Preservation Week, What's In The Lab

Preservation Week 2025: A Day in the Life, Thursday

During the process of treating items from the collection, we sometimes discover interesting details about their production that can be useful for researchers. Take, for example, this repair that I completed last year on The Byrth of Mankinde, a book printed in London in 1545.

It came into the lab because the front board was detached from the textblock and the leather was split along the spine. We were concerned about further damage occurring to some of those original binding materials with use in this condition, so it was important to reattach the front board and adhere the lifting leather.

The textblock is printed on paper, but on the right side of the image above, you can see the smallest sliver of manuscript on parchment. It was common for binders to use waste material in the construction of bindings. Parchment is a very strong material that can be used to reinforce the board attachment of a book, so it was a common practice to cut up the leaves of parchment manuscripts and paste the fragments into new bindings.

It turns out that all of the adhesive attaching the leather to the boards had completely dried out and failed, so during treatment I was able to just slide it off of the book – kind of like a glove. You can see the major splits through the head of the spine and some sizable losses where the raised bands lace into the boards. At one point the binding had green silk ribbon fore-edge ties protruding from the front and back boards, but they have since broken off and only fragments remained adhered under the pastedowns.

With the leather off of the book, I had more access to view the structure of the binding. The sewing supports are made from tanned leather, which do not remain as flexible as they age. It is not surprising that they have failed. Above you can see the manuscript fragment stub wrapping around the last section of the textblock.

In addition to the failing adhesive, the sewing also broken in the first section, so I was able to release the parchment fragment from the interior of the front board and photograph both sides of it. These photos  will be available to researchers when they are ingested into the Conservation Documentation Archive later this year. The text on the manuscript might provide more information about the provenance or production of this book.

I used linen thread to create new sewing supports over the front joint and sewed the first section, with it’s parchment fragment, back onto the textblock. After reattaching the front board and readhering the original leather (with some toned Japanese paper lining the interior of the spine), I decided to leave the parchment fragments loose from the boards at the front and back. Should anyone be interested in reading the text on those fragments, it will be easy to access them if they aren’t hidden under the original pastedowns. I made new pastedowns from handmade paper, so now the original pastedown just becomes the first leaf of the book. This changes the initial experience of reading the book, but from the staining and presence of bookplates, it’s pretty obvious that the now free leaf was once pasted down.

See our other Preservation Week 2025 posts here:

Day 1: Curatorial meetings
Day 2: Presenting our HVAC pilot project
Day 3: Using UV light to analyze materials
Day 4: Discovering details in book bindings
Day 5: Field trip! Gathering damaged books from Circulation points

Environment, Preservation Week

Preservation Week 2025: A Day in the Life, Tuesday

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Welcome to Day 2 of Preservation Week 2025! To see other posts in this series, follow these links:

Day 1: Curatorial meetings
Day 2: Presenting our HVAC pilot project
Day 3: Using UV light to analyze materials
Day 4: Discovering details in book bindings
Day 5: Field trip! Gathering damaged books from Circulation points

Last year, in response to the Duke Climate Commitment, we tested an overnight HVAC shutdown pilot project during the winter months in the circulating collections. We wanted to see if the University could reduce its carbon footprint while maintaining adequate environmental conditions our collections. We worked closely with Duke Facilities to determine how to implement this program. You might recall at the beginning of the project we placed an Onset HOBO MX1101 datalogger inside a discarded book to see how it responded to changes in temperature and humidity in the stacks during the HVAC shutdown project.

We noticed some curious readings and decided that the amount of hollowed-out material likely affected the way the text block reacted to changes in humidity and temperature. This winter we created a second test book but this time we used a probe-style Onset HOBO 2302 datalogger. Our working theory was that a smaller hole in the middle of the book would give us better data.

I grabbed a book from the discard pile and started cutting. Once I hollowed out a space for the probe, I created an Ethafoam plug to minimize air filtration at the fore edge.

Datalogger inside text block.

The books were placed side by side on the shelf with books on either side to ensure they stayed closed. This area of the stacks contain mobile shelving, which are opened and closed regularly as patrons use the aisle.

