reading research from the 1920s is wild. Everything that is known about Southwest archaeology can be summarized in one book. The author just has to kind of guess how old anything is, but hopes that Douglass’s new discovery that tree rings record climate variation of one year per ring could potentially shed some fascinating light on the matter
Artemis BonaDea's Conservation Book Repair holds up remarkably well for being thirty years old. The usual caveats, if you would be heartbroken if it were ruined, take it to an accredited conservator. If you are up for an adventure and do not mind if it looks a bit weird, I believe in you.
Once again lamenting the fact that I am not a book/paper/paintings conservator with an extensive knowledge of chemistry and fancy equipment at my disposal.
I feel like so much focus has been put on arsenic green pigments, with just minor discussions on yellow and red (chromium, mercury, lead), almost always talking about book covers (book cloth and painted vellum/leather) or decorative endpapers.
I’ve found ONE article that mentions testing ONE green edge-painted book. That’s not a great sample. I want more info. I’m curious about the green painted book I’ve got on a shelf, and now wondering about the red edge painted books I have too…and apparently lead was commonly used for a few different things aside from pigment coloring?
Any chemist book lovers out there need a journal article or thesis idea??? Because there really needs to be more studies on other toxic pigments/chemicals used in bookbinding.
Studies in Conservation theoretically released a special issue about bibliotoxicology, but it is not actually listed in the special issues. The latest articles include an open access article about blue edges containing orpiment. There are some less open-access articles about invisible arsenic, arsenic that is not green, smalt in the paper, and health and safety, which seems likely to mention fungicides and pesticides as well. Thanks Studies in Conservation.
Anecdotally, everyone gets excited about this green book they found and sends it for testing, and it is nearly always not arsenic. When it is they are so pleased they write a paper about it. I think the red is far more likely to contain lead than the green is to contain arsenic, because it was used for so much longer. I assume that if something is red, it probably contains lead, mercury, or both, at least until aniline dyes. Pity we do not get uranium like the ceramics conservators.
There has been a recent surge in repatriation/give everything back posts in Museum Tumblr so I thought I would share a story I found out about recently.
Background; I did some volunteer work for the Canadian Museum Association that included looking pretty in depth at a few exhibitions from 2023. One of them really caught my eye because it goes into an aspect of Originating Cultural Relationships that I don't see reflected in the public sector a lot even though its not that uncommon among my coworkers.
So back in the 1860s the Prince of Wales was gifted a series of baskets from the Michi Saagiig [Mississauga] women. These were a gift and have remained in the Royal Collection Trust ever since.
It is agreed upon by all parties that the Royal Collection is doing a good job caring for the baskets. However, the baskets still represent the women, the ancestors, who made them. They are family. And the living Michi Saagiig missed their grandmothers and aunts.
So the Peterborough Museum and Archives [Peterborough Canada, not the one in the UK] worked out a temporary loan from the Royal Trust Collection to bring the ancestors back 'for a visit' to their ancestral lands of Nogojwanong-Peterborough.
This was facilitated by the Museum, but the partnership was multi way, between Hiawaitha First Nation, Mississauga Nation, Museum, and the Trust.
This exhibition ran from April to November last year and was ALWAYS meant to be a 'visit' - that language is deliberate. The baskets came home for a visit before returning to their new home in the UK.
here's an article about it
By kawarthaNOW. 'To Honour and Respect: Gifts from the Michi Saagiig Women to the Prince of Wales, 1860' exhibition at Peterborough Museum &
Now, from a layman's perspective this might seem like a small victory - the baskets, the makakoons, didn't even stay in Hiawatha which is the modern location of the village they were made in. And it was only a few months, but still cool. Still pretty neat.
But from my perspective this is MASSIVE. This means that the ROYAL FAMILY has agreed to send things home - at least on the short term. This will bring about change in British collection law. It won't be quick. But we will see more and more British institutions sending things on visits. And eventually we will see repatriation. It is going to take a very long time, and this is by no means the first rung on the ladder. But
Also the reality is that sometimes, long term loans are... really long term >_>
Like my museum has objects (from local rich people) that are catalogued as "deponointi/deponerad" (which basically means like "treated and cared for as if part of the museum's collection, owned by someone else"; no idea what this is called in English) where I'm pretty sure the legal owners of the things don't even know they own them. Like we are talking time frames of decades if not over a hundred years. We would have to do like family history research to find out the names of the current living legal owners.
So what I'm saying is... short visits can lead to long term loans can lead to "deponointi" can lead to... ">_> well we'll continue to keep it safe like we have done for decades..." Museums have a really long term view on things.
And I can't speak for colonial powers or big national museums, but from my experience in the museum field literally nobody has space for all the stuff. If we have stuff that isn't on permanent display and you have a legitimate* institution that wants to long term borrow it for your permanent exhibition, we will definitely want to talk. Because it will mean less stuff in our storage, plus you will be looking after it for us, plus it'll actually get used! Definite win-win situation here!
And obvs international long-term loans are more difficult and have more things to take into consideration, but not impossible either.
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* Who/what is considered legitimate is another topic indeed, and also something that museum professionals interested in decoloniality are talking about. Bruno Brunlon Soares is the guy for this, too.
As far as I am aware there isn't a specific term in English but we tend to use the phrase 'permanent loan' to describe that phenomenon.
I remember a few years ago - I think pre-2017 but I might be wrong - there was discussion about the French sending the Benin Bronzes back on 'permanent loan' because it was believed that this was a way to 'sneak' them back home without upsetting the stakeholders of the French museums in question.
In which case, the bronzes would still have 'technically' belonged to the French collections meaning they'd be on the hook for paying insurance and all conservation expenses, but there was no intention to return the loaned bronzes back to France.
