What’s In The Lab: Duke And Sons Tobacco Album

By Erin Hammeke, Senior Conservator

The Duke and Sons tobacco album (see earlier post) had interesting structural features that presented challenges for a successful treatment. When the cash book was made into a scrapbook, the owner glued facing pages together to form stiff leaves. The two-ply pages held up well to all of the heavy attachments, but the structure made resewing the text difficult since I couldn’t get access to the center folio. The addition of all of the tobacco cards to the binding swelled the textblock to twice the size of the spine and blew out the sewing.

It’s not every day that we get an item like this in the lab and I wanted to do it justice with a repair that retained its features as a ledger book while allowing it to safely function as a scrapbook. You can see additional images of this treatment on Flickr.

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Scrapbook before treatment.

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Scrapbook before treatment.

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Scrapbook after treatment.
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Scrapbook after treatment.