Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Conservation and Preservation Part 4 7th Archives Workshop
- Speaker
- Unidentified S
- Date
- 2002-09-01
Transcript
Source: Unidentified S – Conservation and Preservation Part 4 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: unidentified-s-conservation-and-preservation-part-4-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:33:01
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What I'm going to do is determine where I'm going to have to cut that tape, so I'm going to temporarily place the document inside it. What I'm going to do is come across the bottom with two-sided tape. I can move, remember the document is not secured yet, so I can move it around. So I'm just going to come across the bottom of the document, or the item, and I'm going to put the two-sided tape. Another nice thing to have is a tape dispenser.
This is not a good way to do it, believe me. Get a good tape dispenser. Where would you find them? School supplies. I've gone ahead and cut the tape. We're going to go up the other side, and note that I'm folding the ends of the tape each time. And the reason I do that is, is if you don't and you have to pull the dadgum tape off of Mylar without a folded end, it's tough to do. Do look for tape dispensers.
Go to a school supply place. You can put a roll in like so, and you just pull it off, pull it down, it cuts itself. So what I'm going to do is put this Mylar on the other side of the opening. Now, I will not press the top down because remember this is going to be a trifold. So I'm going to figure out with this closed where is going to be the best place to cut that tape. And I've determined about two-thirds of the way up.
I'm going to go ahead and cut the two-sided tape. We can pull that off. Let's get rid of it. We don't need it anymore. And we'll trim the other piece on the bottom. We don't need it anymore. Now what we've got is one other thing, and just so long as I don't touch that document, I'm in pretty good shape. Here it is. What we are going to do is actually take and pull the two-sided tape off of there. Now remember, when we encapsulated the item, we've got a corner there, and we don't want to do one until we get them both pulled up.
So I'm going to lift the vertical piece of tape cover. It just wants to be difficult, that's all. And I'm going to lift the horizontal piece of tape cover. I'll pull it off, I'll pull it off, and I will lay this down. And what we've got basically is a tri-fold. The beautiful part of it is, is I can get in there and pull the document out. Sure. I call it a tri-fold. That's really… And there it is.
Gaylord and University Products both make pre-made… Little envelope that you can use also. Remember, you pay for the labor, though. Yeah. See, that's it. You can buy this stuff, but the way we started out with the little piddly budget we had, we couldn't do it. Anybody have any questions? What would you do if you have three holes, five holes in that pamphlet? I don't know of any that have five holes, but I know of some, like a magazine, where I did two sets of three holes.
Saturday Evening Post, I actually did three holes here and three holes here, and I sewed each one independently in the spine. Because if you do just one big one, that's a lot of cord hanging out there, so you do two. Do it not? No, no, no. No, no, no. You leave it open like this. This is stuff that's very, very seldom handled. Be honest with you, this has got to go back to Minnesota. Minnesota is where it's got to go.
This was last year's project that we finally finished up, so we'll get it done and
[00:04:59]
we'll get it back to them. Apparently this was hanging on an old shack, and it
[00:05:03]
even had a little cord that it was hanging from on a little hook on the wall. So we saved the little piece of cord. I'll let him do with that. That's the end of the encapsulation, and that's the end of the tri-fold. We talked about the filly folders. Filly folder is probably the simplest. The actual folder with interleaving buffered bond is even simpler. So you can see where we can progress from item to item to item.
Yeah. How many years do Gaylord covers for dust jacket covers for your books? We can make it out of Mylar polyester. Again, there's where a large cutting mat comes in handy. Yeah, we better. What we talked about is we'll take a small break, and then we're going to go ahead and run that set of slides. … I don't know if there's enough tape there. You can go ahead and look and see. See what's there.
Let's take a small break, okay? Ten minutes maximum. We're either going to do tape or… Wonderful. They'll suck more air through, and you build a booth. And my booth is actually like so, and I can do a whole newspaper sheet on that thing, or I can do a little tiny thing, a little pamphlet, or I can use a, you know, a magazine, you know. Sure, sure. If you ever run short on those, we got them by the ton down there. I need your name, address, and phone number, please, and write something on it about… Yeah, I'll make a note right now.
