-health of musicians, allowing for susceptibility to disease, including TB.^ Musician or bookbinder, these occupations, according to this chart, didn’t bode well for the health of their practitioners.

The incoming repair shelf always contains books covering an interesting variety of topics. Sometimes a quick dip into them expands the historical knowledge of our profession, and reminds us of how times have changed!


* The quoted passages are found between p. 149-151.

** For more information on the history of bookbinders' working conditions, see Bernard Middleton's A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique Appendix II. He discusses binderies of various times and general conditions of life for these workers.

^ For those interested in public health, including tuberculosis, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, explains a great deal about the disease and the work of Partners in Health, an organization founded by, among others, doctors Paul Farmer and Dartmouth's recent president Jim Yong Kim.

Written by Stephanie Wolff.

Conservation Students

Each year Preservation Services hires students to help further the work of our department. Student workers across campus provide a valuable service to the library and college in the work they do. Here in Preservation we hire both end processing students who prepare our general collections for the shelves, and conservation students who do treatments on both new materials and items we already own. In my years in the conservation lab we have had a great group of student workers - some remain with us for all their terms on campus and others for a shorter period of time. Some have gone off into the world after graduation with plans for specific careers in a variety of fields, while others have the idea of exploring possibilities for work or a job they couldn't yet imagine.

This spring another of our student workers, Sanja Miklin, headed off into the larger world of possibilities, after she graduated in June.

In the fall of 2011, Sanja joined us in the conservation lab and worked for two terms, plus some interim periods as well. In the previous years Sanja attended a number of Book Arts Program workshops, and she displayed an enthusiasm and aptitude for working with the tools and techniques of bookbinding. Eventually she applied for work and was hired to join our team.

During her short time here Sanja worked at a variety of tasks including rebacking books (repairing books by attaching new spines). However, she was instrumental (no pun intended) in our completion of a large music score rehousing project. This long-term project consisted mostly of pamphlets needing new sewing. Despite the repetitive nature of the repairs to this group of material, Sanja came to the work each day ready to do the work needed and sought to employ methods of batch processing to efficiently move the material out of the lab. As we wrapped up this long project, it seemed somehow fitting that both Sanja's graduation and the end of this long project happened in the same month.

Last week, Sanja stopped back into the lab to complete one final bookbinding project before leaving for home. She brought in her thesis to bind; something she had spoken of doing earlier in the year during those slow months of research and writing. She needed very little help from us, just the space and tools. Since she was binding one book, she made a second smaller blank book at the same time; batch processing in action! What a wonderful thing for her to have a bound copy of her thesis, the tangible accomplishment of her long hard work in book form. And how nice to see the skills we taught her put into practice for housing her own writing. As it is with all our students, we hope she will continue to find use and value for the skills she learned here in Preservation, whether for her own projects or in her work for others.

Written by Stephanie Wolff.

Introducing the String Binding

Along with processing serial titles for commercial binding, I’ve been working on some in-house treatments for magazines and small pamphlets. Usually, serial titles are sent out to a commercial binder to be bound in hard covers. Occasionally however an in-house treatment is more appropriate. For example, the string binding, adapted by conservator Deborah Howe, is ideal for undersized or short-run serials that are printed as single section issues.

This aspect in particular, whether stapled or pamphlet sewn, is what makes the string binding an easy and fast way to bind multiple issues into a single volume.

The string binding is made of a 20 point board that wraps around the issues, covering the front, spine, and back.

Each issue is secured into the cover with a thick linen thread wrapped tightly around the spine section of the cover and through the center of the magazine.

A separate piece of thread can be used for each issue or a continuous thread can be wrapped through each issue one at a time which saves time in tying knots.

Once all the issues are attached into the 20 point cover a protective piece of book cloth is glued over the spine and strings.

This adds support to the spine and front and back hinges. For volumes that are tall, heavy, or floppy it is best to reinforce the covers with a 40 point board on the inside of each cover.

Written by Elizabeth Rideout.

Conjuring Pages from Thin Air

One of the more unusual tasks Preservation Services handles for the library is replacing pages in books. It’s an unfortunate truth that pages from library books occasionally get damaged or disappear. Sometimes this is accidental…I’ve seen pages that were torn or gnawed on by a pet. Sometimes it is intentional, with pages torn or cut out for personal use or simply as acts of vandalism (please don't do this to library books!).

Fortunately, Preservation Services can miraculously make these missing and damaged pages reappear! Well, sort of. If a large number of pages are damaged, we sometimes just have to replace the entire book. However, if only a few pages are missing we have a pretty great solution to replace only the needed pages. Here's an example of the page replacement process in action:

Here's a book with the corner ripped off of a few pages. The damage isn't extensive, but it does mean some of the text from those pages is missing. Other than these pages, the book is in good condition, so there's no need replace the entire volume.

The first step in the replacement workflow is to order the same book through inter-library loan, using Borrow Direct or DartDoc. We make sure to get the exact same edition so the pages will be identical. Here are those same pages in the borrowed book, still intact:

Then we scan the pages we need from the borrowed book, do some cropping and color correction of the image, and print out the scanned pages onto acid-free, alkaline buffered paper. This ensures that the new pages won't cause acidic degradation when inserted into our book.

We cut the old, damaged pages out of our book (please note, we are trained professionals; please do not attempt this at home on library books or your own books of value!). Then we trim the newly printed pages and "tip them in" to our original book. Tipping in simply means gluing the pages into the book, using a very thin line of PVAc glue along the spine edge of the paper (see slightly blurry glue line example below).

Here's our book, with the new pages tipped in and ready to go. It's almost like it was never damaged!

Of course, we don’t replace missing pages without careful consideration of the context. Even if they were severely damaged, we wouldn’t cut pages out of a rare or valuable book to replace them with scanned facsimiles. In a case like that, we would much more likely leave the original pages and add printed scans of another copy to the book’s housing, so people could read the content on the facsimile while still seeing the original pages of the book. But for heavily used circulating materials, this is a pretty nifty solution to a common library problem!

Written by Helen Bailey.

Nothing Like Production

One of the advantages of treating general collections material is the similarity of treatments that can be performed en mass. This not only expedites and streamlines completion of tasks but enhances the conservator's work experience by offering a chance to practice speed and set time goals for large groups of material.

Here is my colleague Stephanie getting ready to place down inner tissue hinges after completing basic cloth rebacks. As you see she has pre-cut the tissue so now all she has to do is paste them in.

Here are the books having just received tissue inner hinges with the boards open for drying.

And here is a satisfied worker with a stack of finished repairs. Often Stephanie will pick books of one color such as red.

Before...

...and after.

It’s rewarding to see the finished set!

Written by Deborah Howe