The mahogany leather spines of 15th century Bibles seem out of place against the harsh industrial lighting and metal shelves where the books are kept. Just feet away from 400-year-old texts on palmistry sit boxes holding thousands of comic books.
A lot of work goes into repairing and maintaining the 225,000 rare and old documents housed at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, according to the library’s Web site. The special collections library, located on the third floor of Deering Library, includes a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian tablets and 19th century paintings in addition to old books.
“(The books) had lives that we have no idea about,” said Lesa Dowd, interim head of the library’s conservation lab.
Dowd and other employees at the conservation lab repair damage that books have suffered during their long lives, and it’s a demanding process.
The two full-time employees at the lab work almost exclusively with special collections items, while work-study students and two part-time employees repair books from the University Library. Lab employees performed 13,000 treatments last year, ranging from spine repairs to washing individual pages of a book, Dowd said.
Spine replacements are one of the more common treatments. Employees preserve the character of the book by putting the old title label on the new spine. The conservation lab repaired 2,700 spines in 2004, Dowd said. An average spine repair takes about 30 minutes.
Repairs can be as complicated as unbinding the entire book, washing each page, and putting it back together. Special collections books are especially difficult because of the obscure materials that were used when they were printed, like types of glues.
“Every special collection-type item is very different, and a lot of them involve a lot of creative problem-solving,” Dowd said.
Restoring the special collections books is an ongoing process, especially because the library continually receives new objects. Conservation lab staffers don’t have time to fix every book, so they have to prioritize. Not every book gets a full washing and restoration, Dowd said.
Sometimes emergencies get in the way of everyday restoration. Two years ago, a pipe in the ceiling above the shelves leaked water and damaged about 50 objects. One book was destroyed, said R. Russell Maylone, special collections curator.
Employees freeze-dried the books to kill mold caused by the leak, and cleaned some of them with a special vacuum, Dowd said.
Mold can grow on old books and manuscripts if they are stored in a humid environment. But a central heating plant keeps the special collections area at 60 degrees and low in humidity all year long.
“I was working in there for an hour this morning and I nearly froze,” Maylone said.
Employees know when something is wrong, he said, and many times can detect a problem with the air system before it causes any damage.
“The people who work here seem to be oddly sensitive,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘I was just down in tier one and there seemed to be a lot of humidity down there.'”
The books are monitored carefully because they are important historical artifacts that need to be kept as they were when they were made, Dowd said.
“We’re preserving not only the information in the books, but we’re preserving the books as artifacts, as part of history,” Dowd said. “We think that’s very valuable.”
Reach Diana Samuels at [email protected].