Do you do, you always actually, when you talked about the delting process for bookkeeper books, you take the whole book apart, filing? I would not do it. Not dump, or… I wouldn't do it if it were me. That's just a personal. That's just thread. You can get it in the catalogs back there. There's a whole spool of it right in front of him. The whole school. If it were me, I would go ahead and just—I've done so much of this stuff that it's quicker for me rather than go.
We've got a wonderful slideshow we're going to show you. But there's a couple—there's one thing that I want to mention to you. One of the things that Bob told me is that our suggestion to you is go to your local historical organization, wherever you are in your city, and ask them if you can intern with them. Ask them if you can help them. Ask them if they need your help. Because the things that you learn here, you can share with them, and the things that they have, they can share with you.
And you both work hand in hand. A direct result of that is I became the archivist for my city, and it's been the most wonderful venture that I've had other than AA in my life. So my suggestion is ask if you can use your talents out there other than just AA. We're all very talented people. We're all clean, sober, wonderful individuals, and we get a chance to do more than we did before. The name of the game in that—is this thing working okay yet?
The name of the game in that is people love to have grunts around because grunts do the work. And I don't care whether it's a university, like, is anybody here from Colorado? They have a wonderful, wonderful university, great three- or four-month course. Colorado. Denver. Anyway, there are other places. If there is anybody from Washington, D.C., your chances of doing an internship at National Archives or the Library of Congress—I've done both.
You will get invaluable assistance. If you have large libraries in your area, volunteer. Go down and see them. Let them know you're interested in history. Does it mean you might be sweeping the floor every now and then? Probably, but that's no big deal, because the amount of training you'll get is just, you can't put a value on it. The best thing that I can say about that is, is if you will volunteer to do the work, let them know that you would like to have training in the field of conservation. And I guarantee you they will be vitally interested, especially if you can go to a historical society, or in my case, I worked with the Arkansas State History Commission, and I'm there every day.
[00:10:01]
So you get just training that money can't buy. So there is a catalog. After this is over with, I'll tell you, well, let me just give you some numbers. This is where you can reach me, and rather than have to write it 15,000 times, I'd rather just give you the number and y'all write it down. My home number in Arkansas, both of them are area code 501. The home number is 851-3451. The number at the History Commission is also 501.
The number is 682-6905. There was a question asked whether or not that I do the internet. No, Fay and I don't do that, because right now we have so much material on the computer that we do not, until we can protect, we've got to protect it. Almost all the way. And now when we get things in, we really have to screen them. We don't want to be caught up with getting a virus and losing everything. So that's why I don't fiddle with the internet right now.
It isn't that I dislike it. I don't believe in it. Quite the contrary. I think it's a very quick way of communicating. But the big thing to do it, I think we talked about it, what, four or five times today. Let's all communicate with each other. We talked about a whole lot of archival procedures today in the field of restoration. This is truly restoration. There's an awful lot of conservation work done.
The history behind this thing: an 80-year-old, 80, 81-year-old ex-librarian, retired librarian in Indianapolis, Indiana, went to take his trash to a dumpster, one of them big Dempsey dumpsters in the apartment complex. And when he threw the door open, he looked in, and he's just a little old tiny guy. He looked in there and he saw this book. Well, you know, librarians don't like to see books in dumpsters.
So he got some sort of a box, and then he put an overturned— anyway, he got in the dumpster and got the book, and he says, Oh yeah, that's, that's, that's one of them A and A books. It was a red-covered book. He opened it up and he looked at it, and he was a native of Chicago area at one time, and he knew where the telephone number, and he knew the person whose name was in that book. So that book ended up, and the way he sent it, you know these little cheapy mailers? He just dropped it in the mail and sends it up there.
And what are the chances of that book wending its way to a sanctioned archive and not being ripped off in the process? God intended for that book to be there. God intended for it. There's no doubt in my mind. This is another book. Another reason for wearing gloves. Somebody talked about latex gloves. I don't remember. Do not discount them, because when you see the filthy mess that we got, when I got it in the mail, I wouldn't even touch it.
