Book Conservation Showcase 6/7/22

Описание: Join Associate Book Conservator Mary French for a look behind the scenes in the Book Conservation Laboratory at NEDCC! This webinar highlights the conservation treatments of three unique books: a Victorian hair album, a medieval manuscript, and a Kashmiri birch bark binding.

• Sarah Davenport’s Victorian hair album from the Davenport House Museum in Savannah, Georgia contains locks of human hair that Sarah had collected from her family and tied onto the pages of the text block using silk ribbons. This project proved to be an interesting conservation challenge and required drawing upon elements of textile and objects conservation as well as book and paper conservation to find a workable solution.

• The Life of St. Augustine, a 15th century medieval manuscript, features 116 beautiful hand-inked miniatures. However, due to the presence of copper-based pigments in these illustrations, the miniatures had extensive fracturing in the paper underneath and the manuscript was unable to be used without causing further damage. To create nearly invisible repairs to this exquisite manuscript, the conservator painstakingly pieced the fractured paper together using individual strands of Japanese kozo fibers secured with minute quantities of wheat starch paste.

• Kashmiri birch bark manuscripts are extraordinarily rare, and often are extremely fragile as birch bark is composed of many layers that tend to delaminate over time. Repairs took hundreds of hours and involved delicately weaving repair materials through the brittle bark layers.

Participants in this webinar will gain deeper insights into NEDCC’s approach to conservation through these interesting projects and get a close-up view of these extremely rare and unique books.