Category Archives: Book arts

Nests and Eggs on Display at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra

Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio are on display at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra March 1st and 2nd as part of a musical program honoring Oliver Messiaen who was both a major composer of the 20th century and an ornithologist.

Synesthesia

Oliver Messiaen is well known for studying bird songs and interpreting their notes into musical transcriptions. His works are also unique in that Messiaen experienced synesthesia which greatly influenced his creations. Synesthesia is when a person perceives more than one sense at a time, such as Messiaen who experienced colors when listening to music and was able to see sounds. 

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Program

The program at the CSO honors Messiaen by incorporating both music, color, and bird visuals to invite the audience to experience a unique multi-sensory experience. Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (“From the Canyons to the Stars”) will be performed  by the conductor, Matthias Pintscher, and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Click the image for a link to the digital program for the CSO Proof: From the Canyons to the Stars

“Inspired by his visits to Utah’s Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (“From the Canyons to the Stars”) depicts the birdsong and red rock hues he experienced during his time in the desert… Accompanied by immersive video-art, Springer Auditorium will be transformed, allowing listeners to escape into the southwestern landscape and experience a synesthesia of their own.” – As described by the CSO website

Nests and Eggs

Complementing the musical performances, on display will be a page from Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s Illustrations of the nests and eggs.  The page showcases a local Ohio native, the Wood Thrush, who lays bright blue colored eggs within a nest made of old leaves, dried grasses and moss (rarely sticks).  The nest of the Wood Thrush also contains “rootlets” placed intentionally inside of the nest, resulting in a pinkish brown or black lining. The nest is “plastered” with a thin mud that is easily missed as it’s thoroughly worked in and covered.

Nests and Eggs, while lesser known than Audubon’s Birds of America, is quite extraordinary in how it highlights the uniqueness of the construction of nests made by different bird species. Take for instance, the Baltimore Oriole’s nest, which primarily consists of strings and flax fibers to create a soft and long pocket.  Compare that to the more traditional nest of the Wood Thrush whose home is bowl-shaped with a wide opening.

Baltimore Oriole – Plate 1
Wood Thrush – Plate II

It’s also extraordinary that the illustrations are detailed lithographic portraits created by Gabrielle Estelle Jones and her family, despite not having been formally trained.  Their work was intended to be used as a companion volume to John James Audubon’s Birds of America.  While not as large as the Birds of America double elephant folios, Eggs and Nests is still an impressively large-sized volume. 

Gabrielle “Gennie” Estelle Jones

The following excerpt was written by Sara Williams, Arts & Special Collections Reference Librarian:

Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio was a project begun by Genevieve Estelle Jones, a native of Circleville, Ohio. Born May 13, 1847, Genevieve, or Gennie, spent much time as a young girl birdwatching in the woods and wetlands with her father, an amateur ornithologist. Just before the age of 30, Jones’ father forbade her from marrying the man she loved, and in 1876, she visited the Centennial World’s Fair in Philadelphia to take her mind off her broken heart. While there, she viewed hand-colored engravings from John James Audubon’s vibrant The Birds of America. Inspired by Audubon’s example, Jones set out to illustrate the nests and eggs of birds, an aspect often missing from his work. Jones completed only five illustrations for her book before she died of typhoid at the age of 32. The work was eventually completed by Genevieve Jones’ family. Only 90 copies of the book were published, of which only 34 are currently known to exist.  

Preservation

As part of the Preservation Lab’s role in displaying the object, a condition report book was created to accompany the item to ensure the object’s condition is preserved. This helps those who are installing anticipate any possible challenges in supporting fragile pages or bindings. In this case, the upper endsheets are extremely brittle and have been previously repaired, but could break again if not carefully draped and held with polyester strapping in a safe manner.

After determining a proper exhibit case to fit and secure the binding, a custom cradle was made. To protect weak points of the binding on display, a support was constructed out of 8 ply museum mat board to support the heavy and oversized pages from stress along the joint.  

Solutions were tested to fit within an 18 inch deep case, however, the book was just too large!
A custom 8 ply mat board cradle was created to fit within a more appropriate 4 ft case. Pages are strapped with polyester strapping

Before an object travels, it’s often reviewed to make sure it can handle transport and treated if necessary.  Luckily, in this case, the binding was treated in 2016 and is still in great condition for its age.  When it received treatment, at that time it received a lightweight yet strong enclosure that will also work well to safely protect the item for travel to the CSO.