I grabbed the stuff, I grabbed the material, I put it back in a room where we go ahead and debug and delouse and de-everything. And I used latex gloves in handling it. I wouldn't even ruin a pair of cotton gloves. And it stayed in there. How do you debug a book? Well, we use mothflakes. Absolutely wonderful. I put the book, I put it in a bag, put a bunch of mothflakes in there and seal it up, and I guarantee you the bugs are dead.
How many times have you gone to an old building? We recently obtained an entire collection of a group in north, or mid-central Arkansas. We didn't even know was associating with Louisiana. They were always going to the, what is it, Tri-City? No, Tri-State. They were going to the Tri-State convention, plus they were also mixing with a southeast Arkansas group. We don't know who they were yet. But when we opened the building up, the pigeons had pooped from the rafters, and the lady said that all the AA stuff is in them two boxes.
So we had to take and get the stuff off, put it in a box, bring it home. We carried latex gloves with us. We carried bags with us, and before we would even put it in the car, I put it up on the racks, what I did, on top of my van. And that stuff stayed like that for I don't know how long before we could ever get to it. This book was equally as dangerous. Now why would you do that? Wasn't it the last time when I had the severe eye infection?
Time when I had this severe eye infection, last seminar, last archive
[00:15:03]
seminar. You can get some very bad skin conditions from this old stuff. So please, please be careful. Some of you are medically qualified to back me up, but you can get pretty bad shape. So be real careful. I had rather extensive work done on my eyes, so, yeah. I read in Preservation that they're studying right now. Remember the witch burning that said the girls were speaking weird and… Sure. They were also, they had a hold of, well, I guess we had a lot of moisture, and the books that came with them, and they were very moldy, and they're saying that that mold, the mold from moldy books, was possible cause.
These youngsters talking really weird as if they had been possessed. And the mold is dangerous too. Thank you, thank you. I have to add to that, and this is very important. I'm glad that, and I know we're a little bit behind, but kind of bear with me. Drunks smoke when they read old books, especially the first, second, third, all those first edition books. The tobacco was so powerful at that time. We had a lot of cigar smokers and a lot of pipe smokers.
Joe McQuany, as anybody see the Big Book study? Did you ever watch him puffing on his pipe doing the Big Book study? I wish you could have seen the tobacco I took out of that book of his. I've got his book. And anyway, that stuff can make you really rotten, you know, skin irritations and everything else. So please be careful. Use latex gloves. And you saw that hake brush that we were talking about putting Wyto liquid on.
It's also very, very soft and very, very gentle, so you can brush all that stuff out of the spine. You just go through it page by page. Okay. This is the entire story. I wish I had taken a package—I'm sorry, a photograph of the package that it came in. It was so filthy it had stained through the paper. As you can see, that's a first edition, first printing book. As you can see, I wish I had my laser pointer, but I don't.
You'll see some black material there that had actually eaten through. I don't know what got on that book, probably from the dumpster, maybe from battery acid, I don't know. But you'll see the black material. Mind your way. Yeah, can you turn that down a little? If you can do that, that'll help out. Over here. How's that? Okay. The white was some foreign substance. I'm not too sure it wasn't something that we sniff up our nose, and I'll be honest with you, that's why—I'm serious.
You don't know what this stuff is. This came out of a dumpster. Can I sit here? Okay. This will give you a better idea what that book looks like. Now you can see it's very badly bloated. You can also see that this was a challenge and a half. You wonder what you would do with a book like that. I recently restored one, not quite this bad, and I kid you not, have you ever opened up a book and it slammed shut?
I kid you not, that was a first edition, first printing book. I opened it up and it slammed shut. Why am I saying that? It had never been read, and yet it was rotted. It's heartbreaking. Why are we here? We're here, hopefully, to make sure that our archival material doesn't get in this condition. Okay, these are just some shots of it. Another shot of it, and you can see how badly bowed and bloated that book is.
