Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Conservation Training Part 2
- Speaker
- Bob W
- Date
- 2001-09-28
Transcript
Source: Bob W – Conservation Training Part 2 – 2001-09-28.mp3 File: bob-w-conservation-training-part-2-2001-09-28.mp3 Duration: 01:34:46
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It'll take every last bit of that off. Now, are we perfectionists? I hope we are. You know, if we're enough of a perfectionist, we can make every last one of our books in pretty good shape. So, we can do the same procedure on this book right here, and it'll look brand new. Now, I caution you, don't make the book look real, real new and it have an old cover. So, you have to look at the book, and you may be able to take and work on the edges a little bit, enhance the look of the book, and then go ahead and do the repairs.
Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm going to show you later. I'll show you a totally damaged book that was obtained up in Indiana. Is any— yeah, set it right there. Any other questions on the use of this? Now, you can also— let me have the other, the bottom. There you go. Let's just say that I really had a really contoured book that I'm using. I use a very, very fine grade of sandpaper, the finest that I can get. I would imagine this is 103M 150. I know this is 220 grit is what it is.
Okay, if I were to take and have a round little tube, and I've forgotten it, but if I were to take and have a little round tube, I could actually roll the paper up on that tube and get a concave group book, sanded out real well. And that's how I do it. There's, there'll be a tube in here. Let's face it, the pages are like so, and I can go ahead and sand them. And we do have a lot of our, of our, any of the old, old books that preceded Alcoholics Anonymous.
I call them Oxford Group books, for lack of a better term. And a lot of them are like that. This can do it. Go ahead and put it back in there. We'll do one more, and then we'll take a break here for a little bit. Where's the next one? I am going to need a pair of scissors. Where are them scissors? Okay, we're always troubled with the books that come off the shelf. Go ahead and put that back in that cover, and it'll go back in the box.
We're always troubled with the books that come off the shelf that people—please don't, when you get a book, don't grab it and pull it, because that's the damage that you do. That's the damage that you do. When you do that kind of damage, you have one choice. You can either do a major repair, or, out comes the needle and thread. And what you can do is actually go in. I'm not going to do it because it's very, very delicate until I'm ready to sew it. But I will actually go in to the cover at this point.
I will bring it, I will run it just under the blue material. See where that needle is? Okay, now, now bear in mind, I would have gone in here, but it's already, see, it's torn a little bit, so I can't show you that. I would have gone, entered into the front board, I would have gone around, and I would have come out the back board. Now what that does is it gives you a little bit of body. Now when I take the PVA glue, and I'll take that little hairline brush and I show some glue in there, or if you've got some real fine knitting needles, they are wonderful to slip glue down in there, and you don't mess up a good brush.
And what you do is you put wax paper between the cover and the text, between
[00:05:01]
the cover and the text. Then you actually take and pull this out, the back cover, and you can take your fingers, smear the glue, the PVA glue, and you can put that back together again. You see, all the pieces are there, it's just that they were out. What I do is I take a pair of tweezers in one hand and my little finger in the other, and I put it all back together again. There's your strength right there, is that little tiny piece of cord.
And you do the bottom the same way. I left it in because I've already got it glued on the spine, and you can see the bottom. And you can see how perfect it comes out. Now what I'll do is I'll pull it out here, and it's already been in here, and all I need to do is glue it down. One cord. One cord. You should use—now, I use cord like I would to use in sewing a book. This cord is a little bit on the small side, but it was what I had handy on a needle. This is the size cord that I use.
And it is waxed cord, by the way. You can buy a little ball of waxed cord, and it works real good. But as you can see, it finishes up real, real good. The difference between here and here is strength. So the waxed cord is actually not glued; the wax, the cord itself is glued around it. The wax itself is actually in the cord. The outer surface is not. The glue will adhere to it. It will actually adhere to it.
Got it? Does anybody want to take a brief break? Let's do that. Put that in. Huh? Let me. Okay, folks, we're going to go ahead and get started. What I've got here is another one where you talk about age. This book is 1846, and it goes to show you that. We just choose not to lose anything. We choose not to do anything to a book that can't be reversed. And what we've got is some pages that are pulled out of it, probably just from old age. So what are we going to do with this to get it back together again? We've already done it a little bit ago.
There you go. What we're going to do is get a little wax paper. Got some right here. A little bit of glue. No, we use the other. Okay. Let's shake it up. Yeah. Now it's proper. You can wipe that down. All I'm going to do is take, and I've got four pages here. All I'm going to do is run it into the glue where I made a bead strip on the wax paper.
[00:10:01]
You can get me two pieces of wax paper, because I'm going to put one in front, one in back. Here's some wax paper. And I need to very carefully get it down in the spine area. Make sure it's blocked. Where's my bone folder? Let me have it. Always take a bone folder and press it down in the spine. What that'll do is take any excess glue and hopefully push it down into the spinal area. Hold that in half for me.
We need it good and tight. All I'm going to do is slip a piece of wax paper down below it. By the way, Sam's is a good place to buy all this stuff: wax paper and paper towels and everything. You can buy them pretty cheap because of the amount that I do, and that's ready to go. Now, this being an 1846, and near as we can tell, a one-of-a-kind book. One-of-a-kind book. Would we do anything to these page edges?
No. No more than we would to first edition, first printing, other than to take the name off of yours from Indianapolis. We did do that. All we need to do is put that here. Just put it on top of the other book and put the top glass on top of it. Just small enough one there. No. One glass, book, the other glass. There you go. Concentrated on the spine. There you go. And that's done. Now, if you had, you know, something like that, and you can do multiple pages.
Let's just say that that had two dozen pages like that, and maybe two in one area and four or five in the other. If it's four or five, no big deal. Don't cut that book apart. Even though those four or five pages might be attached as a small signature or section of pages, you can go ahead and use B, like we had on the wax paper, and you can tip it in. You just use a little bit more glue. You can put that thing back together again real, real quick.
Just lay it that way. Okay, this is 1872, and I told you that we were going to go ahead and come back. With just a half cover repair, and that's why I chose to bring this. This is non-AA, but that's okay. This cover right here was completely severed from the text. The front cover was completely severed from the text. We've also got a loose page. We need two loose pages to tip in. So what we actually had to do was do a half spine repair.
If you look down in here, you'll see the new mull, that little meshy-looking thing. See it down in there? And you'll see the new mull down in there. If I turn it over, you'll see where we just did part of it. Now, where did I put the mull when I put it back together again? Underneath this cover, what I did, I took this page—I didn't want to lose the old paper—I took my lifting knife and inserted it between the paper and the board. And I'm very careful.
This is where you've got to be really, really careful, because this paper is old. It tears very, very easy, and you darn sure don't want to do too much of it. What I do is I'll actually take my lifting knife—let me have it right down there—I'll actually take my lifting knife and I'll start either whatever's convenient for y'all, and I'll actually insert it between the paper and the board itself, and I'll roll this piece of paper back. This is called the end sheet.
