The Head of Acquisitions brought these over after they discovered the books were damaged during shipping. According to her, these would be very difficult to replace so she wanted us to save them if we could. As you can see, these got pretty squished, and the black smudge indicates maybe they got caught in some mechanical thing. They were very bent and had a lot of little page tears.
I put them in the press for a very long time, giving the pages the opportunity to flatten out and stay that way. Then, as any good manager will do, I delegated the treatment to Mary, my talented Senior Conservation Technician.
It took a lot of work and patience, but she fixed all the tears in the text blocks. She also saved the decorative covers and overlaid them onto new boards. If you look closely you can tell something happened to them, but they look so much better than they did when they came in.