It's very, very bloated. Now we're starting to really see just how bad it is. You can see the cover, the end sheet, the white paper. I better get up there by it. The white paper was actually pulling away from the board itself, and that was through all the chemicals. This was the cover, this right here, and it pulled away from the board. You can see the material, how rotted it was. You can see the staining, and this is how we found out where this book came from. We were able to save that. Why would we, you know, several people have asked about books. This is one of the reasons that gives you a lot of
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history. This book found its way to Indianapolis, Indiana, and out back there with Malone. Now you can really see the damage. There's the board. There's the end sheet. Look at the rot down inside that book. Starting to take it apart, we have to get the cover off. There's the one board with no material at all on it. This was so bad. This was my next challenge. The only way that I can do it is to clean up the spine because we've got to find out how badly damaged it was.
Done, the damage that was done in the spine itself. You'll also see something, probably coffee or drink or something, I don't know, right up in here. You'll also see mold and mildew on the page edges. Please remember the looks of this book because you're going to see the finished subject when we're done. Am I in your way? This is where I'm starting to clean the text itself. As you can see, we're starting to scrape that stuff off little by little by little. All of this had to be broken down to see just what was usable.
We did not want to lose the page with the writing. It's over there somewhere. And the rest, we made a decision, my colleague and I, to not lose any more of the book. Whether we had to, you know, fix it up as best we could and have an ugly page in there, we made the decision to do it. Now what we're doing, we're actually finding out the size of the old boards. These are parts of the cover. I call them boards.
The reason being is I've got to make a board that will fit that book. When you measure these things, measure it, put it up, the following day measure again, because I guarantee your measurements will— God has a funny sense of humor. He seems to want us to struggle on things, and if you go back the following day, you'll measure a little bit of difference. And there, what I'm doing is measuring from here over to the other side because there's a big spinal area in there that's going to make a difference as to how you put that book back together again.
And mind you, I'm not using old soft rotted material. It's going to be brand new material. I've located red material. In fact, I've located most all that material. What I'm doing here is actually cleaning out in the text itself some of my government work. I didn't even know that was there. I must have took a break during lunch hour. Anyway, I'm actually cleaning out the spine there, and if you look real close, you will actually see the stitching of this book all the way down.
Did anybody look on this table and see a little curve? Does everybody know what a suture needle is? A doctor would know to stitch you up a little bit. I use them all the time. And the reason I use them all the time is I may have to go back in and add a little support, so I will suture these pages are put together in sections, or they legally call them signatures. So I might have to suture signatures or sections back together again, or to strengthen them. Okay.
Once I've got that book apart, once I've got the signatures done, then the next thing I'm going to have to do on a book that bad is, how many have worn a shirt and worn a shirt and worn a shirt and worn a shirt until there's no body left in it? What do you do to put body back in that shirt? Sizing. You can't see the container, but there's a container of Knox gelatin up there, and I am actually applying Knox gelatin.
You can see it, the difference between dry and wet. And I had to do page by page by page. Lone Endeavor, I think that was the first edition, first printing, and the last story, was it not? And I don't think that was the only time. Okay, when you add Noxzegelatin to a book, what do you add? It's a food group, and if you had a food group, what's it going to invite? Hey, bugs, come on, let me in. So you're going to have to, when you're done with something like this, is make sure that it's in a secure place, in a safe, okay, or a good area.
So what I'm doing is actually putting Noxzegelatin on those pages.
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As you can see, some of the pages were still attached. What mixture would you have for your Noxzegelatin? Noxzegelatin is just, it tells you what to do: one package to one quart of water. Follow the directions on the package. By the way, don't use strawberry, lemon, lime. Please don't. They have unflavored Noxzegelatin. I really made a bad mistake. I did a workshop up in Chicago area, and a lady called me about two weeks after I come back, and she said my item turned green, and she had used lime-flavored Noxzegelatin.