Corrugated banker’s box with a drop spine houses the Nests and Eggs book. Binding and exhibit labels are ready for packing.
A 4-foot case was kindly loaned to the CSO from the Behringer-Crawford Museum and is ready for use! (Image credit: Amber Ostaszewski)
  • Entrance to the Founder’s Room
  • Bird sounds were played in the entryway
  • During staging of the exhibit
  • Nests and eggs on display in the Founder’s Room
  • The Founder’s Room
  • Night of the performance
  • Entering the theatre
  • Not visible are the camping chairs and fire pits in the orchestra pit

Additional Resources

Interested in seeing more Nests and Eggs?  The entire binding is conserved and digitized where it is made publicly available online. More information about Gennie’s fascinating and tragic history can be read at the Linda Hall website.

CSO Program Dates

There are two programs where you can view the item on display, Friday, March 1st and Saturday, March 2nd, both at 8pm at the Music Hall. Interested? Click here for the digital program.

We hope to see you there!

Ashleigh Ferguson Schieszer [CHPL] – Book and Paper Conservator, Co-Lab Manager

What ſay you! A brief look at the “long s” and its usage

Introduction To The Long S

I was recently building an enclosure for a book dating back to 1681 entitled The Experienced Farrier. While examining this item I noticed something interesting about the spelling of certain words: often, rather than seeing what normally should be the letter “s” I would see what appeared to be the letter “f.”

Figure 1: An image from The Experienced Farrier, containing what appears to be “strange” spellings.

Since noticing this, I started seeing these seemingly bizarre spellings in other items dating to this period, as can be seen in the title page from a copy of Don Quixote from 1678.

Figure 2: An image of the text from Don Quixote, with further examples of these “strange” spellings.

Identifying The Long S

After some sleuthing, I discovered something interesting: these letters were not “f”s at all. They were a now defunct character known as the “long s.” Closer examination of these letters in the text showed that, although they closely resembled an “f,” the horizontal cross bar did not extend all the way across the letter; it starts on the left side and ends in the middle.

Figure 3: A close-up of the word “most” that uses the “long s.” Note that the horizontal cross bar stops at the center stem of the letter.
Figure 4: The “long s” (left) as compared to a lowercase “f” (right).

This solved some of the mystery, but what about the characters that looked like an “f” where the bottom of it curves to the left?

Figure 5: Another style of the “long s,” depicted as it would appear in cursive handwriting.

The answer is that this is also a “long s,” but depicted how it was written in cursive. If you feel like you’ve seen this character before, you’re probably correct: a notable example of this style of “long s” can be found in the first line of the Bill of Rights. Some may also recognize this character from calculus as the “integral” symbol.

Figure 6: The “long s” that occurs in the word “Congress” as it appears in the handwritten Bill of Rights.
Figure 7: The “integral” symbol used in calculus uses the same character used for the cursive-style “long s.”

When The Long S Was Used

You may have noticed in some of these examples that not every “s” is the long form. So, what exactly were the rules for when and where this character was used?

It’s difficult to say exactly, as the rules changed over time and writers/printers didn’t always adhere to the same rules. However, according to a blog from the National Archives, some simple guidelines for when and where the “long s” was used are as follows:

  • An “s” would use the long form if it appeared at the beginning or in the middle of a word, but only if it is a lowercase s. An uppercase S would not use the long form of the letter.
  • An “s” would not use the long form if it was the last letter in a word.
  • It was very common in the case of a “double s” or “ss”, as in the word “opossum”, for both “s”s to be the long form (opoſſum), unless the “ss” ended the word, as in the word “congress”, in which only the first “s” would be the long form (congreſs). *

*An observant reader may notice that this last rule is redundant given the first two rules; however, mentioning the “long s” in the case of an “ss” is significant in that as this character fell out of favor with writers/printers, one of the last remaining circumstances that utilized it was in the case of an “ss.”

Figure 8: Examples of when the “long s” was/was not used.

Final Observations

Gradually, the “long s” fell out of usage around the time of the late 1700’s-1820’s, although it persisted longer in handwriting. Serendipitously, while writing this blog post, the lab received a first edition copy of Goblin’s Market with a handwritten note inside from the author, Christina Rossetti dating to 1862 that features this use even in the late 19th century:

Figure 9: Although difficult to read, this is the word success (ſucceſs) from a handwritten note dating to 1862 that utilizes the “long s” several decades after it fell out of common usage in printed media.

If you still find words containing a “long s” difficult to read, you aren’t alone; it has been theorized that it was phased out in favor of exclusive “short s” usage as they weren’t as easily confused with other letters and were found to be more legible. The disappearance of the “long s” is a good reminder that language, both written and spoken is fluid with ever evolving rules and norms.

