paper conservation

Another year over, and a new one just begun

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

I think everyone reading this will be glad to see an end to the last twelve months: what a year.

The rollercoaster that was 2020 has carried me along like everyone else, and has brought both good and bad times. Dealing with a close family bereavement in lockdown was by far the hardest, and the feeling of helplessness when you can not be with people you care for can not be underestimated.

But as you can see from the selection of images above, work has continued to develop and I have been truly lucky to have the range of projects I have enjoyed this year: everything from the conservation and mounting of a letter to Santa from the 1930s to fasciculing C13th medieval French manuscript fragments. I have been fortunate to be able to conduct several major collection assessments, with appropriate Covid-secure measures, three exhibition installations including for the remarkable (and alas, under-attended due to Covid) British Baroque exhibition at Tate and numerous studio based projects for both institutional and private clients. Several long term projects ended, with new work taking its place: for this I am thankful.

I have been amazed by the response of the heritage sector in their ability to adapt their practice and share their knowledge, much of which I distilled into the open-access Resources Roundup spreadsheet, now in its 20th incarnation. The degree to which the sector, both home and abroad, has pulled together to pool information and resources is incredible, and it is this attitude and spirit by which we will haul ourselves out of this. Working with the ARA committees on which I sit has also kept me connected, gaining from and giving support to colleagues through all the different experiences they have had in lockdown.

Presentations have been a feature of 2020, with in-person speaking opportunities being transferred online. So although my planned trip to speak at the AIC’s conference in Salt Lake City in May was abandoned – I can’t deny this was a bitter blow – I did take part in the online symposium which was more than a consolation. Speaking and discussing what I do is one of the best bits of the job, and I welcome every opportunity I am offered. Connecting with colleagues outside of my normal sphere has been one of the most positive aspects of 2020 and I have shared virtual spaces with people from all over the world and in a kaleidoscope of heritage disciplines.

Lockdown has given me a chance to think anew about where I can contribute, leading to the formation of a project to bring engagement opportunities to those groups who may not have easy access to written heritage materials or who learn by means other than purely sight and reading. This has taken the form of a CIC, Take 5 Engagement Ltd., with the aim of facilitating tactile engagement workshops for a wide range of people and involving sight, sound, touch, smell and hopefully even taste to show how and why objects were made. 2021 will see this new bolt-on venture develop, with a bit of luck and hard work, and I already have a couple of pilot workshops lined up with partners such as The Avenue School in Reading.

The several work trips and holidays I had planned – including a short break for my husband’s 50th birthday (he will be 52 by the time we go – if we go – this coming year!) – have had to be shelved. Even though the temperature was at least 10 degrees less than our planned Spanish break, the sea and sky in Cornwall this summer were a very Tyrrhenian blue, and the caravan’s hot tub made up for the lack of warmth in the air.

On a personal note, I was delighted to be chosen as a volunteer HLF-funded Women into Heritage Engineering apprentice at Crofton Beam Engines. Having had a lifelong interest in industrial archaeology (I come from Co. Durham after all, so it is kind of in my blood) this was genuinely a dream come true. This vastly important industrial heritage site on the Kennet and Avon Canal has always fascinated me, and to be contributing to its continued use as a place to inspire and enjoy is just fantastic. In January I am learning how to weld: I can not wait. I have also been heavily involved in cataloguing the history of my home town, Consett, and specifically the steelworks that made the town and its people – as well as the steel for a whole host of ships, buildings and even Blackpool Tower. For a bit of end of year fun, check out the advent calendar I compiled: who knew steel production would make such a good topic for this sort of countdown?

At the end of this bruising year, I wish all my clients both past and present all the very best for a happier and healthy 2021. Larkin missed something out: what survives of us is not just love, but also hope.

Look, write, say

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

This year has been filled with looking, writing and talking, three things I enjoy very much indeed. I have had several very interesting assessment projects, ranging from a gorgeous collection of medieval and early modern European manuscript fragments to an incredibly complete representation of arts and crafts printing heritage in a collection based on the output of the Essex House Press.  Looking inevitably precedes writing, and the resulting reports on all these great projects must run to many thousands of words of advice.

Talking this year has involved several presentations, most recently to the members of the Royal Philatelic Society of London on their Perkins Bacon collection of letter books. This vital and complete record of early stamp history and printing on an international level was very difficult to access  due to the damaged condition of the material, and is currently undergoing conservation with the generous support of the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust.

A project that is just drawing to a close – and one that will deserve a post all of its own – is the extensive work I have undertaken on the Oliver Messel Archive for the University of Bristol’s Theatre Collection. This has been such a wonderful project to conserve, and centres on a series of evocative photograph albums detailing Messel’s early life and work as a theatre designer and an incredible collection of architectural plans of his later interests as an interior designer.  As there are to be no spoilers for the longer post at the end of the project I will leave it at that for now, with one small tantalising example of Messel’s output – who would not want to live in a house like this?

 

My thanks to the Royal Philatelic Society of London and the Theatre Collection for kindly allowing me to use these images. 

 

It’s Friday, it must be Winchester

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

This week I have been extremely fortunate to have some company on my travels and in my studio, with Surjit Singh joining me as part of his two month internship in the UK.

Surjit has just completed the first year of his Masters degree at the National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology in New Delhi, and is in the UK to develop his understanding and practice in library and archive conservation.

It was a bit of an immersion into the life of a conservator in private practice, with the days being spent both on the road and in the studio. Monday saw us visiting several clients in Oxford, and Surjit got straight into the swing of things by helping me take some cradle templates for a forthcoming exhibition at New College library.

Tuesday was a studio day, and together we worked on the cleaning and repair of the early C19th Petitions of Assistance collection of paper documents for the Salters’ Company archive. This NMCT funded project was a great way for Surjit to practice some key paper conservation techniques and get experience of handling and treating different types of paper which had a variety of damage types, including iron gall ink corrosion.

Wednesday saw us back on the road and heading west, this time to Winchester Cathedral, where I have been working on the Morley Library cleaning project for a number of weeks. We began by helping the volunteers set up the next phase of the cleaning of the collection, and then Surjit moved on to start the installation of the fishing line handling deterrent. In this system, originally developed for use in National Trust libraries, fine nylon fishing line, dark brown in colour, is laced between two conservation grade boards at either end of the shelves. This discourages and prevents casual browsing of the books, and acts as an aide memoir for visitors that touching is not allowed.

Thursday was a welcome studio day after all the activity of the week, and we looked at case binding repair and methods to conserve circulating library collections at Corpus Christi College library. This included scraping and poulticing old degraded spine linings and sewing on new textile linings for additional strength.




We were back on the road again early on Friday morning, bound for Winchester Cathedral to complete our part of the project as well as hand over the cleaning to the volunteers to continue to work their way around the 2000 books that make up the library. It’ll be great to see the progress they have made next time I visit.

Friday afternoon was all about iron gall ink, that key – and rather tricky – component of so much of our manuscript heritage. I showed Surjit how to make and use gelatine-coated remoistenable tissue, through which repairs may be made on iron gall ink media whilst controlling the level of humidity, the primary cause of iron gall ink corrosion.

The week with Surjit Singh went by all too fast. He put up with my hectic schedule, spirited driving style, the menagerie of wild animals that seem to be taking over my garden and my attempts to cook Indian classics for him admirably. More importantly, it was great to revisit some of the techniques and procedures that I do as a matter of course and see them from a fresh perspective. It was even better to see Surjit taking these techniques, thinking how they could be adapted and making them work for him: this is how we all develop as conservators.

Good luck to Surjit Singh, there’s a great future for him just around the next corner.

 

My thanks to all the clients and sites we visited during the week, and for allowing the reproduction of the images in this post. 

Alpine winter greetings this Christmas

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

You will rightly surmise by the shameful infrequency of my 2018 posts, and especially in the second half of the year, just what an exciting and busy time it has been in the last 12 months. Thankfully, the business continues to flourish since my leap into full time private practice almost two years ago, for which I am incredibly grateful. Thank you to all who have helped me on my way.

I have been very fortunate to work on some wonderful collections and material, both for institutional clients as well as some very personal objects for private individuals. The ongoing conservation of a series of late C19th and C20th diaries has a foot in both of these camps.

These nine stationery volumes, all in plain Oxford blue half leather bindings, contain a detailed record of visitors to the Chalet des Anglais, a traditional property high in the Mont Blanc range. It was originally built in the 1860s by the Urquart family and bequeathed for the joint use of Balliol, New and University College Oxford students as a place for summer reading and study parties by Francis Urquart, Fellow and Dean of Balliol, or Sligger as he was affectionately known.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each party was, and still is, required to keep a diary of their time in the Chalet providing a history of its occupancy and use but also a record of changing times, attitudes and fashions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The heavy use of the books over the years has taken its toll on their condition, as well as some temporary ‘in the field’ fixes involving diverse mending solutions such as sellotape and Elastoplast which, although they have maintained the completeness of the record have done little for the material stability. A campaign is underway to fund the current and ongoing conservation of the books for digitisation and future use as research materials.