And if you will look, you will see a minor, minor crease right along here. Where I roll that piece of paper back and have not lost it. Why would we want to do that, especially if it were an AA book? What do drunks do? They got to write on the covers. They really do. Usually, if it's a message from some old-timer, it's on the cover of the book. If anybody signs books and you're going to keep them, what do you want to write them in?
You got it. Don't use ink. Ink eventually will eat right through. The modern inks will eat right through that piece. Ink eventually will eat right through. The modern inks will eat right through that piece of paper. So if you're going to mark up the book, use pencil.
[00:15:02]
Don't they make special pens for that? If you're going to use ink, if you're going to use signatures and write in a book, use pencil. Period. What about those magic markers, too? Magic markers do the same thing. It'll eventually do damage to the book. Okay, we've got a couple of pages to tip in. We're going to go ahead and do that real quick. Now, bear in mind, when I tip these pages in—where's the guy, we're talking about the tissue—okay, when I tip these two pages in, we will actually have an exposed area of the spine. This is where I would use a heavier piece of tissue. Go down to the heavy—here it is right here.
This is where I would use a heavier piece of tissue. I will strip it the same way I did with just a little water bead. I will tear it. I'll probably make it about a quarter of an inch, and I will cover that area. Even if I can overlap it, I can take a little pair of surgical scissors and trim it off. So what we're going to do is put these two little pages back in here. I meant to show you this before because it's got the accessioning information on the front page. Did that hurt your ears? Okay, we've got three different areas in here.
Of course, the bottom one is the date, and the other two entries are the accessioning. It's done in pencil. It's right done on the upper— I always do my archives a lot of that stuff in the same location. If I'm going to put a message on anything, upper right-hand corner. That way you don't have to go through the whole book and say, Well, when did we get it? What year is it? You know, that sort of a thing. So what we're going to do is put these in. I'll need two pieces of wax paper.
We already got them. And by the way, when I took this page out of the box that it was in, I had to put a little reminder of what box it's going back into. Believe me, the archivists that are working up there get very, very testy when you take something out and don't put it back where it belongs. They get very testy. Can you do anything about the browning of the edges? The browning of the edges is already in there.
That's permanent. That's over, that's done with, and that's what acid does. That's the best indication in your material, whether it be grapevines, pamphlets. If you start seeing it brown on the edge, you better start worrying about deacidification. Do you want to run out and deacidify everything right away? I don't think so. You know, just like Kathy said, when the time's right, you'll know it. Okay, we've got one down.
Now we're going to do the other one. Same manner, little bead of glue. Bone folder. Here it is right here. All I'm going to do is take a bone folder. I'll use the edge of it. I'll press it towards the spine. The reason I'm doing that is I'm forcing the glue into the spine area. Wax paper, two pages down, I want a piece of wax paper. Top, I want a piece of wax paper. And I just slide the wax, the folded wax paper about right up where the glue is. Okay, now, there is a part. Let me get in here.
Because I work on so much materials, what I do is I obtain my materials in large rolls. Please don't go running downtown buying all sorts of material in large rolls, because your chances of getting that involved in this stuff are nil or very, very seldom. Now, if you've got a large enough archives to worry about, that's different. That's different. In other words, if you're in a commercial archives and it's got all sorts of books that you're going to be working on, like I do, ours being the Arkansas State History Commission, then of course we've got need for red and blue, and I think there's a brown, there's an orange, there's a black, everything, gray.
[00:20:00]
So the material can be obtained if you'll just give us a holler. We can tell you where to go. I'm embarrassed I did not bring the catalog with me, and you can get smaller pieces of material rather than a whole roll or a whole bolt of material. What I've got here is the material that I'm going to go ahead and put on the spine, and the reason I'm going to put it on the spine is when I took this book apart, I found out that it had not quite as dark a material as this on the spine.
And it had printing in it, okay? This material will actually be tucked, if you'll look where I've lifted the cover material, the front cover material. This will actually be adhered in this manner, just like so. I wish we had more time where we could show this. In other words, glue it down today, come back to it tomorrow. That is actually glued down. Will you glue one part of it and let it dry and then work on the rest? What I actually do is get one part of it and the top and the bottom, okay? The reason being is we know we've got to take and go over the spine and back in here.
And if you'll see, I've left some of this loose on the inside. This will actually go over—I'll have to trim it down a little bit—but this will actually go over the spine and under that material there. So what we'll have is basically a bound spine. Now what I've got of this book that I will adhere to the brand new material is some of the printing of this particular book. So you can see, once you get the—what I do is I actually glue the brown material down first. When that sets for maybe about an hour, no more than an hour, then I come in and I glue this down.
Make sure. Okay, I actually had some pieces of the spine from the old material. I did not bring them with me because they're really, really fragile. And what I'm going to do is I manage to save a part of the top and a part of the bottom. Once I get this adhered to the spine itself, I will use PVA glue, and I will glue them right over that material. And that's the way that book was when I got it, or when we got it.
No, I will actually just go ahead and put it on there. Now, when I'm done with the book, I will put a Mylar jacket on it. Any book of any delicate nature, I will make a Mylar jacket, and I'll show you that in a little bit. So basically, in answer to this question, I'm going to glue part of this material down to the text. So what I'll do is I'll get the material, I'll put a little bead of glue under there, I'll put wax paper between here and this brown. The only glue I want is under there so that it's actually adhered to the board. Okay, then what I can do, you don't want to do front and back because you've got this fold to worry about.
You just do either the front or the back first. Once you've got that glued down, both inside and outside, then you can start worrying about folding this under and putting the book back together again. It's that simple. Remember that this material will actually go over the board, so that's why I've got to pull back here and down deep. You ever do any of the gold stamping? I've got all the dies that I need, and the dies that I don't normally use, I use one book press—I'm sorry, one book binder who is really knowledgeable of archival procedures, and go ahead and put that back.
Better leave that set over here. It's got glue in it. Just leave it right here. Here. In answer to your question, we would certainly want to spend our money for other than dies, which are the print material to put the lettering on the books. I've got one set of dies which takes care of all the first edition books. I choose not to worry about the second edition books because I've found from experience, I just find them all over the place.
And if I find a good book that's really important to our archives, I've actually scalped off a cover from one book and put it on the other one. Yeah, I've actually done that. So that's why you save old books.
[00:25:01]
That's why you save old books. Questions? I'm putting a new spine. You go ahead and on a half spine, you fix them all. You do the half spine. Twenty-four hours later, you're ready to work on it. You go ahead and you pull the material from the front board up. You flip it over, pull the cover material from the back board, and then around the tops of the book itself. The top's being right in here. Top, bottom.