Resources

For further information about the long s and its history be sure to check out these excellent blog posts, that were very helpful in the gathering of information for this post:

Matt McCoy, Conservation Specialist [CHPL]

Book Arts in the Lab

This semester the Preservation Lab is collaborating with the English department and Associate Professor Gary Weissman to teach ENGL 3097 – Book Arts. The experiential learning portion of the course is taught in the Preservation Lab by Holly Prochaska, with much assistance from Jessica Ebert, Catarina Figueirinhas, and Hyacinth Tucker. The course offers students a foundation in the history of the codex, artists’ books, and zines, as well as a hands-on introduction to paper making, bookbinding, and printing.

Last week the students finally got their hands on our beloved board-shears while making a tux box to house the many models they constructed during the course.

It has been a fun and rewarding spring thanks to the enthusiasm of our 12 students!

Students learning to use a board shear
Students measuring and folding a tux box enclosure.
Students measuring and folding a tux box enclosure, other half of class.

If you are interested in learning more about the experiential learning portion of the Book Arts curriculum, please reach out to holly.prochaska@uc.edu.

Holly Prochaska (UCL) — Preservation Librarian

How to Make a Collapsible Punching Cradle: New Video on Our YouTube Channel

We’ve reached the end of Preservation Week and what better way to celebrate than with a fun how-to video on our Lab’s YouTube channel?!

This video goes over how to make a collapsible punching cradle, step-by-step. Punching cradles are a useful bookbinding tool to have on hand in your toolbox. They allow you to create uniform sewing stations in your signatures or gatherings when you are preparing to sew a textblock. Best of all, this type of punching cradle is fully collapsible and easy to store while not in use; especially when you make one of these simple slipcases to hold all the pieces.

Here you can see a collapsed punching cradle stored in a paper slipcase made with marbled paper (left) and a punching cradle assembled and ready for use (right).

Don’t forget to “like” our video and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay in the loop when we post new videos to the channel. If you decide to make your own punching cradle, we’d love to know what you thought of the video or, even better, tag us in a photo of it on Instagram (@thepreservationlab).

We hope you’ve enjoyed celebrating Preservation Week 2021 with us! We look forward to celebrating our 11th annual Preservation Week next year…maybe even in person this time?!

Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Tech & Photographic Documentation Specialist

Button Hole Stitch Binding

Every year our staff, students and volunteers look forward to our Student & Volunteer Appreciation day, which we affectionately call “fun day”. It generally takes place in late November or early December, always before finals week. It is a time to show our appreciation for all the hard work our students, volunteers and staff do throughout the year, while having an opportunity to come together and learn some new bookbinding or book arts technique. In the past, we’ve done paper marbling, made handmade paper, created German long stitch binds, and more.

I have been coordinating our student & volunteer appreciation days for almost as long as I’ve been in the Lab, so for at least 12 years now. I love it because I am the type of person who enjoys planning these types of things, but also I love watching a student, volunteer or staff member just get really excited about something new. You never know if it’s going to be that quiet new volunteer who just can’t get enough of paper marbling, or that student who doesn’t have any art background but just does the most amazing pulp paintings ever! So after all these years, the thought of 2020/the pandemic ruining everything and not having any sort of student/volunteer appreciation day was just unacceptable!

I immediately thought, “What types of activities could we do virtually that would be no cost to the lab and would give everyone a couple hours to come together and decompress?” After a little brainstorming with Holly, we came up with a Button Hole Stitch binding (which I had recently learned) and a simple dissolving view. With the help of my wonderful student staff member and cohort buddy, Lexie, I prepped kits for our virtual event, as well as prepared a step by step video on creating a button hole stitch binding.

Here are some of the beautiful creations that came out of our little virtual fun day:

  • Dissolving view
  • Dissolving view
  • Dissolving view
  • Dissolving view

If you would like to make your own Button Hole Stitch book check out our video on the Preservation Lab MediaSpace channel:

For the dissolving view we used Green Chair Press’ handy template, which you can find here in their blog post on dissolving views.

Jessica Ebert [UCL] – Conservation Tech/Photographic Documentation Specialist/Student Supervisor

Model making: Italian stationery bind, laminated archival bind

Admittedly the title of this blog is a bit dry, but whenever I see the phrase stationery binding my eyes dart and the corners of my mouth start to move upward. Since trying my hand at an accounting book at Paper and Book Intensive 2017 in Chela Metzger’s workshop Early Modern Record-Keeping Book Structures, I have enjoyed learning more about their variations, creating historical models, and using the form as an inspiration for artist’s books.

