As the United States prepares for its 250th Birthday next year, a piece of America’s Bicentennial Celebration came through for binding. Take a look at how Processing and Preparation handles this binding style and compare how things have changed over the past 50 years.
Our exploration of 125 years of binding at the Library of Congress finds a period of great movement and change for the binding office both in physical space and where they fit in the Library structure. Starting the 1940’s with a large onsite bindery in the new Library Annex, the binding office that prepared to move to the James Madison Memorial Building in 1981 had changed in every possible way.
125 years of binding retrospect posts continue as we look at the Binding Office’s time in the Thomas Jefferson Building. During that time, the Library staff worked with the Government Printing Office to research binding materials, moving from animal skins to a new durable, acid-free cloth alternative that we still use today, buckram.
The Preservation Services Division came to the rescue as newspapers from Africa needed a brief holdover on their seven-thousand-mile journey to become part of the Library of Congress’ collection.