The Vespiary Book Binding & Book Conservation

Nothing enrages me more than sophisticated biblioklepts who destroy public property for their own gain. The infamous Stephen Blumberg first springs to mind, with his elaborate and large-scale book filching career that is detailed in Nicholas Basbanes’ book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (there’s also a good synopsis here). I am happy to say that one more saga of thievery has come to an end in Great Falls, Montana. James Lyman Brubaker has pleaded guilty to making off with over 800 books from 100 libraries around the American West, waiting to be broken into maps and plates and sold on eBay. He was found with a “library-removal kit” of magnets, razors, chemicals, and sealable envelopes (to prevent his search without a warrant) used to smuggle items out of institutions. A librarian for the Wilson Library at Western Washington University was instrumental in detecting and tracking down Mr. montanasilver. It looks like he hit a number of libraries here in Montana, but not, luckily, in Missoula, otherwise I’m sure I’d be doing a number of map tip-ins… I don’t even want to talk about the dollar amount of destruction he inflicted on the various items.

More good news is in the establishment of a Missing and Stolen Maps database, sponsored by the International Antiquarian Mapsellers Association. If you find an item in your collection that is missing a map, you can register and post the item, alerting dealers to its potential presence in the market.

While Blumberg awaits sentencing (right now either 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and/or 3 years supervised release), I look around at the large cutting and squeezing equipment available to me in my work space and think maybe they should release him into my care for a week or two…

Our local weekly just published a nice article on local luthier, George Weisel. I’ve been scouring the CoOL and AIC databases for Montanan conservators of various kinds and have come up short, so it was nice to see that Missoula is home to not just one but three talented strnged instrument restorers, John Joyner and Peter Barberio being the other two. John is one of the co-founders of the Missoula Folklore Society and Peter has a little shop right on our main drag, Higgins Ave.(be sure to click the tab for services on his main page - it’ll take you to some neat restoration photos).

One other conservator I did find in the area is wooden artifact specialist, John Kjelland. He’s been in the business for over 28 years and the objects in his treatment gallery are impressive. I can only imagine what his workshop must look like! The Missoulian ran an article about him that’s worth a read.

No website for this one, but another local (ish) reference is to Teresa A. Knutson of Rocky Mountain Textile Conservation. All my references say she works out of Kalispell, but beyond that, not so sure. She can be reached at 406-756-1388, or tknutson@aboutmontana.net.

I was hoping to include one more, Japanese doll expert, Alan Pate, but sadly it seems he has forsaken the Rockies in favor of the Southwest.

The flooding in the Midwest and its effect on the libraries there have had general destruction on my mind. Not too long ago, I read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (recommend!) and there was a passage there that I copied down to put my role in the conservation world into perspective. I’m sharing it with you now, not to discourage you, or make you think that conserving books is a futile exercise, but to convey a Zen sense of satisfaction in work. It’ll all vanish one day, but we do our best, and take pride in our efforts. (photo above is from climactic library fire scene in “The Name of the Rose.”)

The Arabian glue used in the bindings contains fish, honey and bone, and the pages are sized and polished with a finish made from egg while and starch. Greedy shameless mice will nibble these pages away; termites, worms and a thousand varieties of insect will gnaw our manuscripts out of existence. Bindings will fall apart and pages will drop out. Women lighting their stoves, thieves, indifferent servants and children will thoughtlessly tear out the pages and pictures. Child princes will scrawl over the illustrations with toy pens. They’ll blacken people’s eyes, wipe their runny noses on the pages, doodle in the margins with black ink. And religious censors will blacken out whatever is left. They’ll tear and cut up our paintings, perhaps use them to make other pictures or for games and such entertainment. While mothers destroy the illustrations they consider obscene, fathers and older brothers will jack off onto the pictures of women and the pages will stick together, not only because of this, but also due to being smeared with mud, water, bad glue, spit and all manner of filth and food. Stains of mold and dirt will blossom like flowers where pages have stuck together. Rain, leaky roofs, floods and dirt will ruin our books. Of course, together with the tattered, faded and unreadable pages, which water, humidity, bugs and neglect will have reduced to pulp, the one last volume to emerge intact, from the bottom of a bone-dry chest will also one day disappear, swallowed up in the flames of a merciless fire. The sublime gardens and soaring black kites that you still depict with your old enthusiasm, your astounding scenes of death and war, your graceful hunting sultans, and with the same finesse, your startled fleeing gazelles, your dying shahs, your prisoners of war, your infidel galleons and your rival cities, your shiny dark nights that glimmer as if night itself had flowed from your pen, your stars, your ghostlike cypresses, your red-tinted pictures of love and death, your and all the rest, all of it will vanish…

Reading this book instantly made me think of the heroic efforts of Baghdad’s national library director, Saad Eskander. He has remained at the library through its destruction and looting in order to provide a safe haven for learning and healing:

I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together.

He kept an online diary for a while, but chose to end it because of its litany of sorrows.

Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood. The view was surreal. Some of the papers were burning in the sky. Many burning pieces of papers fell on the [library] building.

The British Museum is helping in the effort to recover as much of the looted collection as possible.

I don’t even remember what I was looking for when I found this, but I squealed when I saw it:

The Bindery in a Box!

Made by Dea Sasso of Massachusetts, this set of binding equipment collapses into a nice portable carrying case. I’ve poked around the web, and people who have used it love it and say it’s a great piece of craftsmanship. Right now a little beyond my budget, but definitely something to add to the Christmas list! If you have any experience with this set (or with Ms Sasso and her bookbinding classes), post in the comments.