And you actually take it loose on the inside and the outside. You don't need much, just so long as it's over the edge of that book and you can get it to fold over. You glue it down. I guarantee it'll be just real strong. The strength in this book is not this stuff. It's this mold or airplane cloth. It's number thirteen. Where's that? Where's that press? The one with the handles. Let me have that. Somebody want to come up and sand this for me?
Huh? No takers? We've got a brave soul out there. Make sure that this gets back in the book when we're done. And this. In this book. Oh boy. Yeah, this is where I need that. Let's take these out of here. Take that book out of there. It's dry enough now. And just set it flat somewhere. Put a weight on it. Let's see, you can get something to put a weight on it. Okay, this one. Notice that very carefully. I'm not going to put any pressure on these covers at all.
But what we've got, a book, and again, it's one that we looked and looked and looked. We knew it existed, and we found it out in, I start to say New Arizona, and I think that's where it came from. That's where we found it, in an old junk store. We knew that the family had gone out there. The drunk, the alcoholic, had died, and his family took all the stuff with them. So we had somebody look around out there, and sure enough, they found it in an old junk store. When these people die, get to the survivors quickly.
And please, we're awfully concentrated on the Big Books during this session. If you're going to run an archive, start with the written record. The heck with the books. The books will come to you if you're doing what you should do. It's kind of like working the steps. If we live by the principles, we get the right results. If I'm going to take and work in archives, and I start out by gathering what?
The written history. These things will come to you. I don't think we've got—I don't think we've got a hundred dollars tied up in an entire collection of books, and it's just because we found some in flea markets and Salvation Armies and stuff like that, garage sales. So, just do the written record. What I'm going to do— Go ahead, I'm listening. Just out of the blue. Just out of the blue. And what are you doing, prior to getting those books handed to you, what were you doing? Just talking about our county and district meetings area.
What's the first thing you were talking about? Collecting material from group histories. Enough said. Really, that's the way this thing is. I find that, you know, let's see, Barry's not here, is he? If you start out, if you start out going about it in the right way— Kathy said what? Let's develop a mission statement first of all, okay? We chose, our archive chose to come up with structure and guidelines.
Structure and guidelines is, you're our area assembly. We've got to go to you and say, look, here's what we're doing. And getting us under structure and guidelines, we've got a vote that says this is what we're going to do. Y'all had a vote in what we're going to do. Now all of a sudden, instead of it just being committee of one or two or three or four—let's see, what, about thirty people in here? We got thirty people that vote on it.
And I guarantee if you go about it in this manner, the vote will almost unanimous, and be unanimous, almost always will be. Be unanimous. Be unanimous. Almost always will be unanimous. If you include people, and if you do it with, I like to call it with
[00:30:01]
rookie enthusiasm, they will respond in kind. But you have to do it with excitement. You know, when little old ladies like to come in, and I love them dearly because where we get them from is they're upstairs and they're doing some genealogical research, and they always come down and they say, Well, we'd like to work on some material, you know. Darn right, open them to use. I love to see it because they're absolutely enthused and they got all the time in the world. Now, do we get men the same way?
We get a whole bunch of men, but geez, they like to keep slipping outside for whatever reason. And of course, when they come back in, they're not walking straight, so we know what the reason is. So we kind of discourage that. Okay, the book. What I've got is the real expensive, I don't think we've got five, but I've got probably about $2.50 tied up in this little thing. And again, this costs a whale of money.
Don't spend the money. Just buy these. Instead of two-by-fours, if you want bigger ones, get what? Two-by-sixes. That way you don't have to work with stuff hanging through. Okay, anytime you do a book like this, see you've got a little bit of a concave. So what part are you going to use? Now, what I suggest you do is get a firm grip on it, or like so. Now all you have to do is take—see, it's already started.
It's going one direction? Yep. And just do it gently. You don't have to— This is another reason why I like adjustable clamps. I can work that book from this flat tabletop with adjustable clamps. I just tip the clamp on, the butt of it down here, and I put the clamp end up here, and I've got one standing flat on the table, and I can work the edge of it. I've actually got a couple of pieces of waterline, what do they call it, PVC, you've seen it, the white waterline, and I've got various thicknesses, various diameters, and I cut little pieces of it, depends upon how big or how small the book is.
And I can actually take and get a sheet of sandpaper, fine, fine sandpaper, the 250, and 3M 250, and I can roll it around that and grab a hold of it and slide and get the whole thing. All right, that's good enough. By the way, don't ever wear good clothes when you're doing conservation work. Okay, as you can see the difference. And that's the difference. We haven't hurt this book. I don't care what anybody says.
I'm always criticized for some of the real way-out stuff that I do, but we have not hurt this book one little bit. All we've done is cleaned it up. That's all. You make mine. At what point do you make that judgment call for, like, the coloring of that book to start? When do you make that judgment call? If it's just a run-of-the-mill book, this is no particular—we knew whose this was, and we just wanted to get it back because we knew it got out of Little Rock.
Now, if it's just a book, let's just say, what is this, a first and eleventh? No particular reason. We've already got a first and eleventh. We had a chance to get it back. And if it's a book that we're not really that interested in, I'm not going to go to this extreme. But if it's a first and first through first and seventh, now that's different. That's different. And that's usually where I make the cutoff.
Or if it's one of these, I call them the lesser, first and eighth through first and sixteenth, then I will determine whose book was it, how important was it to our archives. Now, if you really get to where you've got people who can do this work and they want to do it, let them do it. Let them do it. I'm not going to hurt anything. You can't hurt this stuff. Yeah. The top and bottom parts that are close to the spine? Same way.
What I do back there is this is where the adjustable clamps come in. What I do is I actually lay the book on like so. I'll have an adjustable clamp at the bottom and an adjustable clamp at the top. And then I go ahead and very carefully use the sand and block in here, and
[00:35:00]
then I can scrape the rest of it. That's how you do it. You want to do that. Okay, now, I just saw something that we're going to talk about I did not expect to. Where's the knitting needles that were here? Right there. Just let me have one of them. I'll answer your question in just a second. Now, while I'm on this, see where the cover is actually pulled a little loose right in here? I just happened to notice it.
The cover is actually pulled a little loose right down in there. The paper is not broken. The mull appears to be in pretty good shape. The spine does not appear to be broken. So, what I'm going to do is actually get the PVA glue, the thicker stuff. I won't do it now because I'm going to have to transport it and I need to do more sanding on it. But I will actually get the heavier PVA glue. I will take a brush.
I will wipe down—these are knitting needles. They work really good. And if I were to take and stick it right down in there, what's going to happen? You got it. And please don't let it slip out. You got to be very, very careful because you do not want to disrupt the free-floating spine. Now, if you're not sure of your steadiness, get a piece of wax paper and stick it down in there first, because the only place you're going to put the glue is right down in that opening.
Now, what I do is, you'll see the way I grab this knitting needle. It's about halfway. Okay, now if I just turn it around the other way and do the same thing, I go down about halfway and pull it out, close it, do a bone folder, and you're done. Somebody had a question over here, and I said, Disregard it. It was an incidental question. I'll ask you. Nothing's incidental. You said you chased that book out to Yuma.