Many renowned alumni visited the Chalet as students including subsequent Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. This entry for 1900 provides two very famous names, with Roger Casement and Gertrude Bell visiting the Chalet that year.

 

It is Gertrude Bell’s photography skills that provide us with this rather beautiful image of Mont Blanc showing untouched snow and shadow.

I hope all my clients, both past and present, had a very happy Christmas, and send my very best wishes for the New Year. I look forward to working with you all in 2019.

 

My sincere thanks to Stephen Golding of The Chalet Trust for allowing me to use these images.

Back to the Near East with TE Lawrence

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

Following on from my recent posts on the conservation of David Roberts’ travels in the near east, I return to that region but this time in the company of TE Lawrence.

I have recently written a piece for the Jesus College, Oxford college record on the work I have undertaken over the years to conserve and preserve TE Lawrence’s undergraduate thesis, and which has just been posted on the college’s library and archives blog.

This wonderful object has been a constant thread through my professional career and it was a great privilege to lead the project to create two facsimile copies in 2017.
The project was a strong collaboration between conservator, curator, digital photographer and box maker to create a truly tactile and dynamic surrogate, and bring back Lawrence’s lively interpretation of his study travels in Syria in 1909 to the digital copy.

You can read the piece on the library and archives blog by following this link: https://jesuslibraries.wordpress.com/…/…/19/f-for-facsimile/

Image included by kind permission of Jesus College Oxford

Christmas greetings from the Holy Land

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

At this time of year, it is appropriate that I should be involved in the conservation of Harris Manchester College’s copy David Robert’s Sketches of the Holy Land and Syria along with its companion volume for Egypt and Nubia.

Based on drawings made by Roberts during his travels in the region in 1839, this impressively proportioned elephant folio volume is lavishly illustrated with some exceptionally fine and evocative lithographs of significant sites in the region. The image of as yet un-excavated monuments such as the Sphinx are quite remarkable, and let us see very clearly an area that in some cases has changed beyond all recognition or ancient sites that are, alas, no longer there. This is the second copy of this book that I have conserved and it never fails to be a fascinating object to work on, such is the intricacy and perfect perspective of Roberts’s work and the beauty and precision of the lithographs.

For Christmas I bring you Roberts’s drawing of the the Shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Although not the most beautiful or exciting image it is definitely the most appropriate for the time of year. I wish you and all my clients past and present a very merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful New Year.

 

My many thanks to Harris Manchester College Library for allowing me to use the image. 

Trust trainees to do a good job

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

This week, I have been fortunate to work with Poppy Garrett, one of the museum trainees at The Wordsworth Trust.

Poppy came to my studio to learn about handling and cleaning methods in preparation for working with me on the conservation and fasciculing of a large and significant Wordsworth Trust archive collection. The items we were working with during the training were very generously provided by the archive of The Salters’ Company who were pleased to have Poppy and myself treating a collection that otherwise may have not be cleaned in this year’s conservation schedule.

The collection in question was a box of petitions for assistance, dating from 1805. These documents detail the requests for financial help received by the Salters’, mainly due to hardship and unemployment. As you can see, they made good subjects for cleaning training, with plenty of historical storage surface dirt for Poppy to tackle.

 

 

 

 

We started with making a dusting box, an essential piece of kit to control the spread of eraser crumbs and dirt, moved through to cleaning with a latex sponge, brush and vinyl eraser, including grated eraser, and finished with a couple of simple and straightforward tear repairs. We also managed to fit in a quick tutorial on the best way to adhere bookplates, something that Poppy was going to be doing in the coming week.

 

 

 

 

It was great to work with Poppy, who picked up the techniques really quickly and had a good awareness of how to handle and support these often fragile and damaged items during the cleaning process.

My thanks to the The Wordsworth Trust and to The Salters’ Company for supporting Poppy’s training with me. We have an excellent collections care professional in the making!

Read all about it!

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is:

Do you get distracted by reading what is in the documents and books you work on?

I have to confess that yes, sometimes I do, particularly where there is a human element to the text such as photographs or, in the case of this object, some wonderful insights into a previous version of Britain with many differences but some striking similarities to our lives now.

I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to conserve a copy of The Times dating from Thursday 7 November in 1805.  As anyone with a heart of oak will tell you, October 1805 was when the Battle of Trafalgar took place – in fact, 212 years ago to the day of me posting this. How things have changed – from broadsheets and broadsides to blog posts and drone strikes.

