The Vespiary Book Binding & Book Conservation

The flooding in the Midwest and its effect on the libraries there have had general destruction on my mind. Not too long ago, I read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (recommend!) and there was a passage there that I copied down to put my role in the conservation world into perspective. I’m sharing it with you now, not to discourage you, or make you think that conserving books is a futile exercise, but to convey a Zen sense of satisfaction in work. It’ll all vanish one day, but we do our best, and take pride in our efforts. (photo above is from climactic library fire scene in “The Name of the Rose.”)

The Arabian glue used in the bindings contains fish, honey and bone, and the pages are sized and polished with a finish made from egg while and starch. Greedy shameless mice will nibble these pages away; termites, worms and a thousand varieties of insect will gnaw our manuscripts out of existence. Bindings will fall apart and pages will drop out. Women lighting their stoves, thieves, indifferent servants and children will thoughtlessly tear out the pages and pictures. Child princes will scrawl over the illustrations with toy pens. They’ll blacken people’s eyes, wipe their runny noses on the pages, doodle in the margins with black ink. And religious censors will blacken out whatever is left. They’ll tear and cut up our paintings, perhaps use them to make other pictures or for games and such entertainment. While mothers destroy the illustrations they consider obscene, fathers and older brothers will jack off onto the pictures of women and the pages will stick together, not only because of this, but also due to being smeared with mud, water, bad glue, spit and all manner of filth and food. Stains of mold and dirt will blossom like flowers where pages have stuck together. Rain, leaky roofs, floods and dirt will ruin our books. Of course, together with the tattered, faded and unreadable pages, which water, humidity, bugs and neglect will have reduced to pulp, the one last volume to emerge intact, from the bottom of a bone-dry chest will also one day disappear, swallowed up in the flames of a merciless fire. The sublime gardens and soaring black kites that you still depict with your old enthusiasm, your astounding scenes of death and war, your graceful hunting sultans, and with the same finesse, your startled fleeing gazelles, your dying shahs, your prisoners of war, your infidel galleons and your rival cities, your shiny dark nights that glimmer as if night itself had flowed from your pen, your stars, your ghostlike cypresses, your red-tinted pictures of love and death, your and all the rest, all of it will vanish…

Reading this book instantly made me think of the heroic efforts of Baghdad’s national library director, Saad Eskander. He has remained at the library through its destruction and looting in order to provide a safe haven for learning and healing:

I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together.

He kept an online diary for a while, but chose to end it because of its litany of sorrows.

Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood. The view was surreal. Some of the papers were burning in the sky. Many burning pieces of papers fell on the [library] building.

The British Museum is helping in the effort to recover as much of the looted collection as possible.