After digging into Katherine Beaty’s essay Tackets, Buckles, and Overbands: Italian Stationery Bindings of the HBS Medici Family Collectionthe in the latest volume of Suave Mechanicals (http://www.thelegacypress.com/suave-mechanicals-vol-6.html), I decided to attempt a model of the second largest laminated archival bind. Beaty’s essay provides excellent descriptions of the various accounting books within the Medici collection, helping guide me in the construction of the model and filling in large gaps in my knowledge.

Katherine Beaty’s essay is not a “how to” manual, so all the errors and false assumptions that present themselves in the final model are mine alone. Making this at home with materials I had on-hand provided some challenges, so there are some missteps in terms of historical accuracy. But, in the end I’ll give the final product solid B for effort! And I had a great time making it.

Laminated leather archival binding with buckle fastening, size 34 x 27 cm.

I would love to make the next model better, so shoot me and email (holly.prochaska@uc.edu) with tips and corrections. Here is a somewhat rough draft of my instructions – proceed with joy and caution – https://drive.google.com/file/d/10sXW-dRi1XO6cVS8S-5CPBUHH8G_wpMX/view?usp=sharing

Holly Prochaska (UCL) —- Preservation Librarian

Book Arts Course and Remote Learning

As mentioned in an earlier post, this Spring the Preservation Lab is partnering with the English Department to co-teach Book Arts (ENG3097), with the Lab staff leading the hands-on experiential learning portion of the course. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all courses needed to move to a remote learning curriculum for the remainder of the semester. So far one of the biggest challenges has been student access to supplies and materials – papers, leathers, book cloths, etc.

In recognition of this obstacle, I created four different books using the same series of black and white 8.5″x11″ laser prints as the base structure. Ideally the exercise communicates the advantages and disadvantages of each form in expressing my loose narrative, and shows the variety of structures that can be achieved using cheap printer paper. The four structures used are – snake book, accordion with pocket, volvelle inside a scene, and Hedi Kyle’s pocket-link book.

Base images for the snake book and accordion with pockets. I added some color using watercolor pencils.

First up, an exploration of the snake book.

  • (FRONT) The snake book requires the image to be cut into small sections along a circuitous route.
  • (REVERSE)
(FOLDED) Because the snake book has folds that go every which way, it is hard to understand the overall image, without unfolding it completely. There are few opportunities to provide additional text or images if this is viewed, or interacted with, as a traditional book.

I’d say that the snake book isn’t a successful structure for my image. Next, let’s try the accordion with pockets.

(OUTSIDE) Cutting the 8.5×11 sheet in half and pasting it together at the short edge, an 8 panel accordion was created.
(INSIDE) By folding the outside bottom of the accordion towards the inside, a small pocket is created. In the pocket I placed images of items found in my house…that’s why these two little examples are titled “Household Objects.”

The accordion seems to work better for my image. The outside image is clearer and easier to interpret and the inside blank space provides room to tell a story.

Next, using the same base image, I incorporate two techniques that we covered in class – the construction of volvelles and the use of pochoir (adding color with stencils).

  • (FRONT) A double sided-volvelle. The front side poses a question or makes an observation.
  • (BACK) The back side makes a statement on the same topic, but is perhaps a little grim.

Musings on staying at home these past three weeks turn a little grim in this small (8″x7″) scene with an internal volvelle. Turn the wheel and two conversations take place, one on the front and the other on the back, both a bleak internal dialog. The paper dolls are on Neenah UV/ultra translucent paper allowing much of the background drawing to show through, giving the impression of haunting or drifting, not being fully present. These dolls line-up and are sewn together with small pamphlet stitches, with the printer paper substrate in between.

  • Watercolor paints and stencils, a quick way to make multiple color prints.

The last book builds upon the volvelle scene, expanding the content and transforming it into a traditional codex using the pocket-link structure. The structure has pockets created by the way the pages are linked, you can see them on the left side of the double spreads. I’ll be filling these pockets with mementos of my time haunting my house.

Click on this LINK, or the image below, to flip through the book – Ghost in my home.

All four of these books are just models, but I think they all have potential! Maybe you do too and want to try your hand at these simple forms. If so, check out these “how to” links on snake book, accordion book, and volvelle inside a scene. [Unfortunately, I don’t have an authorized set of instructions for the pocket-link structure to share.]

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little diversion into book arts and wishing you well…

Holly Prochaska (UCL) —- Preservation Librarian