How a one-of-a-kind 1850s record book is professionally conserved

• Bexx Caswell-Olson is the book-conservation director at the Northeast Document Conservation Center.
• She shows us how to restore a 170-year-old marriage record book.
• This includes washing the pages, mending any tears, and reassembling the book.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: I'm Bexx Caswell-Olson, and I am the director of book conservation at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. Today I'm going to walk you through how my team conserves a 170-year-old book. This item is a record book that was created between 1850 and 1913, and it contains marriage records for a town in Massachusetts. Everything in this book is written out by hand, and these records haven't been copied or digitized. This is the only place where this information exists, and this is really important historical information. The cover is torn in the joints, and so the front and back covers are really at risk at falling off. The sewing that holds the pages together is broken, and so there are some pages that have already become loose. That puts them at risk of being lost or damaged. And then the ink that was used to write this book is suffering from iron gall ink corrosion, which will eventually cause the ink to fracture and the paper to just be eaten away by the ink.

The pages of this book got dirty over time, lots of people handling it, but also heating your house with a fireplace or coal produced a lot of soot, and that ends up transferring to the book pages. The first step in the conservation treatment is surface cleaning using a dry-cleaning technique. If you don't surface clean first, of course, when you mix water and dirt, you get mud, and you don't want that on the pages of your book. We use a soft brush to remove dirt from the gutter of the book, and then the pages are cleaned with a latex sponge. This isn't a sponge that you would use wet. It's something that you use dry, and it very gently removes surface dirt without causing abrasions or leaving behind any kind of residue.

Next, we disbind the book. So that means that we remove the cover and the spine. We are using a nice sharp knife. The cover and the spine are going to be saved, because we're going to reuse them later on in the repair. After the cover is removed, we use a methylcellulose poultice to clean any old adhesives from the spine of the text block. Those old adhesives are quite aged. They've hardened, they've darkened, and so we want to remove them before we proceed with taking the book apart and washing. We're going to let that sit under a piece of Saran Wrap for a few minutes to sort of soften the adhesive, and then we can scrape it off. We'll just sort of gently scrape it off with a metal spatula. After the spine lining and any old adhesives have been removed, we can proceed with removing the sewing and separating the gatherings of pages from one another. Old paper can be very fragile, and so each stitch of sewing needs to be removed gently to avoid causing damage.

Before the pages can come in contact with moisture of any kind, we want to test the inks to make sure that they can withstand that. And we also want to test the iron gall ink for the presence of free-iron irons. If it tests positive for that, that means the ink is corroding and we need to take some extra steps to slow that process down. The inks in this book did test positive, which means we're going to be treating it later on. I know that washing paper sounds kind of scary, but if done properly, it's very safe. Each page is placed on top of a piece of non-woven polyester fabric, and that's going to provide support for the paper while it's in the bath. And then we spray it with a 50-50 solution of water and ethanol. This helps to relax the paper and open up the paper fibers. After about 10 or 20 minutes, the tray is drained, and you can see a lot of discoloration will come out in the first bath. So the water will be quite yellow. We'll repeat that process and change the water until the water runs clear. After washing is complete, we'll do another bath in a calcium phytate solution to stabilize the iron gall links. Then we can rinse them with filtered water and move on to the next step.

Because any sizing in the paper was removed during the washing process, we need to resize it. This helps to add strength to the paper and also provide some additional protection for the inks. We use a diluted gelatin solution, which is applied to the damp pages in a thin, even layer. The sized pages are then placed onto felts to air-dry in our drying rack, and after drying, we can proceed with mending. To mend the paper, we use a paste made from purified wheat starch, and we mix that with water and cook it while stirring constantly. And this gives us a really nice, strong adhesive that can be reversed with water. And then to make the paste even smoother, it's thinned out with water and strained through a sieve. Tears are repaired with wheat paste and handmade Japanese paper. This paper is very thin, but very strong. We also need to reinforce spine folds to repair any breaks or weak areas along the spine fold before we proceed with resewing.

Once all the mending is completed, the text block is reassembled and then put in a press overnight to flatten it. Before we resew the book is the best time to send it off to our digital imaging department, where it can be digitized. After imaging, the text block is then resewn with linen thread, which is very, very strong. After the book is sewn, the spine is pasted up with wheat paste, and that's going to help the book hold its shape. The spine of the book gets pushed into sort of a rounded shape with a backing hammer. And then we put it into a job backer, where we back it so it kind of gives it a little bit more of that curved shape that you're used to seeing in a hardcover book. Next, we need to add a paper spine lining directly to the spine of the book. This is going to help it hold its shape and prevent the book from opening too sharply after the binding is complete.

While the spine linings dry, we can go ahead and prepare the covers. And since we're reusing the original covers in this repair, we need to lift the material on the outside of the board. Then we can reattach the covers by inserting the sewing supports and new spine material under that lifted leather. Once we've got all that dry, we can go ahead and work on the inside of the cover. And then, last but not least, we can go back and touch up any areas that are glaringly white and do any toning to kind of help the repair blend as much as possible. And we'll look at the item in both artificial and natural light to get a really good idea of whether or not that color is accurate. After conservation, the book doesn't necessarily look much different, and that's actually kind of the point. We want to preserve as much of the original material as possible, and the goal isn't to make it look brand new. It's to make it functional, stable, and something that can be handled safely.