A museum I used to work at in Canada had a similar set up with a NEIGBOURING museum because when some local items were discovered on an archaeological dig, the communities in the town wanted to keep them but didn't have a museum yet. So the neigbouring institution took the objects into their collection and as soon as my town set up their little museum, loaned them permanently back to us. The goal when I was there [the museum was only 3 or 5 years old at that point] was to get those loaned objects repatriated officially, but even if that never happens, they are never leaving the town again.
My archive has several collections that belong to "depositors", other institutions that do not have space of their own. When they want them back for a while they go on "depositor loan". It sounds like the word you are looking for is the one you already have!
Fond memories of hauling books the size of a child onto my shoulder down a ladder, wrestling them onto a measuring jig, and making boxes so big they had to be cut one tray at a time.
Private correspondence has revealed that the objection was to digitizing them, which is fair enough.
I do not have parallel experience, but I have treated a few books that had bombs dropped on them during the Blitz. Whoever rebacked them after the war decided to just cut all the sewing and bits of the spinefolds off, and the textblock was just held together with glue. Obviously the leather was awful as well, so we have an entire collection with the boards falling off and disgusting with red rot.
Many hours did I spend guarding tissue around the folds and sewing. The guarding was already creating a lot of swell so I went for a bypass structure, where you alternate between two or more sections as you sew. You can see the thread zigzag between the sections.
Fond memories of hauling books the size of a child onto my shoulder down a ladder, wrestling them onto a measuring jig, and making boxes so big they had to be cut one tray at a time.
Here is a change of pace for you. I knit this swatch of a baby blanket for a coworker who is intensely interested in Batman. It is just cabling one stitch around so it should be easy to do upside down on the other end. I put together a quick pattern for it if anyone is interested. I knit the white bits with seed stitch in the grey bits.
I just got back from visiting my dismal homeland, where I distributed these shawls.
I am not delighted with the first one (Shetland Forest Garden). The pattern wanted me to start at the tip of the center triangle, leave that on a holder while I picked up the other two edges, knit the lacy bit, then knit the border perpendicular all the way around. Obviously this meant it got all distorted and had a big lump in the middle and I could not stretch the bottom properly. Also, the border chart had an eight-stitch repeat but the last chart of the body had a ten-stitch repeat so I had to modify it so it would line up. I was a bit embarrassed to give it to anyone but I never wanted to see it again.
The second one was good fun (Omelet). I reblocked it as a crescent shawl because I have decided I do not like how triangular shawls sit across the shoulders, which it did not seem to appreciate much. It seems to have turned out all right, and the recipient is certainly delighted.
These images come from a pdf I made a while ago, so the spacing is a bit funny, and Tumblr crushed them to terrible quality. You can see the original here.
I used scrap printer paper because it was around, but you may want to use something nicer. The gsm (grams per square meter) should be listed somewhere. 100–140 is book weight, 150-200 is thicker drawing paper, more than 250 is a bit ambitious.
We are having a good old clean up in the studio, and I discovered a marvelous box of environmental monitoring through the ages.
First up we have a lovely yellow whirling/sling hygrometer/psychrometer (all four combinations seem to be valid with varying popularity). It has two thermometers, one with a wet sock over the bulb. You spin it around and use a psychrometric chart to find the relative humidity based on the difference in temperature between the two. It is undoubtedly the most reliable of any of these because it does not need calibration.
The miserable object below it is an elderly Tinytag datalogger, which has a port to connect it to a computer at the top so one assumes it works the same way as the new ones (the nice bumblebee at the bottom right). It monitors and records the temperature and humidity readings every ten minutes or whatever interval you set, then you can download the data to make a graph to frown at.
There is a dial with needles pointing to the temperature and relative humidity. It is likely to determine the humidity based on the tension on a horsehair. The big thermohygrographs work the same way, but I love them more.
Next we have a handheld environmental monitor. It probably measures the relative humidity based on electrical resistance. I still use one of these, although not this particular model. It seems to be a bit confused, since it thinks the highest temperature it was exposed to was 70ºC, and the lowest was -50ºC.
Below, we have the current array of equipment. There are two freestanding monitors (one out of battery), and one nice Tinytag bumblebee as described above. The port is underneath. We also have Hanwell brand dataloggers that transmit their data by radio in real time to a system controlling the heaters, air conditioners, and dehumidifiers.
But it is much less satisfying to swing a Hanwell around like a whirling hygrometer.
Do you mind sharing what pattern you are using for starshawl!
Of course! It is Celestarium by Audry Nicklin with Stellar Wave edging. The photo that went around today did not show it to best advantage. It is my very most favorite pattern and I loved it so much I made it twice.
Hi! I'm following your blog for quite some time and I know you used to do bookbinding too and wanted to ask since I'm now stuck in a horrible dilemma - what do you think of recycled vellum books and covers? Atm new parchment is super expensive (esp the quality one, vellum) and there's no way I could afford it, but used vellum is really cheap, 10 - 20$ for (large sheets) 1800s law documents (loans & bank stuff) if you're lucky on ebay but that means I gotta cut up and scrub an antique :C
Don’t tell anyone I said so, but that sounds perfectly reasonable. At school we bought deeds off eBay to practice parchment repairs because no one would care if we tore them up. You would also be participating in a long tradition of using manuscript waste for bindings. Most of the time they did not bother to clean the ink off, so there are a lot of quite handsome bindings covered in big old choral book pages. You have my blessing.
I was talking to someone the other day and I mentioned cleaning the polytunnels in the archives, and they were delighted by the concept of a book-greenhouse.
We keep items that are the most sensitive to environmental fluctuation in the polytunnels, because they are markedly more stable than the rest of the archive. Thank you, book-greenhouse.