Some small booklets from the 1820s recently came to the Lab to be cleaned and prepared for digitization at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Ashleigh, our Conservator, noticed a couple of them had a small loop of string attached in the upper left hand corner.
Well, the booklets are all copies of “Freeman’s Almanack”. Before the days of smart phone calendars and weather apps, before the days of catching the weather on the radio or TV, people had almanacs. In fact some people still use them today, though these days their scope has expanded and some of them can be many hundreds of pages, depending on the information they contain. Back in the 1800s they usually looked like small magazines. Published yearly, they contained articles and snippets of wit and wisdom the publishers thought their target audience (often farmers) might enjoy. Most important though were the tables, usually organized to represent a calendar month, giving times for sunrise and sunset, astronomical highlights such as eclipses, church festivals, planting dates, and what kind of weather to expect.
So what about the loops?
Well, the almanac would be something a 19th Century family might refer to often, perhaps even daily. Where do you put such a thing in your home so everyone can grab it quickly when they need it? You hang it on a nail of course! How do you do that? You make a little hole in the top left corner of the booklet, you run some string or thread through the hole to make a loop, and you pop the loop over the nail.
Problem (and mystery) solved!
Veronica Sorcher (PLCH) – Conservation Technician
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Prepping for a Shift
Stack shifts and moves are an inevitability in libraries. Collections change. Spaces change, more often than not becoming too small for the collection(s). And in the end a shift of collections is imminent. For most collections these stack shifts do not require the intervention of a conservation lab. Periodical bindings moving to another floor? It happens all the time and that’s that. But when special collection items are shifted or moved, the Preservation Lab generally plays a part. So when UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library decided to move and shift the bulk of their oversized special collections between stack levels the Lab was contacted to play a part in the prep work.
The plan? To measure and box as many unstable or unwieldy oversized books that will be moving between floors or shifting within narrow, restrictive shelving stacks before the move in April. In order to keep our current workflow of treatments (both general circulating and special collections) for both institutions going, it was decided that a couple of lab staff would measure the books on-site (ARB Library), have corrugated enclosures created through our commercial bindery vendor, and then as the boxes were received the staff would match up the books with the boxes. Three staff members, Holly Prochaska (librarian), Veronica Sorcher (technician), and myself, took on the duty of assessing the books and taking measurements for those we felt could easily hinder the move or be damaged further by handling and moving.
Measuring in the stacks and making do with the space you have.
At this point we are about half way through the process. We’ve measured over 750 books for enclosures! We enlisted one of our trusty student assistants to record all the data so that we could send it off to the commercial binder. The first batch of 150 boxes arrived and were matched up with the books earlier this week. And luckily, our error rate was actually very low, even with that first batch where we were still figuring out the kinks of measuring in confined spaces and often dim lighting!
What’s the workflow like? Each person has list of numbers that correspond to the number the binder prints on the inside of the enclosure, per our request. For each number, the staff member records the call number (to be printed on the spine of the box), along with the height, width and thickness of the book. A flag with that number written on it (in pencil, of course) is then placed in the book so that it is visible on the shelf and clearly recognizable when matching the boxes to the books. So far, the process has worked pretty well.
What kinds of things are we prepping for storage and handling? Prime candidates for move-prep housing include…
- Any book previously tied with cotton tying tape, usually to hold a detached/loose board or textblock in place.
In this case, boards were detached from the spine/textblock. But let’s just talk about the reason I really took a photo of this book on Christopher Columbus…the anchor clasps and catches! How cool are those?
- Any book with loose, detached, or protruding parts that could be abraded, damaged further, or lost during the move.
When I originally pulled this book off the shelf the measure it the corner was nowhere to be found, but I found it a couple shelves down resting on top of another book.
- Any extremely fragile or flimsy books, including extremely oversized, thin bindings or bindings with fragile paper or degraded leather covers.
This full leather binding must have been fire damaged at some point. The leather on the spine was so fragile and would crack and break if you looked at it the wrong way.
- The evil monster known as RED ROT!
Obviously not all books with red rot were boxed, especially those with very minor cases. But books like this, where the movers and every book in the surrounding area would be covered in a red layer of degraded leather…those get boxes!
If you’re interested in seeing more snapshots from our adventures of measuring in ARB, check out the Preservation Lab’s Instagram, here.
Jessica Ebert (UCL) – Conservation Technician