First test book (left) and the newer book are identified by their bright red wrapper.

I looked at the last 30 days of data from this datalogger in preparation for a talk about this project at the State Energy Conference today. You can see the old book (blue line) vs. the new book (green line) both react slowly to changing conditions. However, you can also clearly see the book with the smaller hole is reacting more slowly to changes in humidity (temperatures remain very stable).  Both books are slower to react to ambient rH conditions. But you can definitely see a difference between the two books, which I think is at least partially due to the amount of material excavated from the center of the book.

Environmental data from last 30 days

Tom Young, Critical Systems Controls Engineer in Duke Facilities Management, and I are excited to share our findings with the conference attendees today. Spoiler alert: the energy savings were substantial and the books are fine.

 

Preservation Week, What's In The Lab

Preservation Week 2025: A Day in the Life, Monday

Preservation Week is here! This annual celebration, first sponsored by the American Library Association and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services in 2010, was established to raise awareness of the role libraries and other cultural institutions play in providing preservation education and information. The theme for this year is Preserve the Past, Shape the Future: Inspiring the Next Generation.

All this week Preservation Underground will be bringing you snapshots of the different kinds of work that we do to support the collections and mission of Duke Libraries. Today we are engaged in probably our most important work: planning and prioritizing.

Books of various sizes spread out on a table. Each month our conservators meet with curatorial staff from the Rubenstein Library to assess collection material that has been identified for treatment and set priorities for our work. The materials that we care for come in a wide range of sizes, materials, geographic and cultural origins, and time periods. With millions of items in the collection and just a few of us in the lab, we are not able to work on everything. During these meetings, we consider the past and anticipated future use of these items (for research, instruction, exhibit, or digitization) and try to determine what treatments are most appropriate for them. Some items will receive extensive treatment, while others will just get minor stabilization or an enclosure.  Collaborating with the curators on treatment plans and priorities helps us to support the work of researchers and students who come in to use these materials. Good stewardship of Duke’s collections will allow them to be usable for generations of researchers to come.

Day 1: Curatorial meetings
Day 2: Presenting our HVAC pilot project
Day 3: Using UV light to analyze materials
Day 4: Discovering details in book bindings
Day 5: Field trip! Gathering damaged books from Circulation points

CDA, Technology

New Records in the CDA!

by Erin Hammeke, Senior Conservator

We’re very excited to announce that a new batch of conservation records has just been made publicly available in the CDA! With the addition of this batch, we have a total of 1,788 records preserved in the collection to date. The latest group of records date from 2017 through 2020. To view them, you can browse the CDA collection and then sort by date (New to Old).

Encompassed in these years is documentation for work performed on the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection exhibition and loan, which was a huge project for us in Conservation and in Rubenstein Library during this time. The collection focuses on women at work, and the conservation documentation includes such highlights as a photographic portrait of Sojourner Truth, Henry’s beautiful treatment of this blue paste paper binding, and Rachel’s transformative stain reduction to the ceramic Anti-Slavery Dessert Service.

Other highlights include repair to an early edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, flattening of a patent issued by Queen Victoria, and repair to this sweet children’s book from the 1930s.

It really takes a team of people to ensure these records are ingested, described, and displaying correctly. Thank you so much to the staff from Conservation Services, Repository Services, Rubenstein Library Collection Development, Technical Services, and Digital Collections for their skillful work on and dedication to this ongoing project.

Collaboration, Conservation, Housing, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

The Case of the Oily Book

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by Erin Hammeke, Senior Conservator

We’re preparing to launch another batch of treatment documentation in the CDA, and the process has reminded me of one of the most complicated, and ultimately, one of my favorite treatments from over the years. I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli, medico senese, … is an early Italian natural medicine text, printed in Venice in 1557. It contains lovely woodcut illustrations of animal and plant species that offered medicinal remedies. Rubenstein Libraries’ copy was acquired for the History of Medicine Collection in 2016 from a family in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

Image showing the open title page of I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli, medico senese
Title page, before treatment
An image showing the front cover of the binding, with dark staining from handling on the fore-edge and damage to the parchment strip covering the spine.
Binding, before treatment
A two page spread in the interior of the text, with woodcut illustrations of plants and dark yellow stains at the fore-edges of both pages.
Partial staining and plant images, before treatment

When we acquired it, about one quarter of the text and a portion of the early paper binding had long been saturated with oil, and there was less severe oil staining throughout. It was so soaked with oil that the pages were slightly transparentized and were becoming stiff and blocking together. This video demonstrates the condition and handling challenges it presented when we first received it [SOUND ON].