Can somebody buy that book and donate it, or did you purchase it out of the archives funds? No. The family said that, well, I'll say their nephew went to Yuma, Arizona. They said that nobody wanted the material, so he just took a box of Daddy's A and A stuff, is the way they put A and A stuff. So I said, Do you know what's in there? Were there any letters, or were there any pamphlets, or were there any— And we got quite a few old Grapevines out of that.
And that's—I knew that they existed because he was a Grapevine writer, an article, Gillespie, you'll see it in the earlier Grapevines. But he actually—the family allowed the stuff to go out to Arizona. Now, when we have a way to bring this stuff back, because we didn't know, number one, how early were those Grapevines? Were they the 1940s that we don't have and we're looking for? Probably. There's a good chance they were, because that's how old the timer was.
He had about a 10- or 15-year slip in there. He was in real early, then he got out and came back in and died. So chances of having the old stuff there. How did we find this stuff? What we do is we search, and if it's just one of these things where the family does not want it for whatever reason, the nephew had it, we beg him, just like Kathy asked this morning, We are so-and-so, and by the way, we have cards printed up. We need to get yours printed up as soon as we get back.
We have a card that's got our permanent mailing address. We had that P.O. box. 1258 A.M. We've had the same P.O. box since we started up the archives. It's a good thing to do. The archivist alone has a name, an address, and a phone number. Anyway, we talk to the people and say, Would you be willing to donate that stuff to us? Yeah, probably would. I said, Well, can we go through this? What we'd like to do is acknowledge your donation to our archives.
And of course, that's when you go ahead and fill out the paperwork. That's when you fill out a right to use and get everything taken care of right then and there, right then and there. Okay, we heard about the book, and he said, I'll be honest with you, I understand that they're worth a lot of money. And from right at that point is when we said, We love you dearly, but we do not buy anything for Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you can laugh all you want, and I'm not overly religious, but there's a God in my life. And if we approach any type of a request for material in that
[00:40:04]
manner, I guarantee you that people will respond in kind. Every now and then somebody will take us to get our butt out the door and he'll go sell it downtown because maybe he needs a fix of coke, I don't know. That does happen. But it happens so little, almost 90, 95 percent of the time they'll say, You can take this. Questions? Knitting needles are wonderful things, and they come even smaller than that.
As Bill Sees It, The AA Way of Life, stuff like that, all the smaller books, there were smaller knitting needles. Say again? Straightening cocked book. Fine as cock. In other words, where it sits, but it'll sit up straight, but it's like it's rotated, like front cover, back cover. I've got a press down the history commission. Go ahead and put that cover in there. I've got a press down the history commission, and this is where pressure comes in handy.
I will put that book in a humidifying chamber, okay? Got to get moisture in it. Then this press, Don Bennett got it out of Chicago. It's got a handle up here, and it's a big double wooden shaft, long, long metal shaft. We've got it up on a couple of pallets. And when we put that book in there, he's looking in the back, and I'm tightening, because when we tighten that down, we don't want the spine to bow out.
We just don't. So what we do is we get the book, we hold it in there by hand, and then we tighten it down, and we leave it. We just tighten it a little bit the first day. And tomorrow morning we'll look at it. It has not shifted. It'll dry. It'll begin drying because we've got a fan on it. Okay, then we tighten it down a little bit more. And each day we can tighten it a little bit more. And before, by the time that thing is about dried out, we're ready to pull it out. Let me have a book.
Any one, doesn't make a difference. That one's fine. By the time we take it out of the spine, out of the press, then we can go ahead and open it up like so, and we have a little bit of heat and a fan blowing on it, and I guarantee the rest of it just dries out. And it's a perfectly back to normal shaped book. What's the next one? Okay. How many know what to do? Don't put leather covers on your books, please.
That's acid eating into that book. What can I do about that? Oh, come on now. What can I do about that? If I got old paper, if I've got the time and I want to very carefully slip that off, I can get rid of this paper, you know. But is that hurting anything? How would I kill that acid action that's in that paper? How would I do it? Huh? Deacidification. I will not reverse this. This is damage that's in there.
Your grapevine's really bad, you know, stuff like that. Your pamphlet's really bad. But I can arrest the acid action by deacidification. The damage was done by the leather. And please don't look at my big book because it's got a leather cover on it. I get kidded about that, but it's been all over the world and it's going to continue. Okay, what we've got here is a book that has got different areas, and it's a pretty good book, and it's one of our earliest women members.
And I'm going to bust her anonymity because the name Pickens and Bonds. Is there anybody in the construction business? Pickens and Bonds, a big major construction company, and this is a distant relative. This was the black sheep of the family. And thank God that she wasn't so black out there and she wasn't so much of a sheep that she didn't make it back to us. She did make it back, and she died with Bob.
Whew. Many, many, many, many years of sobriety, and she was such a help in pulling the women into Alcoholics Anonymous in Little Rock. She really was. Okay, what we've got is a couple of things. We've got a part of the board, and it's just merely not from carelessness. It's just from use. It looks like we've got a little bit of damage here. So the best way in the world, let me have the real thick PVA.
Tell you what, I got some right here. Yeah, just set it there. And let me have the next smallest brush.
[00:45:00]
Where's that small? Here it is, right here. No, this one. Okay, what we've got is some damage. It's very, very minor. You can see right here where the cover material is kind of shot. All I'm going to do is get a little PVA glue. That wasn't rinsed out. I'm being very, very careful not to. If you're shaky and you're nervous, you can put a piece of wax paper in there. Probably the best thing. Let me have that piece right there.
Now I know if I'm careless, I won't get it on the rest of the book. I've put some PVA glue in there, and I go ahead and I try to work that part around, and you can doctor the whole book in that manner. You know, all I'm doing is putting a little bit of glue on it, and there's a little thread. I don't cut the threads off. I try to get them glued down. And you can see it makes, even though it's light, it makes for a very dark thing.
Now, if I were a perfectionist, I've got the blue material that this stuff is made of. I will put a piece of blue material in. This is not a perfect book. This is a badly stained book. If I put a piece of blue material in there to hide the piece of board, what will I have? A bright, glaring piece of brand new blue material. So I choose not to do that. Okay, we've also got from where corners. Yes. Could you set it with, like, French file?
Could you set it with an old wheel? You do as little to this. Is this the distilled water? Just let it soak a while. Let it soak a while. Not something that small, but what to do with it. I keep a box that says old paper. I keep a box that says old board material. I keep a box that says old cloth material, old leathers. And they are. They're stained, they're damaged and everything else. And her question was, can you put a piece in here?
Yeah, if I can find a perfect match, sure can. Chances of it happening are probably pretty good. Where do you get old paper? From old places. Okay, anytime. That's a damn good question. It really truly is. That's a very good question. If I were to go to—how many like to poke around junk shops that have some books? Okay, how many times do you go in there and you find a big old book, especially the big ones that are real thick, they're either religious, psychology, or they're history. For a clue, that's—you look in those three categories, and they're usually pretty good size. So they're bigger than any of the books, the AA books.
What I do is I go up and I say, Oh, hey, does it sense for that? I open it up, and a lot of those old books have how many front pages and how many back pages that are blank? Two or three blank papers. Yeah. Some of them have five or six. So I said, Sir, I can buy that for fifty cents, and I always carry a scalpel. I like to have a little kit in my back pocket. And while he's standing there at the desk, I go ahead and I scalpel the pages out. I have an acid-free folder.
I drop the pages in the acid-free folder, and I very carefully, I put a little dot of glue on it, and I glue down the piece. You can't even see where I've cut them out. I say, Would you like this book back? And I guarantee you, the next time he finds old paper, he will have a pile of it waiting for you at that store. He's made money on that book, and you're satisfied. You find it in old places. Has anybody seen the old scrapbooks that are yay tall, yay deep, and yay thick? If you have any, and you do not need that old paper, please, please, please give me a shout.
That's the only one that I'm really lacking, and of course that takes up your first and first to about first and seventh. All that paper was the same thickness, same consistency, same everything. So if you find anybody, anything like that, give me a shout. I need that book that we're— Old paper. It's an old little— First and first through first and seventh. The paper is not the same thing. It's close enough to where I can use— if I can get the old paper, I can use it in any one of those, almost.
[00:50:00]
The first and first was the thickest of them all. It really truly was. But if I can get a scrapbook and I've got maybe half of one left, then I'm really hoping that I don't need too much between now and the next time I need some. Are these scrapbooks the kind of brown things, really? They've got an ugly green cover on it, and it says Scrapbook on the spine, it says Scrapbook on the front, and there's nothing written in it.
I mean, they're big. Okay. What we've got is all those busy, and I'm going to show you where the damage is in the corners, if you can see where I've split that apart. We've got another one down here that's the same way. It's actually damaged. So what we've got to do is get a little bit of glue in there. Before we put any glue in there, the best thing in the world we can do is make sure that there's some way for the glue to get in there, because we're going to put a clamp on this, and we're going to put that little rascal back in pretty good shape.
So what I'm doing is going a little bit past the break. I'm getting it opened up, and I'm using a lifting knife. Likewise on the other corner, I need two of those metal clamps. Hardware stores, very, very inexpensive. If you get this type of clamp, you can actually bend them back to where they're flat instead of pointed at an angle. So, what I've done is I've actually got this corner. Now, I don't need a brush on this.
All I'm going to do is dip it in there. I'm going to put some PVA glue on there. And you don't need to worry if you slop it on there. It's not going to hurt a thing. And what I'm doing is forcing that glue down in several places. Now what I'm going to do is get a little bit on the edge because we're going to have to glue down the cover material. If you'll wipe that off for me. Okay, this is where it gets a little bit messy.
I never work towards the board. I always work towards the tip. The reason being is that tip of that board is now very, very soft and very, very pliable. I don't want to crush what's in there, but what I want to do is force what's in there out towards the tip. So what I do is I take my thumb and my first finger and I push it back together again. Then what I do is I go ahead and fold the blue material over.
And I'll be darned if we don't have a perfect corner again. Now, that's going to take a little bit longer, and that's when I definitely use 24
[00:55:02]
hours to dry. Will you hold that cover up? Now what I'm going to do to make sure that that cover doesn't shift is I always use clean, brand new wax paper. So what I'm going to do is lay the wax paper over it. I'm going to go ahead and fold it. And this is piece of board material, like cover material. I will put a piece on one side and a piece on the other side. And when I clamp it, I will make sure that that clamp is over the corner. And you can see how the corner looks in between the boards.
That'll be there forever and a day. The reason you wrap it with the wax paper is this is going to put a lot of pressure. It doesn't seem like it. It doesn't seem like there would be that much pressure, but it gives you perfect corners. Now let's just say that I got a little careless and I pushed a little bit too hard and a little bit too much oozes out. What can you do with that to get, once this PVA glue dries— What's a better way? Or—who said shave?
Go ahead and shave it off. Every now and then a little bit will ooze and you'll see a kind of a funny, gooey-looking stuff that you don't like, and you can shave it. You can sand it, but I don't like to use sand on the edges because if I go too deep, then I'll have more repair to do. So I very carefully shave it. It'll dry clear. Yeah, PVA glue dries clear. We're going to do one more corner. Okay. I'm getting it inside the board.
Now what I'm going to do is get some on the outside. I always have a little bowl of distilled water handy with a sponge. And the reason being is every now and then I'll spill some PVA glue on whatever I'm working on. If you wipe it up real quick, you won't have any kind of a mess. You won't have to pick it off real hard later on. All I've done is take it and pushed it to the corner. And if you'll see, all I've got to do now is take the rest of the material and fold it over the break.
So therefore I've got my color back into it. Wax paper. It's very, very simple. I just use the folded wax paper. I pre-crease it and I put it right over the top. I fold it at the other point. I put a piece of board in front and a piece of board in back. And go ahead and glue it or clamp it. Now if you'll notice, I put them towards the edge. There's a reason for that. This has got to set a while. Now that's perhaps not a good idea to have your book setting on two little points like that. So what I've got is a whole bunch of different things in the archives, like perhaps some cloth material.
That I can take and prop that cover up. That way you won't have a bow in it, or a bow in it. Anybody have any questions? And you can do four corners. Now, what would you do with it with four corners? Then how are you going to set the book down? You get a piece of wood and you stick it over the edge, just like so. If the corners are really worn off, besides being bumped hard, can you actually take, like, some blue material and match it?
Give them a piece of that blue material. Good question. It's exact match of the blue, yeah. What his question was is, can we actually put the blue material in there? Sure, you really can. But I mean, if, like, the fibers of it's just worn a little bit, instead of actually making a true patch for the actual new material, you could. You could. Anybody have any questions on that? We're just going to let that set.
We're just going to let that set. Okay. Yes. I got a question. You said there are no stupid questions, but— Yes. How do you deacidify?
[01:00:01]
Very carefully. I'm brand new at this. Okay. You keep saying words and— Why don't you hold that question till when we're done because of our time constraints, and I will go over that. In fact, Dave and I will cover as much as y'all want when we wrap this session up. Be glad to. The gentleman from Indiana. This is one that I purposefully had blocked. What this is is an original 1903 Varieties of Religious Experience.
This was pulled out of a dumpster. As you can see, there was major damage to this book. Any light material you'll see is pages that I've had to repair. It was so embrittled when I got the book that I actually had to, number one, clean the book; number one, deacidify it; number two, sew it back into one piece of text. Now, when I got it back into one piece of text, the front, the bottom page edges were so in such bad shape that that was the decision I had to make: what can we do with it?
