Tuesday, August 24, 2010

One of the projects that we’ve just begun to address has been waiting two years. The Czech Slovak library has roughly 7500 books that were frozen post flood. They estimate that 20 % of the books are damaged beyond repair and will need to be replaced.  Nancy and I went up to meet with Dave Muhlena to get an idea of the range of material and extent of the damage to the books. We took a random sample of 19 books which I brought back to the lab to work on. This children’s book was in such bad shape I thought it would be a good example. These images are of the book in it’s post flood condition before it’s been worked on.

To flatten this book I humidified it, interleaved with 10 pt. card and put it in the press overnight. The moisture relaxed the paper and the card interleaving absorbed the excess. The pressure of the press reshaped the warped pages to lie flat again. I lined the pastedowns and endsheets with paste and thin japanese paper so I could reattach them to the text block. I made new endpapers and a new case for the cover and reattached the cover image to the front of the book. This was the result: