Every once in a while a library receives a new book that needs a little something special. Sometimes it’s a pocket to hold an enclosed map or other added material, sometimes it’s a special box or enclosure, or sometimes it’s an extra page that needs to be tipped in. Recently the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County received 20 copies of the book, “S” by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. It’s unusual and highly visual, filled with things like postcards and news clippings, 22 in all, stuck in at different points as if someone had been reading it and had absent-mindedly left their impromptu bookmark between the pages. None of these ephemeral-seeming pieces are attached in any way. It’s a really neat interactive book, in fact I want a copy of my own, but having a book with numerous loose parts is definitely challenging as part of a library collection. The potential for the various pieces, all part of the book’s storyline, to be lost or misplaced is huge! In fact there was an outcry across the country as the book arrived and librarians saw the potential for chaos and disaster:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jj-abrams-mystery-book-s-654109
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Tag Archives: Veronica Sorcher
Meet the collaborative lab's new conservator!
There’s a new face in the Lab these days. Ashleigh Schieszer (pronounced She-zer), our new Conservator and Lab Manager, arrived last week. She hit the ground running just a few days after moving to Cincinnati from Los Angeles, California where she was completing her internship at the Huntington Library. Somehow, though, in the midst of the orientation sessions, getting to know her way around the Lab and meetings with managers and colleagues she found time to sit down for an interview with me.
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A Room with a View
“You have a window!”
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A Weighty Issue
One of the trickiest things about making a cloth-covered clamshell box happens at the very end when all the pieces finally go together. You’re applying a fair amount of adhesive to a fairly large surface area and the moisture in it inspires the boards of the case and the trays to want to curve. To suppress this natural tendency and make sure the pieces stick together properly we have to use a lot of weights.
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Paper, how do I cut thee? Let me count the ways…
A few years ago if someone had asked me what I cut paper with I would have said, “A pair of scissors, of course.” Then I came to the Preservation Lab.
We cut a lot of paper here. It can be in big sheets, little sheets or tiny scraps. It might be heavy or lightweight, made of short fibers like the ubiquitous wood pulp paper or long fibers such as Japanese kozo paper. We use it for different things too. Heavy board for book covers and boxes, corrugated board for different boxes, light board for folders, paper for pages or repairing spines, Japanese paper for mending tears and making hinges, newsprint for waste paper to catch adhesive overflow. With so many variables it helps to have a few options for cutting the paper.
Probably the tool we all use most often for cutting paper is a scalpel. We each have a least a couple at our work station. My go-to scalpel is the #11 which has a fine tip and straight, angular blade. The #23 with its curved edge is good too, depending on the particular task. Scalpels are great when we need to make a nice clean cut trimming excess paper from a repair, or we use them with a metal straight edge when we need to make a long cut that wouldn’t be straight enough if cut with scissors.
