Panting up five flights of sole-worn marble stairs to the Conservation Laboratory of the Newberry Library, that blackened stone hulk on West Walton Street overlooking Bughouse Square, you’re trudging toward the front lines of a war against the ravages of time.
It is a hushed war.
On a recent busy morning, with the lab at full assault (and the elevators out of order), only these sounds were heard: the occasional thump of a plump pink eraser being cast aside after wiping away the smudges of decades, the creasing of an ancient paper being folded against itself, then a dreaded ripping sound–the ugliest of all in a place dedicated to keeping paper from crumbling–the sound of a tear in a page of a centuries-old book. More grating, though, is a sin without sound–that of ink running off paper as it’s being cleansed of its grime, a tragedy rare in this room of last resort, where to lose a manuscript is to lose a piece of our cultural memory.
This laboratory–two sprawling chambers of natural light, where medieval meets Space Age, and ancient crafts come together with 20th Century science–is the triage center for books and papers on the verge of falling apart. “Terminal embrittlement” is the most frequent diagnosis stamped on the patients’ charts, and, occasionally, “dangling from a thread”; a book’s spine is dangling, that is.
Here, in what is now divided into the conservation studio and the laboratory, the great works of the Newberry are saved. The conservation studio originally was the bindery, which had been around since the library opened in 1893. The laboratory was the first on-site conservation facility in any U.S. library, established in 1970 by one of the great pioneers of modern conservation, Paul N. Banks, the Newberry’s first conservator, from 1964 until 1981.
Items among the vast collection of rare and treasured books, manuscripts and maps are brought in when they’re deemed just this side of needing a final resuscitation. With a larger staff and budget, the paper doctors would get an earlier start.
But that’s the thing about the ravages of time on paper: You can’t bring anything back. The best you can hope for, say the conservators, is to stop the march of time. Or else, says preservation specialist Joan ten Hoor, “it’s cornflakes,” meaning that the dried-up bits of paper eventually break into many flimsy flakes and drift onto the dust heap of history.
And so, a most modest corps–one full-time book-and-paper conservator, a self-taught bookbinder, a preservation technician, two part-time conservators (a book conservator and a preservation specialist)–is en-gaged in doing battle with the enemies of paper.
The corps members are hellbent on keeping time from erasing what we know about who and what went before us, at least what we know on paper, and that is, to date, a fair-size chunk of the record.
Quite simply, the conservation squad at the Newberry comes to work each day to keep our collective memory from turning to dust.
“We’re not the old kind of librarian who is happiest when everything is on the shelf,” insists the Newberry’s president and seventh librarian, Charles Cullen, countering the crusty old myth, sometimes shared in whispers among the scholars who frequent the research library’s reading rooms, that the Newberry hands you a pair of white gloves with every tome, then stands watch as long as pages are being turned. So, while Newberry librarians won’t insist that you examine your tome under a dust-proof dome, they do have high hopes for their collections. Says Cullen: “We want these materials to be here in 100 years, in 1,000 years.”
It is in the lab, then, that the truly wounded–the pages that break off with just one fold, rather than the minimum measure for brittleness that allows three folds before breaking; and the books with severed spines–are given a once-over.
The treatments here are hardly dramatic: a dry cleaning, perhaps, basically nothing more than erasing away the dirt; a mending, backing a worn page with a sheet of tissue-thin but sturdy Japanese paper made from the inner bark of a mulberry tree; a rebacking, and sometimes a rebinding, too; quite often, nothing more than a recasing, building a little cardboard house for a book too fragile to be touched; and, once in a while, a plain old bath, though the filtered water in these tubs is of a meeker composition than that from the everyday tap.
About as severe as the treatments get is deacidification. When the unstable and highly acidic chemical makeup of all commercial paper produced since the 1850s, in effect, cannibalizes itself–that sin is absolved by an alkaline bath or spray that works not unlike Alka-Seltzer taking the acidic ouch out of pepperoni overload.
The tools in these chambers are a charming mix of the everyday–a box of 64 Crayola crayons for blending in blemishes, a ginger grater from Chinatown for breaking vinyl erasers into the smallest, gentlest size, to be gently rubbed or rolled over an ancient surface that a standard erasing would rub raw–and the medieval–a battery of savage presses with gargantuan screws, and a giant blade called “the guillotine,” all of which would not seem out of place in a torture chamber of long ago. More recent additions enter the Space Age–a clear-plastic bubble called the vacuum suction chamber that resembles an intensive-care incubator, costs upwards of $12,000, and can be used to suck out stains or simply to hold paper flat; another contraption called the Minter encapsulator, also in the $12,000 range, that uses neither too-intrusive heat nor adhesive but sound waves to seal the edges of a see-through polyester called Mylar, which forever fortifies and protects papers that once had been nearly dust.
