A Bit of Mystery in “A Little Book of Nature Thoughts”

We have a charming little mystery in the Conservation Lab right now.  A particularly aesthetically pleasing volume from our General Collection,  A Little Book of Nature Thoughts by Richard Jefferies (Mosher Press, 1903) caught my eye as it sat on the shelf awaiting repair.  Its type, its fine laid paper, its worn but once-beautiful sheepskin full leather binding, and its spare but elegant gold-stamped cover decoration all gave this slender, pocket-sized book an air of something special.

A Little Book of Nature Thoughts (1903)

A little bit of digging revealed some characteristic particularities of Mosher Press editions, which expressed Mosher’s love of the book as artifact, as an object of beauty, and not merely as a utilitarian vessel for its content.  All books were hand-set, usually with Caslon type, with a few, modest decorative flourishes.  Most were printed on Van Gelder hand-made paper, and indeed, our little volume bears the Van Gelder watermark on a few of its pages.  Forty-seven Mosher titles between 1898-1913 were also printed on vellum.  Finally, most of these publisher’s bindings were bound in white, blue, green, or gray paper-covered boards and housed in slipcases.  This last detail about the binding surprised me, until I came across evidence of the allure that Mosher Press editions held for contemporary fine binders.

According to the program of An Exhibition of Books from the Press of Thomas Bird Mosher from the Collection of Norman H. Strouse (1967), “No press has tempted the best efforts of so many of the world’s great binders as has the Mosher Press, but even when rebound in full leather, whether by the famous Grolier Club Bindery, Zaehnsdorf, or Sangorski & Sutcliffe, there is always something about the dimensions and title of a Mosher book that admits its identity to the Mosher collector on sight.”

Mosher himself was aware of his books’ appeal for the fine binder.  He commented in his 1898 catalog A List of Books in Limited Editions, that “In America, Mr. Otto Zahn, the Misses Nordholf and Bulkley; in London, Miss Prideaux and the Guild of Women Binders have re-clothed in exquisite bindings not a few of the special copies” of his editions.

Our copy of A Little Book of Nature Thoughts, unfortunately, bears no bindery ticket, and no discernible private mark of its binder.  Something about the blank endpapers and simple, somewhat generic, floral board decoration suggests the work of a larger bindery rather than an individual fine binder in private practice.  I had hoped that the gold-stamped symbol on the back board (pictured above) would provide a clue to the binding’s origin, but my cursory searches have turned up no lead.  If this lit torch, surrounded by intertwined serpents (or vines?), represents a bindery with which you are familiar, then please let us know.  We welcome any and all theories and speculations!

 

Do You Have the Recipe?

Recently we have been thinking about how we are going to handle a certain book. Yes, I know this sounds funny – we do make treatment decisions daily but this one really has our wheels turning. The said book is a binder-style cookbook. There are pros and cons to each option we come up with. Is there a “right” solution?

 
So what do we do?

Option 1: Make a box for it.
Pros: This would help protect it a bit – and would definitely help if it gets returned into the book drop. Pages are easily removed to make photocopies.
Cons: This wouldn’t stop people from easily removing and stealing pages. Pages can also be easily torn/damaged around the holes.

Option 2: Post-bind it.
Pros: Less likely to have pages stolen. More stable than the ring binder.
Cons: Harder for people to make photocopies of the pages or use the book, because it wouldn’t lay open as easily.

Option 3: Send to the bindery.
Pros: Easy solution.
Cons: Slick pages paired with the heavier tabbed pages would just be a recipe (pun intended) for disaster.  It wouldn’t be long before pages (tabbed or not) started popping out.

Option 4: Leave it as-is.
Pros: A basic scan of the stacks shows that there are a number of these types of cookbooks left as-is on the shelves. Leaving the original binding unboxed and unaltered is visually appealing to those just scanning the shelves for similar books.
Cons: Same as option 1 : the possibility of numerous damaged pages if going through the book drop, and vulnerability to theft of individual pages.

Is there a simple/right solution? Are we thinking too hard about this? We go back and forth on what best to do. My question for you is: what do YOU do with items that come in ring binders like this?

 

Send to Preservation for Repair!

What do the four titles Marketing Research; Drinking Water; Herbs, Health and Cookery; and Tigers in the Emerald Forest all have in common?  These are four newly-purchased books coming to the Preservation Department this week for repair.  Two need minor mending repairs and the other two books will need to be recased entirely, as they have major damage.  The worst is Marketing Research — apparently there was no quality control at the publisher’s!  The last four pages had significant damage.  The picture below speaks for itself.