If you take it out—and we're not so restrictive that we don't use—why have something in our archives if we're not going to use it? That's probably the primary question you should ask yourself. This was so embrittled, all you had to do was, Oh geez, I broke some more pages, and it was that bad. So therefore, I had to do what they call blocking the book. Now, I do not have that equipment because it takes an enormous press.
You'll have to picture the cover separate from the text. It's got to be clamped. It's clamped like so. It's clamped like so, and this blade comes down, and not only comes down, but it slices and it levels off those pages. So I lost a little bit of the original contour of that book. But I chose to do that to get down into the sturdy part of that book, the same way with the bottom. The cover was a hopeless cause.
I went ahead. We re-sewed this book just like I— in fact, it was that very same frame. We used three vertical cords. We sewed it back together again. And if you will look in here, you will see three vertical cords. Those are the sewing cords right there. Yep. Okay. Now what I've got to do is get the text back in a cover. So what I'm going to do is, first of all, I get wet on it. How do we attach the text to the cover itself?
What's the most important thing? The mull. So I go ahead and I get the mull down. Make sure that when I get it down, I'm able to tip in the end sheet and the flyleaf. This is a folded-over piece of paper that was actually tipped in. I should have said before I laid the mold down, I got this tipped in, and then after it dried, I got the mold glued to the cover. Always put your tipped-in pieces in that manner prior to anchoring the mold to the boards.
Does that make sense? The reason being is, with the mold hanging over it and in a press, it's going to dry real good and real tight. Now, if you'll notice that because the book is shaved down, I took the exact dimensions of an original cover, and I didn't realize that the text and the end sheet are going to be a little bit different size. Now, I can trim this up, and I will, but the next thing, once we've got the text attached to the boards themselves, is we are actually going to feather out the vertical cords.
Why would I want to do that? If I were to take and glue this down, it would be just one big ugly lump, and there, when I took and glued down the end sheet, there would be a lump right there. So we're going to feather them out. What I need is an awl. All I'm doing, and this is a part of the sewing, is I will actually get it in those cords, and I will take and feather them out. There's another one in there that's long and blue, and it's probably in the same compartment.
[01:05:04]
Let me have that one. That's a better one. You can put that one up. This is just the smaller awl, and it'll get down into that cord to where I can fray it. And the reason I'm going to fray it is I want to glue that stuff down, and that's exactly what we're about right now. Okay, and all that I'm going to do is take and fan them out. Likewise, the next cord will be done the same way. Does that have anything to do with original binding books? All depends on who the book binder is and what his training is.
It all depends. If I have to re-sew a book, I will do it in this manner because I don't want to lose. Now, some people—you can. Now, all right, it's a good question. I see why you asked it. You conceivably could have cut that off because this glued to this is going to be very strong. But if I leave that cord on, and that's the next thing that I glue down, what have we got in this book now? Additional strength.
Somebody said it right over here. Sure it does. Sure it does. So all I'm going to do is go ahead and feather them out. You want them where there's no lumps whatsoever. Okay. Brush, and I'll need that one. Now the next step, when I'm at this point, is front and back, I'm going to go ahead and glue down. The vertical cords at this point. I’ll need two pieces, or a piece of folded over wax paper. And all I’m going to do is put some PVA glue down in here.
I don’t need to get it on the end sheet at this point. Actually glue it to the heavy cover, the heavy board. Yeah. Front board. Heavy glue. Okay, we got the top one, got the middle one. Is just saturating the cord with the glue and laying it down in a fan shape. And if I lay it out in a fan shape, and I’m going to have him pass it around here in just a second, you’ll see why. It flattens out real good, and it makes for a nice, even gluing job without any ridges underneath.
And you’ve got a lot of strength. Here you go. Twenty-four hours. Don’t let that close at all. And if we do that, I’ll always let glue 24 hours. Now, could I go ahead and glue the board and put the end sheet down? Yeah, I could. But I prefer, if I’ve done a procedure on a book, I prefer to go ahead and finish out that procedure. If I’m doing the third step, when I get halfway through the third step, do I want to do the fourth step next? No.
No. I mean, this stuff is nothing more than the steps in a different way, you know, that’s all it is. And that head I knot feathered out or fanned out the three vertical cords. You would have had one big lump sticking underneath that end sheet, and you don't want that. You can see books where that's done. Yeah, that's because they get in a rush. Yeah. The end sheet will be glued completely on the back?
Yeah, we're going to do one here in just a minute. I think we are. Yes. Another silly question. Nope, no silly questions. How did you get the binder attached to the book? How did we get the book after it was all cored and stitched, and then you put it to the binder before you do any of those parts? The mull I put over the spine. In other words, I will actually take— Good question. Have we got an exposed spine?
That one's fine, I think. Is that exposed? No. Let me have that. This is true binding.
[01:10:02]
This is General Service Office cheaper way of doing things. I'll talk to you, and that's important to know. I would like to cover that before we leave, because true binding can be fixed very, very easily. Do you remember when we first started out, I said we take the text, we sew it up, and then the next thing we need to do is get it into one piece. We've got it sewn. Now we need to get it in one piece. I'm going to take that text— Very carefully snip the cords. I'm going to put them in here, and I'm going to tighten it up with the spine exposed. At that point is when I take and cut a proper-sized piece of mol or airplane cloth.
Now, before I put that mold down, on a one-time basis, I'm going to put PVA glue over the entire back of that spine to make sure that there is no cords exposed. In the process, you might leave one loose, and it could break. I'll let it set 24 hours. The next morning I come in. Now I've got a good hard surface. I can actually take the text out of the little clamp and the vise and pick it up and hold it. So what I do is I leave it in here, and at that point I'll put PVA glue over it again, and then is when I put the mold down. Now once you've got the mold down, that's very, very tight.
And remember, when you, once you put the mold down, you've still got those little cords to handle, and then that part you're going to have to pray. So, on the spine, only on the spine. Think of it as spine, the front cover, the back cover, were all integral parts. You know, it's just kind of like our home group. What do we have? We have a GSR, a secretary, a treasurer, an alternate GSR. So they're all the parts to keep the thing together and keep the group going.
The groups are what keeps the district going. All of our districts keep our Area Four going. So that's the same thing with the book that we're working on. That's simple. Think of it as what is this whole thing all about. We're at 20 minutes. 20 more minutes. Okay. Does anybody have any questions as to this procedure right here? My next thing would be to go ahead and glue the end page down, but remember, I do not like to do it with wet cord in here.
So this book right now, I'm going to have to press that a little bit more. See it bow up? When I went to close that cover, the cords bowed up a little bit. Hold on, wipe it off. All I have to do is weight this down. What do we got for weight? Okay. Use your gallon. Put a piece of wax paper on it and put the gallon jug on it. Just a piece of wax paper and then put the gallon jug on it. Okay, where are we at? Down here.