What makes paper fall apart is simple. Paper, at least since the 1850s, when there was a shortage of the cotton and linen rags that until then had been its choice components, is made primarily from wood ground to pulp. Cellulose–the lightweight fencing that forms the cell walls of plants–is short in wood, and the shorter the cellulose strands, the more likely the strands, or fibers, will crumble.
Acids, when they come in contact with cellulose, chomp away at the cell walls to the point that the paper falls apart at a finger’s touch. And with wood pulp, there’s already a lot of acid in its very composition. In the field of conservation, they call this nasty little trick of nature “inherent vice,” and it’s Paper Enemy No. 1.
Add to that another acid poured into the mix since paper was first mass-produced in the latter half of the 19th Century. It’s alum-rosin sizing, a wash added during the beating of the wood pulp that makes the paper absorb ink more quickly, essential in the age of paper overconsumption, when high-speed printing has been the order of the day.
Paper, especially old paper, has other enemies as well, and the foes are nothing more than the stuff of ordinary living: heat, humidity, light (especially ultraviolet), insects, air pollution and, sometimes worst of all, you and I, the book-beating public, whose greasy fingers or crude means of propping open books or marking pages can do in the sturdiest of tomes.
History, too, has taken its toll, as each of the last several centuries has offered up its crime: 17th Century literary fashion saw fit to paint over the spines of every book in a private library in the same hue, drawing from the family colors, and doing away in a brush stroke with whatever was the original construction; 18th and 19th Century bookbinding practices, gaudy at best, were notorious for damaging a book each and every time it was opened or closed, wrenching the pages from the spine; and in the 20th Century we have those big conservation no-no’s: Elmer’s glue and Scotch Tape. Any modern adhesive accelerates embrittlement and leaves behind cracked and yellowed and stubborn-as-all-get-out reminders of where it last attached.
All that is what the Newberry is up against.
And, mind you, the Newberry, as one of only 15 private independent research libraries in the country (the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is another), holds on its shelves an awesome stack of one-of-a-kind books, dating from a book of homilies produced in the early 9th Century.
The Newberry is home to more than 21 miles of books–one of those nifty if none-too-meaningful figures calculated by the number crunchers at the library back in the summer of 1982, when the staff had to schlep the entire collection into the then-new and still-state-of-the-art, “environmentally correct” 10-story building that now houses the whole 36,960 yards in computer-controlled conditions. Miles or yards, the long stretch of spines translates into roughly 1.4 million volumes, 5 million manuscripts and 60,000 maps.
Among them: a first edition of the first opera ever performed, Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” written for the marriage of Marie de Medicis and Henry IV of France in 1600; the first Latin edition of Columbus’ report to Ferdinand and Isabella; the first edition of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” believed to be the only copy in existence; a copy of the second book ever printed in English, Jacobus de Cessolis’ “The Game and Playe of Chess,” printed by William Caxton in 1482; and first editions of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” printed in 1590, and Thomas More’s “Utopia,” printed in 1516.
“The trick then is not to be terrified now that you’re told it’s the only copy in North America,” says book conservator Robin Zurawski, whose passion is her paycheck (she earned a law degree back in 1977 that she’s never put to work).
“In the course of your normal life you tend not to run into books from the 15th Century,” Zurawski says, “and I have to say there is something about the physical contact, just touching the earliest manuscripts. The materials are superb–so alike and so different from the paperback murder mysteries I’m reading. It’s the epitome of book.”
And so, like her comrades in the Newberry lab, Zurawski meets her task each morning with a healthy dose of awe for what will pass through her fingertips.
“You often find that the rarest thing you work on is the one you want to do the least with,” she says, touching on but one of conservation’s ironies.
The Newberry’s conservators are a curious breed in a society where egos often know no bounds and fame is too frequently a commodity fought for at all costs. Theirs is a profession of buried egos and a code of ethics with a built-in humility, where the guiding tenet is to do nothing that cannot be undone, never to assume that yours is the last hand to touch an object or the last mind to determine its fate. Literally and figuratively, they aim to leave no fingerprints on the pages of history.
