Today We Learned: Always read the label before opening a box from the History of Medicine collection. Moving aside the tissue paper packing, we were greeted by this sculpture a little too early this morning. We were not prepared for such a creepy surprise! Made by medical illustrator and sculptor Charlotte Holt in 1961, this hand-painted plaster relief sculpture depicts treatment of fetal skull and clavicle fractures. Holt’s attention to detail is excellent… which makes it all the more disturbing.
We regularly see book publishers’ attempts to set their products apart from the rest of the market here in the conservation lab – usually because the novel materials or structures they have chosen don’t hold up so well under normal use. We often find ourselves asking, “What will these publishers try next?” This week the answer to that question came in the form of robots.
This very large and weighty volume depicts over 100 space-themed toys held by the Vitra Design Museum. Much like our copies of Audubon’s Birds of America, the book is so large because the toys and their original packaging have been photographed and printed at a scale of 1:1. And I will say the images are wonderful.
The unique feature of this book, however, is a USB memory stick that has been integrated into the headcap. The stick contains a film by Luka Dogan, showing a selection of the robots in action.
We often see volumes with additional media included, usually as a CD or DVD inside a paper or plastic pocket that has been adhered inside one of the boards. Other types of media are too thick to be handled in the same way, so the location of this USB and it’s “holster” are interesting and unobtrusive. It includes some nice design elements, like a small magnet to hold the stick securely in place.
The problem comes when you actually try to get the stick out. Grasping the stick and pulling it free puts a lot of stress on the headcap and joints, some of the weakest areas of the binding. As you can see, the front joint has already started to tear. Additionally, the glue holding the metal USB holster in place has failed and it now easily slides out from the spine piece.
Including additional media with a publication can provide a lot of additional value to the reader. It also means loose components can easily become lost. As technology ages, it can be a challenge for readers to actually use the media. For example, the laptop I’m using to write this post doesn’t have a disk drive of any kind, so reading a CD or DVD would be a problem. I guess it’s only a matter of time before a USB Type-A port becomes scarce as well. The added media might become less accessible, but at least you don’t need a machine to read the book!
Margarita Philosophica by Gregorius Ileisch (1504), depicting a hornbook
Long used as a primer in children’s education, the hornbook originated in England in the 15th century. The books commonly take the form of a wooden paddle inscribed with the alphabet or a piece of text, which is protected with a transparent sheet of horn. The materials of construction can vary, with the paddle made of wood, bone, leather, or stone. The text can be printed or in manuscript, on parchment or on paper. The protective transparent sheet might also be made from mica. The hornbook is referenced in literature as early as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and is a format that was often used in both English and the American education until the late 18th century.
Woodcut vignette from the title page of Hornbyes Hornbook by William Hornby (1622)
We learned all this and more when a special edition of Andrew Tuer’s History of the Horn-Book came through the lab recently for boxing. The publisher’s use of the hornbook’s iconic shape in the decoration on the front cover and the spine label is quite appropriate.
But while this parchment case binding looks fairly ordinary, it contains quite a surprise. The front section of the book has been glued into a solid block, which is quite heavy.
The blocked section features a textile flap along the tail edge of the front flyleaf.
Opening the flaps reveals a hidden compartment with three facsimile hornbooks!
Don’t you wish every history book you picked up included little artifacts hidden inside a secret compartment? Thanks to Rachel Penniman for snapping some photos of this amazing object before it returned to the stacks in its new enclosure.
Erin Hammeke describes a wooden board repair to Mary Yordy and Rachel Penniman.
Caring for library collections often requires experimentation and ingenuity. In supporting the needs of library programs or researcher requests, we are regularly confronted with unusual objects or condition issues that have no obvious treatment solution. When you happen upon a novel or particularly effective approach to these complex treatments, it’s always nice to share what you have learned with your colleagues!
This week, the Conservation Services staff were treated to some tips in treating very large books and broken wooden boards by senior conservator Erin Hammeke. Hint: Both involve the liberal and creative application of clamps.
