The conservation ofAnnotationesinLibro Evangeliorumusing a natural cloth hollow over a moulded Japanese paper spine-former

Abstract

Seventeenth century tight-back leather bookbindings, examples of which exist in many libraries in Britain and abroad, often require conservation depending on their state of preservation. A new technique has been developed and proposed for the conservation of such objects. The technique emerged from the treatment of a 1641 Amsterdam printed folio in a contemporary English tight-back trade binding from Merton College, Oxford. This paper describes the treatment applied on the specific object. This treatment used transverse linen liners to improve board hinging and the consolidation, with gelatine, of the detaching leather grain layer. Following that, the paper describes a method of supporting the consolidated, but still vulnerable, leather using a natural cloth hollow over a moulded Japanese paper spine former, enabling the spine to open as a shallow but semi-rigid arc. The moulded spine former and its construction is a new technique which offers a method of supporting and conserving similarly damaged bindings in situ. This technique offers for the first time a way of treating this type of damage. Communicating this technique to the wider book and paper conservation field has proved particularly useful as it has been adopted by a number of conservators. The importance and the novelty of the technique have been proved by its utilisation by important book and paper conservation departments nationally, including the Bodleian Library, the British Library and the V&A Museum. The adoption of the technique indicates that it could be used as a standard technique for these bindings and possibly taught in the future in relevant conservation courses.