Snakeskin Bookmarks (Yes, Really)

Linnea Vegh was working at a large, well-lit workspace in the Conservation Division on a recent day, considering an unusual problem in an 1869 Persian-Arabic dictionary published in India: snakeskin.

Staff in the African and Middle Eastern Division had found five pieces of snakeskin — thin, desiccated, brownish, each several inches long — among the 500 or so brown, brittle pages of “Muntakhab al-lughāt,” a lithograph produced in Lucknow, India, by the influential Nawal Kishore publishing house. It’s one of several hundred rare Persian-language lithographs that Vegh is preparing for scanning and digitization.

The repeated usage implies that, unlikely as it might seem, “they were probably used as a convenient bookmarker,” said Vegh, who, as one of the Library’s book conservation technicians, is familiar with finding weird things in old books. In this collection alone, she’s found “leaves, flowers, insects, spiders … breadcrumbs, tobacco and of course lots of handwritten notes.”

Welcome to the world of “inclusions,” an ecosystem known to archivists the world over in which they come across all sorts of things readers have purposefully or inadvertently left between a book’s pages. Time passes, the item is forgotten, the book goes to a library or museum and, decades or centuries later, an archivist turns the page to find a talisman.

Modern readers do this all the time, using something at hand for an impromptu bookmark — a letter, receipt, pencil, note, a $1 bill — and so did their long-ago peers. Sometimes people will press autumn leaves between pages for preservation. Other times, readers will tuck a love letter or special note into a book — perhaps at a meaningful spot in the narrative — for a private memory.

All of these may or may not be meaningful to researchers and scholars, prompting a professional quandary: What to do with this stuff?

Breadcrumbs, bugs and tobacco aside, technicians check with curators to see how they want items to be preserved and where. Pressed leaves, for example, are nice but they are acidic and damage the book over time, so they might be preserved separately.

And that, as it turns out, is the same strategy for snakeskin that is likely more than 150 years old, of uncertain provenance with an unknown meaning.

So Vegh began her work in one of the Library’s conservation labs, a windowless room in the basement of the Madison Building, across the street and miles removed from the glamour of the Jefferson Building’s Great Hall.

Vegh first mounted the snakeskins in a sink mat (a slender shadow box), covered it with mylar and placed it within a hinged cover. She then set this inside the preservation box of the book itself. This will allow the snakeskins to be digitized, kept with the book and seen by scholars without having to be handled.

This might seem overly cautious, but the Library measures time in centuries. Who can know what future technologies or insights may come? Who, in 1869, would have predicted DNA or hyperspectral imaging?

“We’re always talking about how you can’t really know what future scholars and researchers will want to see or know about these items in the future,” Vegh said. “So we really try to be conservative in terms of keeping everything together as much as possible.”

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