Occasionally an item will arrive in the lab that is so intriguing that I just have to know the story behind it. These five miniature photograph albums titled “LIFE WITH CIPE” caught my eye. The photographs were tiny but beautiful and I was curious about the meaning of the title. What is CIPE?
The photographs mostly look like candid vacation snapshots but there are also some still life and city scenes.
They are all so small and regular in size and proportion that they must have been printed from negatives as a contact sheet. One print even shows the holes from the film.
The images show a great sense of design and there is an eye to composition significantly better than your average family snapshots. They really felt more like an artist’s portfolio than a typical vacation album.
So it was no surprise when I heard back from archivist Rick Collier and Hartman Center Director Jackie Reid Wachholz that these are photographs from the personal collection of graphic design power couple Cipe Pineles and William Golden.
While the Creative Director at CBS in the 1950’s William Golden designed the eye logo still used by the broadcaster today.
Cipe Pineles (pronounced Cee-Pee) was the first female art director of a major magazine and the first female member of the Art Director’s Club of New York in 1943. Working at big name publications like Glamour, Seventeen, and Mademoiselle she created magazines directed at young working women that appealed to their intelligence and independence. She is also credited as being the first to commission fine artists like Ad Reinhardt and Andy Warhol for work in mass media publications.
In order to learn more about Cipe Pineles I borrowed a biography from Perkins Library and discovered it was written by none other than our very own conservation department volunteer Martha Scotford. Before becoming a volunteer in our lab, Martha was a professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University and is the reigning expert on Cipe Pineles. What a small world! I was so happy to be able to share this addition with Martha who recognized these albums from her visits to the Golden’s home when she was writing Cipe’s biography.
Duke Rubenstein Library also holds a collection of William Golden’s papers that I looked through for more insight into William and Cipe’s lives. One of my favorite discoveries in that collection was a letter with attached photographs that William sent to Cipe. The photos are from his time in Paris during WWII and illustrate the events he saw on VE day. The photos are the same size as the ones in LIFE WITH CIPE and I wonder if this was a precursor to the albums.
Rubenstein Library has also recently acquired a collection of Cipe’s papers too. I wonder if there are more tiny photographs there.
It’s so nice when folks come down to the Perkins Library basement to visit the lab, and this week we had quite a few visitors from very different parts of the campus community. Early in the week, around 20 incoming freshman came to learn about the conservation program as part of Project Search, a program designed as an introduction to undergraduate research at Duke. Then this morning, we were visited by a tour offered through the Duke Alumni Association.
Technician Sara Neel describes circulating collections repairs.Senior Conservator Erin Hammeke describes a recent conservation treatment.Conservator Henry Hebert describes some in-process conservation treatments.
It’s always a pleasure to share our work with Duke students (both current and former), because they are just so personable and naturally curious about the process of conservation and the library materials we have to show. Thanks for dropping by!
Today is the last day for Garrette Lewis-Thomas, our second HBCU Library Alliance/University of Delaware Winterthur intern. The end of this two month internship really snuck up on us! As you may have read in some of Beth’s recent posts, we have thrown a ton of information and instruction at Garrette in the last eight weeks – and she has accomplished so much in that time.
We decided to wrap up with a fun little intro to some basic bookbinding: Coptic style bindings.
These books are a simple, non-adhesive structure that mirrors some of the earliest multi-section codices. An unsupported chain stitch serves as both the primary sewing and the board attachment. The books are very flexible and open flat, which makes them wonderful little notebooks. We dressed them up a bit by covering the boards with decorative paper and stamping Garrette’s initials in gold on the front cover using our Kwikprint hot stamp.
We will miss Garrette so much, but wish her luck in the coming school year!
Some of the more intriguing objects in the collection have characteristics that show evidence of a previous owner’s interaction with them. A good example of this recently came through the lab for an enclosure.