Reminded me of another blog post I saw a while back regarding portable artist’s kits. I gotta get busy and make one of these…

I just saw this post that a friend of mine shared in my feed reader, and had to pass it along. From the ever-funny, FAIL Blog

:

Click the image to see the original post. The text reads:

book rental service? was just thinking. my sister does -alot- of reading, and spends like $1000 a year on just books alone. most of them she reads once then never looks at again. is there any kind of like…video rental store but for books? would make things alot cheaper, plus once one person had read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc

Get that poster to the patent office.

One of the loveliest summers I ever spent was in the employ of the Oregon State Department of Agriculture. I set and check both gypsy moth and Japanese beetle traps. I worked out of my own home, set my own hours, drove a hilarious beater government K car, drove around the fringes of Portland, and listened to gobs of public radio. One of my favorite shows was by folk singer and hobo Wobbly, Utah Phillips.

His show, Loafer’s Glory, introduced me to all kinds of folk and hobo music, and proved to me that men could be just as passionate about women’s rights (even more so, perhaps!) as women. It was so idyllic to listen to his expert storytelling voice and pass over railroad crossings in the forested northwest hills.

Sadly, Utah has recently passed away after a struggle with congestive heart failure. He had a huge impact on the folk music scene, and was a rabid spokesperson for unions, rail culture, and the homeless. Recently, Democracy Now broadcast an interview with Utah, who it turns out was the archivist for the state of Utah back in the 60s. I’m including part of the transcript of his interview here, but you can listen to the rest of the interview by following this link.

UTAH PHILLIPS: Archival science is in a serious—a serious crisis, and that’s because of electronic media, electronic storage and retrieval. A lot of hotshot, fancy, high-tech salesmen have gone to a lot of archives and archivists and sold them some bogus hardware and software. How many books has the Library of Congress lost? Millions of books, because the images have vanished, whatever the storage system is, electronic storage system is. It’s degraded to the point where the stuff is no longer usable.

In the Utah state archives, the best and most durable records are on paper, from the 1800s, the old Mormon Governor Brigham Young’s papers. Why? Because there was potassium in the water they used to make the paper in their own mill, and that’s a natural paper preservative, you know. And that’s true, I think, of any archive in the country. You talk to the archivists; they’ll say the most durable resource they have is still on paper.

Well, what’s the shelf life of a CD? Is it about ten years, ten, twelve years? Congress won’t accept tape for archival purposes, because after about ten, fifteen years, it bleeds through, you see? That it—paper. You know, LPs, I have, what, over 150 John McCormack 78s from the early 1900s—my favorite singer, John McCormack—and I can play those and listen to those. Same with my LPs. The whole information is becoming more and more temporary. And you’re absolutely right. You know, it is terribly threatening to every archive to be bullied by technocrats into going that route.

UTAH PHILLIPS: I was an archivist, yeah. I handled 75,000 cubic feet of public records. For an information junkie, that’s heaven. Yeah, I loved studying archival science, and I still have a library in my home that I curate, my own little research library of popular antiquities. And that’s where my mind lives when I’m at home.

Bonus link: Wobbly lingo

Sometimes people try to help out when books begin to fall apart. One of my favorites is the hammer and nail technique. Usually someone will either nail all the way through a book and bend the nail on the other side, OR if the nails don’t go through, they’ll add more nails on the backside of the book. Check out our latest find:

So folks, unless you’re making some kind of creative artist’s book, let’s stay away from the nails.

Who isn’t talking about digitization and the projected demise of the word on paper? My reading load and podcast schedule has been full of it lately, with some surprising arguments for paper as technology. On the Media recently had a whole program dedicated to the book, and one of the featured speakers was William Powers, media critic for the National Journal. He posits that paper itself is a part of the substance of what is being transmitted:

What I basically argue in my essay is that paper isn’t just a container for content. It actually becomes part of the content. It affects the content because of the way it interacts with the brain. It’s a technology, although we don’t usually think of it as a technology.

The essay he refers to above is called “Hamlet’s Blackberry,” and while on the longer side, is a thoughful exploration of the headbutting of these old and new technologies.

And I realize that I might be opening a can of worms that was already put to rest with my current reading, Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, but I’m a bit behind the curve regarding the battles and controversies in the conservation world. Newspapers don’t crumble into dust due to their own acidic nature? But…but…. I was always taught that they were! Something curious that I hadn’t considered was Baker’s assertion that much of paper’s degredation occurs early in its life and then basically levels out.

But, the land-war over shelf-space issue is really at the heart of the issue, as Richard Cox from University of Pittsburgh writes. Most bibliophiles have at least some hoarding tendencies, and so Baker’s arguement is seductive: “let’s save everything!” Maybe that will occur once our society turns its funding to the library-industrial complex (still working on that), but until then, hard selection choices will continue to be made.

We see all kinds of crazy “treatments” that have previously been sanctioned as “good preservation.” While Baker may have simplified the complexities of maintaining certain types of collections, I think his observations lead us back to the Middle Path, with its “can’t we all just get along?” mantra.

Digitization, preservation, conservation, paper, digital media… why do these conversations tend toward mutually exclusive tones? Cooperation, imagination and initiative!

After more poking around, it looks like Baker’s American Newspaper Repository collection has found permanent housing at Duke University.

This lovely gem of a poster, recently unearthed by Mansfield’s Special Collections librarian Jordan Goffin, is now proudly displayed on the wall of our conservation department. I’m all for education through humor, and I squealed when this was given to me. It’s of an early 80’s vintage, as far as I can tell, produced by the Illinois Cooperative Conservation Program. I’ve found some mention of them on the conservation dist-list, but they seem to be defunct now. Anybody know more about this program? Recognize any of your old pals? Looks like the photographer, Daniel V. Overturf, is a fairly famous photographer and photography professor at Southern Illinois University.