The text was bound in an early paper binding with a parchment spine overlay. The sewing was broken in places and pages were coming loose. Initial testing found that the oil was soluble in a couple of different solvents but I found that of the few I tested, ethanol moved only the oil but not the printing ink. With this information and considering other factors, the curators and I agreed that it was appropriate to disbind the text and to use solvent baths to remove as much of the oil from the paper as possible.

Working in our fume hood, I treated the most oil-stained sections of the text with multiple ethanol baths, which significantly drew out oily residues and moderately reduced the staining, a result that the curators were ultimately pretty happy with. These solvent baths were followed by water baths and then resizing, since the previous immersions removed most of the original sizing.

Saving some of the residual oil in ethanol, I was able to analyze it with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) at the SMIF facility on campus. Conservation scientists in at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware were able to identify the residue as palm oil, along with an unknown plasticizer. These results ultimately didn’t impact the conservation treatment, but the information does present another interesting detail in understanding the curious life of this item. After treating the text, I mended it and resewed it, and was able to rebind it in the original binding.

A two page spread of the text, showing a small illustration of a barrel cactus and dark staining all across the pages before conservation treatment.
Staining before treatment
The same two page spread after treatment, showing significant lightening of the oil stains.
After solvent treatment

I Discorsi… is likely to be on display in an upcoming exhibit on early botanical texts. You can also see further images and details of this treatment in the CDA, here. Many thanks to Dr. Mark Walters, Dr. Chris Petersen, and Dr. Jocelyn Alcantara-Garcia for their assistance in oil analysis and identification.

Tools and Equipment, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

Box Girls on Boxing Day

Keeping a large circulating collection in usable shape means you are often so busy fixing or boxing books to get them back on the shelf that you don’t have time to look at the contents. When a first edition of Mary Van Kleeck’s Women in the Bookbinding Trade came into the lab, however, we all stopped to take a look.

Two photographs of bindery workers. "Box girls" in the upper photo, case makers in the lower photograph

This book, originally published in 1913, is a fascinating look into the working conditions for women in the binding trade around the turn of the century. Margaret Olivia Sage had used the considerable wealth amassed by her late husband to form the Russell Sage Foundation in 1907 for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States”, specifically by using scientific research to advocate for progressive reforms. The foundation funded a series of studies which documented the condition of women’s work in important trades in New York City. The 1900 US census reported that over a quarter of women bindery workers were employed in the city, so the location offered a sizable sample to extrapolate conditions across the United States.

Table and bar graph depicting the number of persons engaged in bookbinding in the united states by decade.

The turn of the century was an important period of transition for the binding trade. Work that was traditionally done completely by hand had become more mechanized in the late 19th century, and the number of women working in the trade was growing rapidly.  Binderies were typically gender-segregated, with women relegated to less skilled and lower wage work, like folding, gathering, and sewing textblocks and endbands. In most cases, all of the forwarding, covering, and finishing work was done by men. Van Kleeck’s book includes a lot of photographs, which offer a look at the conditions of the workspaces, the roles assigned to each gender, and the shift from fully manual to machine-assisted labor during this time.

Van Kleek notes that the introduction of more capable binding machines displaced a lot of workers in the book trade, shifting them to lower wage work or out of a job entirely. The author describes the case of one woman who learned to operate a folding machine, allowing her to double her weekly wages to $9.00. Within a few years a newer machine arrived that made multiple machine operators obsolete. She was transferred to hand folding, which was harder physical labor and only paid 4 cents per 100 sheets. Working as quickly as possible she could only earn $7.00 per week (p. 51).