This copy of Walter Crane’s The Bases of Design (1898) is wrapped in a protective cloth cover, likely handmade by a previous owner. The cover is signed Naomi S. Gray at the tail of the spine, so we can only assume that she was the person who made it. These kinds of home-made book jackets are not all that uncommon, but the amount of detail in it’s design and construction is pretty extraordinary. The actual design of the publisher’s binding looks like this:
The design of the titling on the spine of the case is copied faithfully onto the jacket – but rather than continue with the floral motif of the publisher’s design, a small drawing of a crane is included to represent the author. A hem and single line of stitching at the head and tail of the jacket spine was added to prevent the cloth from unraveling where it is cut. The turn-ins on the interior of the boards show an equal level of care.
Lacing with ribbon or cord in this fashion is often seen in home-made book jackets of this style. In most cases, the materials used appear to be cheap scrap. Rarely do we see hemmed turn-ins and individual stitching around the lacing holes.
The attention to detail in so many aspects of the design and construction of this book jacket tells not only a great deal about the appreciation that Naomi had for this book, but showcases her excellent hand skills. In many ways, the evidence of ownership can stir a greater connection to the object than the text itself.
The library loans a large number of items from various collections to other libraries and museums each year for exhibitions. The typical loan agreement is for a small number of items (usually less than 10), but occasionally we get a loan request that is much larger. It is important to document the condition of each object that is borrowed, and we do this by creating a condition report. Condition reports document any pre-existing conditions of a collection item (or lack thereof) and help to establish the responsible party for any future damage. A good report allows anyone handling the object to check and compare the condition of the item as it is packed and moved between destinations.
There are no standards for the length or format of a condition report. For many years, our reports have taken the form of a simple text document that includes an object’s identifying information, a brief description, and notes about any condition issues. In addition to the report, we take photographs of the object and save them to a networked drive.
This form has served us well until now, but in the next year we are facing some much larger loans. We began to wonder if there was a way to more quickly and accurately document the condition of an item, while still maintaining good record keeping practices. In recent years, a number of conservators have developed methods for adding photographs and digital annotations to their condition reports. With the increased functionality and reduced cost of portable touch-screen devices, the time seemed right to experiment with new documentation methods.
[Click to Enlarge]At the most recent AIC Annual Meeting, I attended a talk by Katrina Rush, Associate Paintings Conservator at the The Menil Collection, on digital condition reporting using Apple devices. While the method she presented appeared viable for our needs, we needed to use hardware and software that could be fully supported by our IT department. We recently acquired a Surface Book 2, which combines the versatility of a laptop and a tablet in one Windows device. The accompanying stylus allows the user to precisely annotate images and the portability means that we can bring it along with the items as they travel. The attached camera could be useful for documenting the item outside the lab.
I began designing a new condition report template in Microsoft OneNote. This program allows us to include all the same information from the old form, as well as insert and annotate images. There are also some handy time-saving features like working checkboxes and timestamps. I have included an example of an item documented with the new form here.
At this stage in development, I am conducting “trial runs” with the new form and device. So far I have not been timing myself, but completing the report seems to go very quickly. For much larger loans, I have successfully tested workarounds using “mail merge” to generate the tables of bibliographic data for many items at once. I’ve found it very easy to fill out the fields and to drag and drop images into the form. While the drawing tools are extensive, it would probably be helpful to develop a standard legend of specific colors to describe common condition issues. Exporting the report to a more preservation-friendly file format (like PDF) is easy enough, but can require some adjustments to keep page breaks from splitting an image.
As this new documentation method gets more use, we will likely continue to adapt it. In the coming months I hope to share some of the lessons we learn and the resulting workflows on this blog.
A few of us travelled to Connecticut this week to attend the Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC). It has been a very busy couple of days, listening to talks, reading research posters, and looking at the latest in conservation equipment and materials. As always, there is so much quality programming and not enough time to see it all. I’m feeling a bit if FOMO (fear of missing out) and, by the end of the week, my brain is pretty full. I’m looking forward to our department’s recap of the conference to review my notes and further digest everything I’ve learned.
The unique feature of this book, however, is a USB memory stick that has been integrated into the headcap. The stick contains a film by Luka Dogan, showing a selection of the robots in action.