Yeah. Let me see the next one and then we'll go from there. Yeah. Let's talk about deacidification, okay? Why don't you go ahead and cover it. Okay. Deacidification is the process of how we remove the acid from the paper. Most papers that were made before, as Kathy was talking this morning, before the 1990s had a lignin pulping process that used sulfuric acid in the paper making process. And through time, these papers tend to liberate this acid.
And so, as you saw before, it turns the paper brown, it makes it brittle. And so what we want to do is, obviously, we can't reverse— So what we want to do is, obviously, we can't reverse that process, but we can stop it. And by doing that, we use a deacidification solution. There's various ones made. Wee-Tow is one brand. Bookkeeper's another.
[01:15:01]
You had— Nasty. You had some other chemicals that we can use, calcium carbonate, calcium hydroxide, calcium oxide, calcium carbonate. And what this does is it eliminates the acid from the paper, and it leaves a base buffer. If you have a stomach ache, what do you do for the stomach ache? Tums. We're going to add Tums to the paper. Maybe not Tums as such, but that's all we're doing. We're killing the acid. What it does is it leaves a three to six percent—you can't really see it except through a microscope—but it leaves a really fine residue on the paper that stops that acid from reforming on it.
You can do it various ways. You can buy commercially made through University Products, Gaylord, Light Impressions, and you can also use the—you can make your own solution for using, dipping in newspapers, various other papers that are not really important for you. You can use a cheaper solution on that, and it's a—Bob can probably tell a little more about that, but I myself use the Bookkeeper. You can buy it very cheap and spray it on. How do you determine whether your paper is—take out what is called the pH test. pH is a determination of whether it's acid or base.
It's a little marking pen. It does leave a permanent mark on your paper, but it'll tell you it's a yellow pen, and if it shows purple, it shows that it's base. In other words, you take a brand new piece of copy paper and you mark it, it'll show a purple line. If you have a piece of paper that's 20 years old, it'll show a yellow line, and the yellow line shows the… What you do is you can either dip or spray, for whatever solution you want, and then let it dry. At that point, your paper has become deacidified.
Now, it's very important that you don't touch that paper afterwards, because your fingers have acid in it, and you've just reintroduced acid. And at that point, well, what do you do? You wear some gloves to touch your paper. You can do various things at this point. Say you're deacidifying documents. You can take it and put it in a plain acid-free, and I stress the word acid-free, folder. You don't want to introduce any material that might have acid in it next to that piece of paper, because that acid will leach from one piece to another.
So you use an acid-free folder. Or you can put it in an acid-free folder and say you have multiple documents you want to put in. You can take a piece of buffered tissue paper. It's an interleaving paper. You can get that also through the different archival supply houses. And what it does is it will keep the papers from touching each other, and it also gives it a little bit of protection in between the two.
Or you can do what's called encapsulation. That's a little bit more difficult. It's actually putting your piece of your document between two pieces of Mylar. And that's done with, I don't, we're not set up for that today to do that, obviously, but it's, you use a double-sided pH neutral tape that is around the outside. Your piece is deacidified. It's put in the middle of it, and the air is evacuated from the piece with a brayer or a roller, and then you can handle it.
You can look through at both sides of it. People can touch it. There's an even simpler way. Can I use your folder? You can take a folder, an acid-free folder. You can take a piece of double-sided tape, put it along the one side. Now this is a, it's not a, it's a 3M brand tape. It's not Scotch tape. It's not like Scotch double stick. I recommend the 3M, I believe it's 451 tape, because it's neutral pH.
And you just take a piece of Mylar that'll fit this size, put it on here, strip the backing off, put the Mylar down. You take your document, you put it inside, and you fold the piece of Mylar over. It's called a filly folder. And now you can open it up and you can look at it any time you want, and it's protected. Now that is a relatively inexpensive way to do it. You can also, other than encapsulation, let's
[01:20:02]
see. Got another one for you. How many have a small archives, real small, two, three, four, five boxes? Okay, wonderful. This right here, and I've only got one piece. We can, I'm sure, get some copies, and I'd like for you all to get some copies and take it with you. It says, Use of magnesium bicarbonate. I talked about the Tums for the tummy, and I do not say this jokingly. I say it in all seriousness. That's actually what we're doing for the paper.
Use a magnesium bicarbonate prepared with magnesium carbonate and club soda. We're all drinkers. We all know what club soda is, see. Now we can carry that over into our productive years. Preparing a solution: wet two teaspoons of magnesium carbonate with one or two ounces of cold club soda. Mix until rise any hard particles with the back of a spoon. Pour a spoon of slurry back into the quart of club soda.
Don't try to write it down. I'll get a copy for you. Replace the bottle cap and shake the bottle gently to thoroughly disperse the slurry. After this initial shaking, replace the bottle in the refrigerator and keep it there because a stronger solution is produced with cold club soda. Now Thurman was here. He is an individual who's very, very smart as far as chemicals are concerned, and he could tell you and explain that.
After 10, 20, or 30 minutes, take out the bottle, shake it gently to redisperse the undissolved white powder. Continue shaking every 10 minutes until essentially all of the magnesium carbonate is dissolved. Then allow the bottle to sit quietly in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until undissolved powder settles to the bottom of the bottle. Treat the solution of magnesium bicarbonate and club soda carefully.
I'm sorry, pour the solution of magnesium bicarbonate and club soda carefully into a pan. Press each sheet of paper gently into the solution. Okay, soak for about 25—I'm sorry, soak up to 25, eight and a half by 11 sheets of paper in a solution, minimum of 20 to 30 minutes. Now, I never will ever soak a whole bunch of sheets of paper in a solution. What's going to happen? Stick together. Now, if I get window screen, not metal, nylon window screen, you can buy a whole big roll of nylon window screen.
Window screen paper, window screen paper, window screen paper. Please separate the papers. I had a worker who was very, very knowledgeable, and he ruined a whole set of papers. They stuck together, had no screen in between them. Anyway, dry the sheets in the air or use bladders for very wet papers. Again, how do we dry a whole lot of papers that we've deacidified? I've got another process where I bathe huge quantities of stuff.
You've all seen the old-timey window—I'm sorry, screen doors. Okay, there's very little to them. Oh, you can almost take a hand or a fist and punch the screen out. Again, using nylon window screen, we make a whole bunch—I call them screen doors—and then we have a rack where they slip into little slots all the way back. We pull the little rack out, we lay these documents that are in between front, you know, top and bottom nylon screen, we lay them on top of the screen, and we just lay them off. We push the screen in, pull the next one out, lay them on there, push it in, do the next one.
Then all we've got to do is circulate the air. We have a tremendous exhaust fan behind my head. We turn it on, and I'll guarantee you, come probably a day, at least by tomorrow morning, that stuff is so dry it's unbelievable. And the beautiful part of it is, is keeping the document or the item concerned between two sheets of window screen. It's going to come out nice and flat, very flat. This is, it's relatively inexpensive, and the one that Bob just talked about, we're getting some copies made for you right now. So for those of you— Is that being done?
