The following is a post by Meg Gray, a Library Technician in the General Collections Conservation section of the Preservation Division.
The email came in on a Thursday afternoon from the Access Services Division.
“We have a rush request for two books to be repaired for the White House. Can they be ready by tomorrow?”
Instantly, energy crackled through the General Collections Conservation Section. This was a special request with a short turnaround time, even for us. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. Could we do it?
Of course we could!
Each year, the General Collections Conservation Section receives approximately one hundred and twenty rush requests from Access Services. These requests are by and large for members of Congress, although occasionally requests will come in for interlibrary loans to be repaired before they are fulfilled. When a staff member in Access Services receives a request for a book in General Collections that is damaged, that staff member contacts the General Collections Conservation Section (GCCS), and requests a rush repair. They can ask to have the book back in forty-eight hours, a week, or three weeks, depending on the urgency of the patron’s need.
Each book that comes to General Collections Conservation as a rush request is assigned to a particular technician. That technician handles any and all treatments the book requires from start to finish, whether that treatment be a simple page repair or something much more complex. Upon retrieval, it became obvious that the two books requested by the White House were going to need a lot more than a quick dab of glue and a bit of heat set tissue.
The books we treated, Paddle-to-the-Sea and Seabird, are by author Holling C. Holling (1900-1973) and date from the 1940s. In Seabird, a gull carved by a young boy out of a piece of ivory becomes the mascot of a variety of ships and one airplane and accompanies them on their journeys. The Newbery Honor-winning book is popular as an aid to homeschooling as it illustrates geography and discusses the history of American seafaring. Paddle-to-the-Sea similarly focuses on the travels of a carving made by a young boy, this time of a First Nation man in a canoe, as it makes its way down river from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. The carving encounters various dangers and adventures before eventually being taken all the way to France. The book won a Caldecott honor in 1942. Both books feature beautiful illustrations which Holling’s wife, Lucille, worked with him on.
When Seabird and Paddle-to-the-Sea arrived in the General Collections Conservation lab, they were in rough shape. Both books needed new spines, cover corner repairs, and in the case of Seabird, the endsheets in both the front and back were beginning to tear at the hinges.
Preservation Specialist Leslie Long and I went to work right away to stabilize and treat both books. Both spines had to be removed and replaced with new cloth. This treatment is relatively non-invasive as treatments go, but it still takes time and a careful hand to lift the old spine. Once that has been done, a new spine must be constructed out of book cloth, lining cloth, and paper and inserted into the slots left by the old spine. Seabird was easy enough to color-match with the book cloth we had on hand, but Leslie went the extra mile for Paddle-to-the-Sea and toned linen to make the new spine.
While Leslie was setting the dye on her cloth, I completed the repairs to Seabird’s endsheets with heat-set tissue and then set about patching the ragged edges of the cover with Japanese tissue.
As you can see, the tissue I used did not precisely match the color of the book. When this happens, technicians use water-color pencils to perform a treatment we refer to as in-painting to make the tissue more closely match the color of the book’s cover. Both toning linen and in-painting can be tricky processes since it takes a keen eye and solid understanding of colorant working properties to achieve the desired color. It can be hard to find the right mix, and sometimes despite our best efforts, some slight variation will still be noticeable. In the end, though, both Leslie and I succeeded in our endeavors and Seabird and Paddle-to-the-Sea were in the book presses, the glue on their new spines drying, certain to be ready by the deadline the next day. Time?
6:00 p.m.
General Collections Conservation: We come through when seconds count and your materials aren’t rare or (too much) older than the Library.
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Comments (8)
Wondrous
Very impressive! Two talented people working together to do a fabulous (and speedy!) job.
Nice work! Kudos for getting it done so quickly!
When you perform this conservation work, do you document your treatment, and add photos to it?
Hi Sandy! Thank you for your interest in our blog. In answer to your question – yes, we document our work on every book we treat. We log which treatments were performed, when, and by whom so that we can keep track of whether something has been through our lab repeatedly, why, and at what interval. General Collections Conservation does not typically add photos, but the Conservation Division as a whole does keep photographic records of treatments.
I’m curious as to why these specific books were urgently requested by the White House. What are the criteria for evaluating “urgent”? Your work is invaluable and should not be idly re-purposed.
We receive all kinds of requests that we work hard to fulfill as quickly as possible—everything from research support, to exhibits, or ceremonies. We feel that anytime a book used, it is a good thing!
Are books proactively checked for damage, or just when checked out? If no one has requested these books, would they ever have been repaired?
Hi Pat. Thanks for your interest in our blog and our work! The Library does proactively check books for damage periodically as part of our stacks survey process – in fact, there’s a previous blog post about it! The Conservation Division also reaches out to our research divisions and General Collections regularly and receives many, many books each year to repair, to the tune of 1200 to 1500 treatments per technician per year in the General Collections Conservation Section alone. We’re never idle!