Dropped on its edge as a baby: conserving a volume with many paper repairs.

Paper repairs, creased corners and fragile page edges are all in a day’s work for a book conservator, but it isn’t often that we come across a volume that with such a violent past. The 1632 Book of Common Prayer, belonging to St Catharine’s College Library, came to the Consortium studio with a badly damaged lower bookblock edge, featuring extensive tears and creases on almost every page. While it is hard to say exactly what might have happened here, it appears that at some point this volume was dropped, or perhaps even had something sharp forced into the bookblock edge while the volume was closed.

As a conservator at the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium, the painstaking process of carrying out paper repairs fell to me. I used a lightweight Japanese tissue adhered with wheatstarch paste. The long fibers of Japanese tissue form a strong, flexible repair, while its light weight avoids adding unnecessary bulk to the material. To secure the tears while they dried, I used magnet pads wrapped with blotter and non-stick bondina. This meant that I could work on multiple pages while the repairs dried between the magnet pads, allowing me to move more quickly through the volume.

As you might imagine, this process took many hours of focused work. The life of a conservator is not always glamourous, but it was satisfying to see the bookblock edge become whole again as I worked my way through the volume.

Structural repairs

After the paper repairs were complete, I moved onto the structural repairs to the binding. The leather sewing supports, which had originally been used to lace the bookblock to the boards, were broken. This meant that there was an area of weakness along the board joints which would require reinforcement.

After separating the cover from bookblock, I could work on the volume’s spine. I used linen thread, passed behind the original sewing supports, to extend the broken supports. This allowed me to re-lace the supports into the boards, similarly to how they would have been laced originally. This forms a strong mechanical attachment, without relying too heavily on the use of adhesives alone. I laced it in such a way that when it was pulled tight, you could only see a small amount of white thread tucked behind the original supports. For this I took inspiration from Emma Fraser’s board reattachment technique, where the connecting thread is passed diagonally through the board and then out through another horizontal channel in the board, forming a strong but subtle attachment.

For additional strength, I used linen tabs with extending flanges, which I adhered to the spine and underneath the cover leather on the boards. For such a large, heavy volume, a strong board attachment like this is especially important.

After some repairs to the endband and the covering leather, the conservation treatment was complete. The structural repairs, now almost invisible, have helped to strengthen the volume for future use. The most dramatic transformation is in the lower edge of the bookblock, where the paper repairs have improved not only the handling strength of the pages, but the legibility and aesthetics of the volume too.

Every book has a story; not only written in its pages, but also in its materiality, condition and damage. As conservators, we can only guess at what its mysteries past might hold, but we hope that our work will ensure that its story can continue into the future.