That's how we can go astray, you know. It wasn't an important document, so thank God that it could have been worse. As you can see, a lot of these had to be bathed. Now let me talk about that, and I'm sorry we ran out of time today. I bathe my documents in between sheets of window screen. Now, is it like the window screen on your windows? No, absolutely not. Nylon window screen. Never use metal window screen.
Nylon window screen, I make a solution, a bath, a large container, and in it is warm water and Orvus liquid. Orvus liquid. If women have really, really delicate clothing, they will hand wash things. It's the same Orvus liquid, O-R-V-U-S. Wonderful to bathe things with. The reason I could do that, and you can see the difference between the quality of that paper and what you saw before. Almost every page was damaged. Okay, what I'm trying to do now is the areas that had to be tissueed back together again.
Remember, this book's got to be put back together again. So I had to take—there's some of your little towel weights. I put felt on the top and the bottom. There's some of the little glass weights that we talked about. I'm still doing more tissue repair on more signatures or sections. I'm getting towards the front of the book here. You can tell by the title page. Don't go to your archives looking like this. I had the opportunity, and I worked for the federal government for many years, and it's not a very good story for the federal government to be doing things on federal government time.
There's a story behind it, and it was perfectly legal. If I worked overtime, the following day I had the rest of the afternoon off. So I get on the history commission and do the work, and that's why I'm dressed like this. Okay, what I found was is some old cord and some old yucky PVA glue, which I'm actually taking off with that lifting knife over there. I'm getting it out of the way. Now what I'm doing is tissue repair.
You can see where I've done a little tissue repair back here. I just do all the repair and then I go back and do all the trimming rather than one-page trim. Do all the repair and then go back. So I'm doing the tissue repair. We can do nothing about this. I told you that you could take stains and rust out of paper with diethylformamide. The chances of it coming out in this case are nil. So please don't even try. You'll just make a stain more ugly.
I found it necessary to go ahead and take some of the stuff. I was short that day, that month, and I was short of time, and I was trying to do some work at the—what do you do when you go on display? I take some work with me because if I've got to sit there and babysit the archives display, I carry some materials, and those always go with me. And I've done that for a good many years now. You can get a lot of work done. And another thing too, going back to the people seeing what you're doing, I'll guarantee you that intrigues the heck out of them.
They see their money at work. They actually see their money at work. We did that down in Louisiana when I come down to do the area assembly, didn't we? Yeah. Okay. I told you that we made our own presses. You can do local purchase and local manufacture. This is not one that you make. This is one of those university product, seventy-some-odd-dollar things. Well, we've learned that rather than buy— Things. Well, we've learned that rather than buying these high-dollar items, we can just go get
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a couple of pieces of two-by-four, a couple of long, long bolts, a couple of wing nuts, washers and whatnot, and drill holes through them, and we can make our own little clamps like this. This is actually being held between two tables. Why— let me back up. The reason I've got it in a clamp— I'm going the wrong way. Ah, come on. No, absolutely not. Not going. Okay. What I'm doing there is you can look at the PVA glue, which actually builds up the spine.
All this is old rotted glue, and it has to be taken off. What do we take it off with? Quick. We used it today. Methyl cellulose. Thick methyl cellulose. Never, never, never watery, because the water will run down into the text, and you don't want to do that. We go ahead and we saturate the spine area. Note that I've got wax paper between the text and the board, and it's laying over the side because sometimes it'll stick to the board, so be real, real careful.
Anyway, I put it on. We go upstairs. There's another old book that I'm working on. That was an old legal book. Anyway, we go upstairs and maybe have a cup of cappuccino or something. We come back 10, 15 minutes later, and we can take a lifting knife or a spatula and actually scrape all this stuff off. Okay, when we have the text, the spine clear, we actually have to take and anchor in before we can put the rest of the support on. Note that the spine is clean, the spine is clear, all the cords are in pretty good shape. I've got those end sheets and facing sheets that we had to throw away. They have to be put on.
So I'm using natural adhesive or PVA glue, and I'm making a little bead, and you can see it there. And I've got the paper that I'm actually slipping in there in that little line of glue. That's a folded-over sheet of paper, which will be the front.