Books Teach Us Their Secrets by Spilling Their Guts

​One of the most important teaching tools for the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) library and archives conservation major is our Library Materials Study Collection. Of course, we have a world-class research library right downstairs from our conservation training facilities at Winterthur, but there our Masters students are patrons and assistant caretakers of the collection. The Study Collection, by contrast, provides our students with a broad array of bookbinding “corpses” to study. Some of these books are in good condition and we maintain them as representatives of different bookbinding traditions and styles. The majority, however, are deteriorating in some way – and that’s the fun part. By examining books in various states of decay, our students learn about the chemical, biological, and mechanical ways that books break down. They also learn more about the history of bookbinding than they possibly could from intact bindings, because it’s only when you get to see the “guts” of books that you can really understand how they were constructed. Our Study Collection exists to spill its secrets. 

​WUDPAC recently received a gracious and generous gift of several dozen French volumes, spanning the centuries from 1600 to the 1920s, from the Louis Bay 2nd Library in New Jersey. Head of Adult Services Nicholas Jackson coordinated the donation of these books, which suffer from common book ailments: brittle, crumbling paper; splitting spines; fraying thread; red-rotting leather; overall grime and stains. These are not books any library patron would want to handle or read, but for our students they hold immense value as physical artifacts. 

​One of the gems of this donation is a set of two volumes of Plutarq’s Les Vies des Hommes Illustre Grec et Romains, published in 1600.  Thanks to the deterioration of the leather covering, the spine and some of the boards are visible, so we can answer questions that would be more difficult to be sure of with an intact binding: the textblock is sewn on five raised cords; the sewing is not “packed” (in contrast to packed sewing, in which the sewing thread is wrapped around the sewing cord in between stitches to cover it completely); the cords are laced into the boards; the laminar boards are built of individual sheets of heavy, cream paper pasted together and shaped to fit the shoulders of the textblock. 

​We can also see something that we would have no way of knowing if the binding were still intact: the textblock has been lined with manuscript waste written in Latin. This was a fairly common practice by early bookbinders, for whom paper and parchment were valuable commodities to be reused and recycled. (Are there any Classics scholars out there who have an idea what this repurposed document could be…?)

Being able to handle, poke, prod, and test samples from historical bookbindings like this one provides our students with the opportunity to develop a tactile understanding that informs both their intuition and their intellect. Peering into the “guts” of books reveals tangible evidence of the history of bookbinding. Conservation is truly a marriage of art and science, and in-depth exploration of physical artifacts enhances this relationship.
 
We are so grateful to Nicholas Jackson and the Louis Bay 2nd Library for recognizing that these books, while no longer useful for their institution’s mission, could still serve an important use for WUDPAC. Generous donations like this one enhance our students’ educational experience, so they, in turn, can go out into the world and best serve the library collections under their care.