This book was severely water-damaged as part
of the flood and you can sort of see the way that the covering cloth on the book is warped
and no longer attached. So what we’re going to do for exhibit is
to very carefully take it apart. These original sewing threads are going to
stay in the box with the book. We were very fortunate to be able to hire
two conservators and two conservation technicians to carry out the treatments and all of the
aspects of the documentation that needs to be done. This is a ring binder from the Frank Iny School. There’s about 200 of these ring binders. Almost all of them got wet during the flooding. So we have to remove them from what’s left
of the ring binder, which is not much. Most of our collection has a lot of mold on
it, this actually appears to be caked-on soil. One of the most unique things about this book
are the hand-drawn illustrations in the front of what appears to be mythical creatures,
a griffin. And luckily we found what appears to be the
missing section of this illustration that the conservators will then reattach. There is a librarian on the team and her role
is critical because she has language skills and also the bibliographic knowledge that
others on the team don’t have. This is the oldest book that we found in the
collection. The Book of Writings or, in Hebrew, the Book
of Ketuvim. It’s just a really lovely book. It’s held up really well for being over
400 years old. This is the text of the Book of Psalms, and
then surrounding it on this side is the commentary of the medieval rabbi Ibn Ezra. We’ve already done mold removal with a HEPA
filter vacuum but there’s still some more deeply embedded surface grime on the paper
that I’d like to clean up before we start washing. What I’m using for surface cleaning is a
kind of a sponge called a soot sponge or a chemical sponge. It was developed for cleaning soot or ash
off of fire-damaged materials. The title page is currently in three pieces. So with this book we’re going to vacuum
it to get the mold off of it, disassemble it. It’ll look much more complete when it’s
finished. You can really see the water damage, possibly
from the flood in Baghdad. I’m hoping that the bath will reduce or
eliminate this tide line. We only have four or five sections in the
bath already but you can see that the discoloration is coming out into the water. I have never washed a book this gross before. The easiest way to get all of the pieces to
unfold, lay flat and fit together is to line it with a very thin Japanese tissue and paste. You have to test the media, all the different
inks on the page to make sure that they aren’t going to run or get damaged. So the first test is to take a very thin piece
of blotter, wet it up with a dot of water and blot against the ink. And as you progressively get a larger and
larger area with solvent you’ll see if the ink is reactive. There are a lot of revenue stamps in the collection
that got loose when the water event happened. If we can figure out where they are we replace
them with methyl cellulose as we go so that we don’t lose them. Then we do mold remediation, flatten them,
put them in doc boxes and folders and then they get scanned. The first step to doing a wet lining is spraying
up the paper so that everything is very relaxed. So that I can align all of the tears and get
all of the pieces to fit back where they originally were. This is a precipitated wheat starch paste. The next step is brushing this very thin tissue
out. I lay the tissue paper down on the object
and then I squeeze out all of the air bubbles and most of the excess water. After I turn it over I can remove the Hollytex
that I had been using as a support. And then I bring a blotter over to remove
the excess moisture and start the drying process. The entire book went through five baths and
the final bath had almost no yellow so I knew that most of the acidic contamination had
been washed out of the book. I can already see that the very dramatic tide
line that was there when we started the bath is gone. After washing it and mending it and repairing
all the folds it’s finally strong enough to be rebuilt as it was originally. This is a traditional sewing frame and it’s
a way of holding the linen cords in perfectly straight lines so that you can sew each gathering
of the book onto them. When a book is sewn of course the threads
are up inside the fold of each gathering. And so a book is fatter at the spine than
it is in the rest of the text block. And what that does is it makes the book kind
of wedge shaped. So in traditional book binding the text block
is further shaped in what’s called a job backer, this machine. I’m looking to make certain that the book
is swelling evenly from both sides. I’m not going to do that much shaping on
the book because my book is old and fragile. After mold remediation we took the illustrated
frontispiece. These pieces will be moved back into their
location based on the lines of the illustration, mended on the back side. We have numerous bags of fragments containing
everything imaginable in this collection. And we sifted through all of the fragments
but unfortunately we didn’t find any more of the illustration. But it took us about 20 hours just to go through
them. Now it’s dry and the tissue is holding all
of the three pieces together. I’m going to go in and fill these losses,
here and here and the holes here. In order to get all of the custom fills for
these losses we make what we call a map. And it’s on mylar and that is what we use
to put tissue on top of and cut out all of these tiny fibers. On exhibit this will look like it is a whole
piece of paper. So this is the book almost completely done
the last stage will be to put on the title. And it’s been cased in to a new case with
new end papers. And this is the page that will be exhibited,
the title page. The National Archives has truly devoted years
to this project. It’s really been a labor of love for a lot
of people who have wanted to see this material transformed and made widely available.