“The most important conservation and preservation we do is invisible,” says preservation specialist Ten Hoor, who worked for two decades as a reference librarian before switching eight years ago to keeping books in basic working order.
“It’s not as glamorous as taking apart an herbal (an early book of medical writings),” she says, speaking of “Hortis Sanitatis,” a medieval medical book, printed in 1485, that tells, in early block-letter German and in haphazard alphabetical order, how to use herbs if, say, you have a cold or are pregnant.
The taking-apart, bathing, mending and putting-back-together of the almost 560-page work is a project that has consumed about 1,000 hours over the last 21Z2 years. It was “a mystery that kept unraveling,” says book and paper conservator Carol Sue Whitehouse.
In fact, it is not for those kinds of glamorous so-called “single-item treatments” that the Newberry earned its reputation in the 1970s and ’80s as one of the front-runners in library conservation. It was for the quieter work, the invisible work, what might be called “keeping the cornflakes at bay,” or, plainly, preventive preservation.
That the Newberry is out front on that score is evident by taking a walk around back, to the north side of architect Henry Ives Cobb’s main library. Back there is where you’ll look up and see what’s known as the “stacks building” and likened to a “10-story thermos” in that it’s a double-walled, windowless vessel designed purely for the preservation of its holdings. “It would be ideal,” one Newberry librarian once wrote, “to literally freeze most of the library’s materials.”
Thankfully, the man put in charge of the project back in the 1970s, was neither so cold-hearted nor severe. Paul Banks was a book conservator who had toiled in his own little shop on New York’s Lower East Side before being lured to the Newberry in 1964.
Banks, who left the Newberry in 1981 to start the nation’s first graduate-degree program in library conservation at Columbia University, remembers the board’s decision to expand the library by constructing a building solely for its collections as “pretty darn revolutionary at the time.”
Banks spent the 1970s researching how to build the perfect building for papers old and not-so-old. For the book-stacks project and other contributions to the field, he is one of the most respected of modern conservationists.
The knowledge regarding the best environment for books and paper had been around since the 1930s, thanks to work done by the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, Banks said in a recent interview from Texas. He’s there now as a senior lecturer in preservation and conservation studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the school that adopted the conservation program when Columbia closed its library school in 1991.
“For whatever reasons–economics, World War II–that body of knowledge got buried,” Banks said. He would be the one to dig it up. And the Newberry would be the one to stack it 10 stories high, completing in 1982 a building that is practically impenetrable to the things that wreak havoc on paper.
There is no vertical penetration of any floors–stairwells and elevators are on the outside–thus preventing the spread of fire or water from one floor to another. Waterproofing wraps the basement level, and, ever fearful of The Big Leak, the library planners built no cooling tower on top.
Temperature and humidity are controlled and monitored by computer. Someone from the conservation lab measures temperature and relative humidity on every floor every Wednesday morning to catch any flaws in technology. A triple air filter keeps out the toxins you and I inhale every day.
Lights go on only when someone is in a particular aisle, and only in that section of the aisle. No one can get in without a security card, and a security guard with a beeper is on call 24 hours a day.
Before any new book is added to the collection, it must be quarantined, that is, tossed into the modified ice cream freezer that is under preservation specialist Ten Hoor’s supervision. It’s her job to deep-freeze any silverfish or roaches, carpet beetles or book lice, spiders or even the rare book worm (yes, there really is such a creature; it’s the larva of a certain species of beetle) that dares to make its home inside the Newberry’s paper palace.
The Newberry was lauded then as now for laying down the $6.5 million for the addition, an investment in the future of its holdings that will pay off in the long run even if, now, it means there’s not as much money to staff the lab the way Cullen, the library’s president, would best like it to be.
“We’ve got equipment we don’t have people to use,” he laments. Were it a perfect world, “we’d be reading the shelves, as it were, before (a crumbling page) got into the hands of a reader.”
Despite that handicap, neither Cullen nor any of the Newberry’s conservators and librarians can afford to forget the warning of the library’s last president, Lawrence W. Towner, who said: “If we do not preserve the literary and historical record . . . we will lose mankind’s memory and the ability to make human and humane judgments. The library is the stored-up memory of mankind. Without that memory, we cease to be human.”
And so, in a hushed laboratory on the top floor of the Newberry, a humble company of paper menders and book rebinders, armed with Space-Age encapsulators and pastes known since ancient times, goes about preserving that memory one page at a time.