Okay. And I'd like to talk about one other method. Somebody over here talked about these huge volumes of newspaper clippings. Please don't turn them down because there's a very inexpensive method to do this. Calcium chloride and calcium carbonate are the two compounds. I can mix in a five-gallon tank.
[01:25:01]
I'll tell you what, let's not write all this down. I've got somewhere in this, I've got the explanation of how to mix this solution. I will get it out and I'll try to have it ready for tomorrow. We'll see if we can run some copies off. Rather than you writing all of this stuff down, we can make a little diagram tonight. We'll make some copies run off. That way we don't have to go through it because I think we're running about time.
Any questions about deacidification? I know we ran through it real fast. I would suggest before we run home and start deacidifying all our documents, we better darn sure test for ink runs. What do we do? I take and always in the same corner, always in the same corner, whatever I'm deacidifying, I prefer to use the lower left-hand corner. I will take and put a little dot with a Q-tip, I'll put a little dot of distilled water over the ink.
I'll let it set there for a while. I'll take a perfectly dry Q-tip and I'll roll it over that. If it comes out clean, then I can soak it. I can do whatever I want with it. But let's just say it doesn't come out clean. That's when a bookkeeper is best, and it's always best to come right in from the backside. Ink runs. We had an onion skin paper in the archives. Sorry, Burke, I didn't have to tell this, but this came from our first delegate, and it had a mimeograph on it, and we put it in the solution, and all of the ink just went.
There wasn't a single thing left on the piece. Needless to say, there was crying and a gnashing of teeth. So we switched to Bookkeeper, which we haven't had a problem since. Bookkeeper is expensive, but it tends to work a little bit better. Yes, you had a question. Yeah. When you get the sort of paper, aren't you supposed to clean it first, or— Well, yes, obviously. It's already been cleaned. Yeah, once it's already cleaned— We're going on the assumption this has already been cleaned. Yes, you've already done cleaning and preparing and cleaning.
No, we didn't. Okay. No. Too basic. If you're interested about document cleaning afterwards, I'll be more than happy to. We've got some materials here I'd be happy to show you. Any other questions? We have a slide presentation which covers— Well, somebody put some dessert underneath that ledge, didn't they? Chocolate? Yeah. You want to taste it? You want to know where you got the— You can buy a big bundle of plain old cheapy cotton. I suggest large.
Believe me, these things are so tiny, but big old huge hands, I can't even put them on my fingertips. Get large. University products are light impressions. You get a whole bundle of them for a couple bucks. You can get them at … supply stores too. No. Cotton. Get cotton. Do not use all this plastic. And I use a—sometimes when I'm dipping things in solution, I may use a latex glove, but very rarely. You know, it just washes off.
Where do you get them? You can get them at various places. You can get them through any archival supply stores. Art supply stores carry them. You can get them sometimes at paint stores, construction. Grab one of the light impressions. Bring that. Give me that. Both of them. If you look on the back of these two catalogs, there's a 1-800 number. I'll leave these up here, and you're welcome to lift the numbers on them.
I would give you these, but there's a particular customer number on them that I need. Yeah, we've got more stacks. Okay. They have a web address also if you need. Okay. Does anybody—if anybody wants to see the entire process of what we're talking about, I may take just a second and may go over just a little bit, but we're just going to do that. This is an acid-free book box. We did not make them the last time, but this is that book that we totally restored, and as you can see, it's pretty yucky.
It had to be totally taken apart. This is one that we actually bathed to clean. We actually bathed it to deacidify it. At that point, it was very, very fragile and delicate. We had to figure a way to put body into each page. Way to put body into each page of this book. So we use plain old Knox KNOX gelatin. You brush it on with a hake brush, page by page by page by page. Now, when you do that, you're done with the book.
What have you done to create real severe problems for your archives?
[01:30:03]
Knox gelatin is a food group, and I guarantee you, if there is a critter, whether it be four-legged or bug, it will find this book. So what are you going to do with them? You're going to put them in a safe somewhere where critters cannot get to them, or rats or cats or whatever. So we need to be extremely careful. Go ahead and put this in there, if you will, and wrap it up. No, never. Knox gelatin is—it's not going to hurt any of what we do.
I just asked if that was bug-proof. It doesn't look like bugs could get in there. The box is just for protection of the book. I'm going to cover one more, and this is thanks to the gentleman sitting back there. This is the book that was totally ruined. I do have the slide presentation of it. If anybody's interested, we can get a room and we'll show it and we'll go over it. This book was absolutely ruined when we got a hold of it.
This is the one that came to us from Indianapolis Intergroup, and some—certainly wasn't a friend of mine—some bookbinder had put it together again, but he had— Gone ahead and did block stitching. And when you do block stitching, that's when a press will actually press it, and it squares the book off. The pages are all trimmed. When I received this book, I realized after trying to get it back together again that I had a problem. I defy anybody here, and I'm going to handle it because it's, for all practical purposes, like a brand new one.
I'm going to handle it with gloves. This book is a crookedy book. The reason being is when that blade came down—let's see, we figured it out last night—when the blade came down and shaved these pages, the book must have shifted a little bit. So here I am trying to build a cover, put it on the book, and I'd look at it and it's crooked. I'd make another one and I'd build it, and it was crooked. So I actually had to build a crooked cover for a crooked book.
Now, I don't think anybody in this room would be able to spot it, and I'm serious. That's how fine a dimension that the crooked part was. It just shifted a little bit. I'm sure that the blade might have bucked or it wasn't pressed tight enough. But this is, for all practical purposes, one of the best condition books I've ever seen. I'm not going to let anybody hold it because we don't have enough gloves to go around. This is the old paper that we talked about.
This is the old paper. So you see, you can match it identical to what's in the book. Now, another nice thing about old paper, this page was missing from this book. This page right here. So I was able to actually imprint from a copy that I keep broke down because of this. I keep it broken down so I can use it. To imprint on old paper the very first pages. So there's a lot that you can do. There's an awful lot that you can do.
Nothing is to be destroyed, you know. Providing we follow simple archival procedures. Does anybody have any questions? Bob, I want to make a correction. Bob, stone breaker, stone. Yeah. Yeah. Get over here. Beautiful job, Bob. Well, again, it's one of these things where God gave me a job to do, and I'm going to continue doing it to the best of my ability. But the one thing we need, and I would really caution you, is don't do it too long to where some other individual that would like to do it gets discouraged. Turn it over.
Next year you're going to see a different person up here doing this. It's going to be Gary. You might even see a young lady come in. She's very, very young, but extremely sharp. We got a time constraint, so we got to close up. Anybody have any questions, we'll get it done after this is over with. Come pick this up.