As a side note, this page caught my eye when I realized that the heads of the people in the bottom photo had just been drawn in. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe they were a bit blurry because the camera exposure was long and they were moving quickly? Was it to anonymize the workers, or to make them look more the part?

20th century photoshop

It is so interesting to see photographs some of these machines in action. The technology was advancing pretty rapidly in this period and most of these models no longer exist. Some versions can be seen at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco.

In the finishing department, women were often only found laying gold leaf onto covers, rather than operating stamping machines or gilding the edges of textblocks.

The introduction of electric lights in the late 19th century allowed businesses to operate at all hours. Without labor protections (and a supreme court actively hostile to organized labor), many factory workers were forced to work long hours. Van Kleek notes that binderies are legally classified as factories, and despite state laws barring any woman over the age of 16 from working more than 60 hours, workers regularly reported 14 hour shifts, 6 days a week. The book describes workers commuting to and from dangerous neighborhoods in the early hours of the morning. As a result, young women regularly went missing. The study also records rampant child labor violations in the book trade.

I think we can all relate to “artificial light all day”

By examining the details of Mary Van Kleek‘s work, one can follow a line directly from this book to the establishment of the modern work week and labor protections we enjoy today. Van Kleek began working for the Sage Foundation shortly after its founding as the secretary of the Committee on Women’s Work. There she was mentored and trained by prominent labor activists like Florence Kelley and Lilian Brandt. Her research for this publication and others like Artificial Flower Makers (1913) and Wages in the Millinery Trade (1914) was  instrumental in the passage of New York state labor laws limiting working hours in 1910 and 1915. During WWI, Van Kleek was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to lead the new Women in Industry Service group in the Department of Labor. That group published a report that became the basis for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the eight-hour workday, five-day workweek, a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and prohibited child labor.

Conservation, What We Find In Books, What's In The Lab

An Adorable Fire Hazard

We’ve written before (many times) about the unusual and sometimes problematic objects that we find in books. Scrapbooks tend to be the worst offenders for this situation. In most cases, the inserted object is either damaging the pages around it or too bulky and deforming the book. In the case of this scrapbook from the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans family papers, though, the problem item poses a danger to the collections around the scrapbook, too.

Several of the scrapbook pages have paper matchbooks mounted to them. Much like the ticket stubs that appear alongside, the printed matchbook is a keepsake to remember a special occasion. These matches come from a Longchamps restaurant, where Mary dined before attending a show. The exterior of this matchbook is a metallic gold, but the real design highlight appears inside.

The matches are shaped and printed to look like rows of little chefs!

This scrapbook dates from the 1930s, so these are probably “safety matches” – meaning they cannot ignite without the contacting the striking strip on the cover of the matchbook. They are also quite old at this point, and may not even light using the strip. There is still a risk to the collection, however, so Rachel Penniman did some research to determine the best way to make them safe before rehousing the scrapbook.

There are a couple of options for dealing with matches in a collection. The quickest solution is to physically remove the matches. In another example from the same scrapbook (pictured above), the bottom of the matchbook and all the individual matches were torn off before mounting. If all of the matchbooks were treated this way, then we wouldn’t have to worry, but a lot of information would be lost.

One of the individual matches (already used) is also taped to this page, so we can see that Longchamps used more than one chef design in their matchbooks.

Clipping off just the match head could also be a good solution for removing the potential for ignition while retaining more of the original material. If the matches in these books were more of a plain design, that could be a viable option here, but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to decapitate the little chefs. Luckily, there was another way.

Our colleagues at Northwestern University have developed a method for coating the match heads to prevent lighting. To treat the match heads, Rachel applied three coatings of a matte acrylic medium: one dilute layer to penetrate and then two coatings of undiluted acrylic to form a protective layer. After the coating had cured, the scrapbook was ready to be boxed and returned to the stacks. The acrylic medium is not tacky when dry, so it will not stick to the matchbook cover or facing scrapbook pages when the book is closed.

One of the major challenges of caring for a large research collection is the wide variety of objects and materials that are contained within it. When confronted with potentially harmful items like these matchbooks, it is so helpful to read about how other conservators have dealt with them.

Duke University Libraries Preservation