Soooooooo…a coworker just brought me a book she’d found that had been “fixed” with packing tape. Somebody put packing tape over the inner hinge of the book! This in itself isn’t that unique…EXCEPT that the hinge WASN’T. EVEN. BROKEN!! Somehow whoever did it thought putting tape on an unbroken hinge was going to do something good […]
Sometimes you find the strangest out-of-context things in collections.
uispeccoll: If you’re off to a fancy costume party during the late 19th century in France, then this copy of Histoire du costume au théâtre is perfect for you! Published in 1880 by G. Charpentier in Paris, this book gives the history of French theater costumes with the aid of splendid illustrations, both color and […]
Paper curls from cleaning the spine of an old, big book in the conservation lab. I usually start out my spine cleaning by using a special dull knife to scrape away as much of the paper lining as I can, until I get down to the crash/mull/super fabric lining underneath. That’s when I switch to […]
Neon catfish art. Found in the art building on the campus where I work
Yup! Peter Verheyen and Donia Conn have written up some great instructions for how to make a German-style springback. Check them out on the Book Arts web! On that same site there’s also instructions for the English-style springback here. I’ve made both types of springbacks, but it’s been so long I don’t really remember which […]
The Paper Project This project chronicles handmade and mould made paper images produced by a scanning-laser confocal microscope. This type of microscopy is unsurpassed for producing sharp three-dimensional images and allows us to see not just surface features, but often all the way through the sheet. The microscope scans successively deeper layers of a specimen […]
Hi! A good rule of thumb for storage of paper items is that paper is the best way to store paper. Of course, you want to use very high quality paper filing supplies, so look for words like “buffered” or “acid-free” on the box. I highly recommend buffered paper folders to store the kind of […]
This is an old-books-about-Egypt appreciation post. I love publisher’s bindings, and Egyptian art, so this was a fun excursion into our stacks. These are all circulating books, by the way, not part of our special collections. Also I can’t get over that typeface they used on “Redemption of Egypt”. SO pretty! Anybody know what it’s called, […]
Oh my god I just made a protective plastic L-sleeve for a 5.5 feet (1.7 meters) long panoramic photograph and I just need to sit down for a bit now and catch my breath. It is longer than I am tall. That is a 15 inch ruler for scale, by the way. Did I mention […]