Marketing Research

It is often too costly for the Library to send books back to the publisher for replacement, so instead they are sent to the Preservation Department for repair.   This used to be a rare occurrence but is now a much more common happening each month.   It is disheartening to see a new book damaged before a student has a chance to crack it open for the first time.  Many bindings such as Herbs, Health, and Cookery fail because of cheap glue and poor construction, which does not hold up to the processing of the book when received at the Library.  All I can say is that when I repair Herbs, Health, and Cookery, it won’t be falling apart later!

Herbs, Health, and Cookery

 

Repurposed Books: Yea or Nay?

On a recent trip to Kansas City, MO, I dined at a trendy, downtown gastropub where the server brought the check to the table not in one of those ubiquitous pleather folders or on a tray, but rather, tucked between the pages of a cloth publisher’s binding ca. 1910.  I was simultaneously charmed and aghast.  The experience recalled the mix of emotions I feel every time I see books repurposed, whether as objets d’art or as alternatively functional items.

A cloth publisher’s binding from the turn of the 20th century holds the check at Gram & Dun, Kansas City, MO.

As a book conservator, my mind is ever bent toward protecting the book not only as a container for intellectual content, but as a physical artifact which holds evidence of material culture.  I feel strangely torn to see books cleverly repurposed as purses, coasters, and furniture, valued neither for their textual content, nor for their binding structure, but merely as raw material.

Photo credit: Design Every Day Blog. Click image to visit original post.

My inner dilemma arises from the fact that such projects destroy the primary function of a book, and as a conservator, my role is always to preserve and protect that function.  I feel torn because I often genuinely appreciate the result of such projects, and somehow, a project constructed of books still speaks to the constructor’s love of books, albeit for aesthetic rather than informational purposes.  And let’s face it — if a book is no longer valued as a work of textual transmission, if its binding is not unique or rare, then why not give it a second life as some other type of artifact?

Photo Credit: Rookie Magazine. Click image to visit original post.

My devotion to the history of the nineteenth century publisher’s binding (a category of book I consider “medium rare” — not quite Special Collections material yet, but heading in that direction with the passage of time) motivates my strongest caveat in the repurposing of books.  Many of these significant bindings have been lost over time, particularly as a result of commercial binding practices at academic libraries.  While not every publisher’s binding from ca. 1830 to ca. 1920 may be significant as an historical exemplar, the popularity of this type of binding for repurposing chafes my conservation ethos.  And yet… I am still tempted to make myself one of those nifty book purses — with a modern, mass-printed discard, of course!

The BookBook Shelf from design firm Not Tom. Click to view article at Design Buzz.

Preservation professionals, what’s your take on the repurposing of “old” books for new DIY projects?  Librarians? Artists/makers?

Click image to visit the website of artist Brian Dettmer, who transforms books into narrative sculptures.

 

Five Shades of Gray

Some library materials come to you and you’re just not sure what your treatment will be.  There might be a lot of staring, thinking, drawing, prototypes, and conversing with co-workers to get ideas as what to do.

THE GRAY NOTEBOOK by Alexander Vvedensky is one of those library items that I won’t forget because of its uniqueness.  It’s a nice little pamphlet with gray, zigzag stitching offset by a half-inch inside to the right from the spine with two unattached, folded papers that, when they are unfolded, are larger than the pamphlet.

Mylar pockets sewn in along the fold.

I first humidified and flattened the two papers to take the crease out.   I wanted to preserve these pages flat and house them separately from the pamphlet, so I encased them in two Mylar pockets welded onto a single, folded sheet of Mylar.  The pockets were both left open along the gutter edge so the pages could be removed later if needed.

Pamphlet stitched into the binder in five spots, following the same zig-zag stitch of the original sewing.

The thread used to stitch the pamphlet into the binder was first dyed gray.

The pamphlet was sewn into the binder off-set from the Mylar pocket folio.

Next I used acrylic paints to dye white book thread to gray, as I wanted something that would match the gray thread originally used on the pamphlet.  After the thread was dry, I decided to sew the Mylar pockets into the pamphlet binder first along the main back crease.  Then I sewed five zigzag stitches in through original holes in the pamphlet to attach it to the binder in an offset fashion in front of the Mylar encapsulations.  I had to make a new crease in the binder to accommodate the pamphlet and then trimmed the pamphlet binder and rounded the corners.    The finished product came out nicely, very useable, and I’m proud to say I did it.  And yes, Virginia, there are five shades of gray in the completed product.