 

 

 

 

 

The condition of the object was very poor, as is to be expected from newsprint even back in 1805. This was right at the beginning of wood being introduced into paper pulp. Although wood wasn’t used extensively in newsprint until slightly later in the nineteenth century, it is likely that this object, given its browned and fragile paper structure, contained low quality fibres and a weak and possibly acidic size. It had extensive ingrained surface dirt and was split and torn along the fold lines and in several separate pieces, making handling, let alone, reading impossible. But it was clear that it was all there – tantalising for its owner, who was keen to read all about it.

 

 

 

 

 

The treatment was fairly straightforward. After gentle surface cleaning using a very light touch due to the fragility of the paper, the paper structure was strengthened with an application of a low-aqueous surface size. This had the additional benefit of flattening out the curled and folded areas, allowing better repair.  All the splits, tears and losses were repaired using a toned Japanese tissue and dilute wheatstarch paste as an adhesive. The paste was applied to the repair tissue on a blotter to reduce over-wetting and the risk of localised staining.

 

 

 

 

The treatment revealed the full text for the first time, and with it some glimpses of a world both very different and strangely similar to today. The newspaper was in a typical format for its time: classifieds on the outer pages and the main story in the centre spread. The account of the battle was suitably heroic and florid, and rather out of step with war reporting today, with plenty of blow-by-blow action to keep readers informed and entertained. But what was most charming were the advertisements.  Solutions to bilious disorders, genteel youths requiring a situation and lost dogs: the conservation has enabled these very human, and familiar, stories to continue to be told and enjoyed.  Let’s hope poor Basto was found and returned to his owner.

 

 

 

 

 

As always, permission has been sought for the inclusion of this project and images.

All that’s gold may not glitter

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

I have recently been fortunate to work on two book conservation projects which, to outward appearances, concern the conservation of quite humble bindings. However, these modest objects have great significance and importance to their owners. Both are well-used and well-loved family heirlooms, and their conservation has ensured they can be passed on and enjoyed by future generations of the families concerned.

The first project was to conserve a well-thumbed, and judging by the fantastic array of stains and accretions on the pages, well-used cookbook of handwritten recipes, passed down from mother to daughter and then to grand daughter. The recipes themselves are fantastic – who wouldn’t want to eat Orange Velvet, Sticky Bread or Creme a la Russe? – and are both carefully written and fully indexed.  They are also a record of friendships and family relationships, with recipes being named as a particular person’s recipe. The binding was a simple, off the shelf stationery binding with a cloth cover, which I suspect had been covered with sticky back plastic at some stage as a means of keeping it clean and durable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The textblock was breaking down, and the pages themselves had clear evidence of water damage – this is a hard-working cookbook after all.  As well as bleeding to the media, this had led to softening and losses to some of the pages. The binding itself was cracked and split, with the spine exhibiting the worst of the damage.

After repair and resewing, the textblock and binding have been returned to functionality, ready for the next generation of budding cooks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We all have significant books from our childhood, texts that we never forget and are almost like constant companions throughout our lives.  The second project was to conserve just such a book, passed from father to daughter and enjoyed by both.

 

 

 

 

This cloth case binding was showing classic damage from being a well-loved book, with a detached upper board and some minor splits and tears to the textblock from over-zealous and excited page turning. It was important to make sure the repair to the binding and the reinstated upper joint was as in keeping with the binding as possible – such books are like well-known faces, and any difference in appearance will jar and be very obvious. Through careful toning the new joint is as invisible as possible, and in keeping with the overall fading of the covering textile.

 

 

 

 

 

As always, permission has been sought for the inclusion of these projects and images. 

Pick a number, 1 to 8

/ Victoria Stevens ACR Library and Archive Conservation and Preservation Ltd.

The fasciculing of a selection of manuscript material at The Wordsworth Trust was completed with an enjoyable tooling session, putting the finishing touches to this part of an ongoing rehousing project.

 

 

 

 

Fasciculing is a effective means of storing primarily single sheet  or bifolia material, such as correspondence collections, with the maximum support and security whilst minimising handing of the original object.  Fascicules are slim pamphlet bindings constructed like a guard book, with compensation guards to allow for the bulk of the inserted material. The individual items are hinged onto to the support sheets with a Japanese paper guard tipped very narrowly onto the verso, allowing a wide border around each item for turning  the pages. These hinges can easily be removed and replaced should the item be required for display purposes. The individual fascicules can then be stored in boxes, keeping the items inside flat, secure and dust-free.

The image shows me tooling the reference number onto the fascicule covers so that the correct volume can be retrieved from each box as and when it is required for research, again to minimise the handling of the collection.

 

As always, permission has been sought for the inclusion of these images.