MAKE magazine recently posted a fun set of links about an art installation called “Breathing Books.” It appears that the Arduino mechanism that powers the breathing action caused a bit of a stir with pretty much every security agency, and was no end of trouble for the artist.

Kevin Driedger posted some great Collection Care Videos from the British Library.  I had a little trouble with Windows Media Player, but got them to work fine with VLC.

The Antarctic Conservation Blog always has extreme news from the bottom of the earth, but their recent travel in the Antarctic Mobile Conservation Lab has been fascinating. Imagine if your conservation lab was stuffed into a converted refrigerator and then towed across a frozen ocean by a bulldozer.  Yeah, it’s like that.

Graphic Conservation has been getting inundated with questions about how to best preserve beloved newspapers.

And a couple of great articles/op-eds from the Gray Lady.  The first, “How to Publish Without Perishing,” by James Gleick (of Chaos fame), is about how certain perfect technologies (such as books!) are unlikely to become obsolete; and a link to an article about “La Dotta Mano,” a lavish and luxurious book about Michelangelo’s sculptures.  Save your Euros!

And lastly, I’ve just started selling some of my blank journals and sketchbooks over at noteworthy* here in Missoula.  So if you’re looking for a great holiday gift, shop local!

I am most in interested in the revealing of the newly restored Star-Spangled Banner.  The museum has an great (and kid-friendly) interactive website detailing the history of the flag and the conservation efforts taken to ensure its integrity. Be sure to scan through the 14 or so photos of the work in progress - I call this next one “The League of Extraordinary Conservators.”

Apparently, the flag had its own lab constructed for it, and you could watch the work in progress.  This is not the first time the flag has undergone conservation treatment.  It showed up at the Smithsonian in 1907 in pretty shabby shape.  They hired Amelia Fowler, a respected flag-restorer to stabilize it.  Her work sounds daunting: sewing the flag to a linen backing with 1.7 million interlocking stitches.   Daunting to do it and probably even more so to undo it, as they did in the most recent treatment.

The interactive flag feature allows you to zoom in on parts of the flag to learn details of the flag’s history and conservation process.

]]> http://thevespiary.com/blog/2008/11/21/vexillology-n-the-study-of-flags/feed/ http://thevespiary.com/blog/2008/11/14/omerta-ital-n-conspiracy-of-silence/ http://thevespiary.com/blog/2008/11/14/omerta-ital-n-conspiracy-of-silence/#comments Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:24:29 +0000 Audra Loyal http://thevespiary.com/blog/?p=43 I often curse when I have to reverse patch up jobs done on books with poor materials and inept hands, so it’s somewhat comforting to hear that this happens on a much larger scale as well.

The Ambrosiana Library of Milan has announced that they are going to dismantle the Codex Atlanticus, a huge collection of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, thereby reversing a misguided (and controversial) restoration project of the 70s and returning the pages to their original loose state.

The Codex Atlanticus (called so because of its atlas-like enormous size) has not had an easy life, and teaches many lessons of how NOT to care for a precious manuscript.  With the best of intentions, an Italian sculptor named Pompeo Leoni gathered together as many of da Vinci’s drawings from Leo’s assistant, Francesco Melzi, and then cut them up into a thousand pieces and pasted them in giant notebooks.  That’s right, he cut up the originals and bound them thematically as he saw fit.  The Codex Atlanticus contains most of the technical and scientific drawings, while anatomical and naturalist ones went into other codices.  He often mounted the original folio pages in paper frames so that one could see both front and back.  Unfortunately by doing this, much of Leonardo’s margin notes were obscured.  With one fell swoop, Leonardo’s original filing system was totally annihilated.

Skip ahead to 1966.  A contract to dismantle Leoni’s work is drawn up between the Ambrosiana Library (who had acquired the Codex back in 1636) and the Grottaferrata Monks (the last Byzantine-Greek monastery in existence).  This contract specified that no one could observe the restoration work performed in the Laboratorio di Restauro.  According to Carlo Pedretti, a da Vinci scholar, even more damage was incurred by submerging the pages in water and alcohol, and then badly touched up.

Given that the most recent sale of a Leonardo drawing fetched 25 million dollars, the damage caused by this restoration was genuinely incalculable.

A side controversy erupted during this dismantling, the discovery of what some have thought to be a drawing of a bicycle, 300 years before it was invented.  Prescient sketch? Assistant doodle?  Or hoax that was perpetrated while the codex was entrusted to the monastery?  Read the article.

Now, the museum is going to undo what was done by the monks, and split out each individual page for examination and proper treatment.  The museum also addressed concerns about blooming stains with assurances that the marks were not a dreaded mold attack, but mercury salts added as a disinfectant to protect the codex from bacterial damage.

More:

• The Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia has a nice listing of the various manuscripts and a brief synopsis of the contents and current owner (i.e. Codex Leicester is owned by Bill Gates).
• The Guardian has an additional mystery surrounding some drawings called the Windsor Folios.  Even without all the hubbub surrounding The da Vinci Code, there’s plenty of mystery and omertá surrounding Leo’s work.
• L3 - a company that offers an array of digital media and international exhibits on da Vinci’s inventions and work.  They have an interactive Codex Atlanticus on CD-ROM available - I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy and give you the full report.
• Lastly, the Universal Leonardo site.  The timeline at the top of each page is fun to play with.

Still, some mending is in order…

First off, the classic essay, “Your Old Books,” by Peter Van Wingen, previous chair of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.  I like this essay because it is a very sensitive and gentle way of telling folks that merely because a book is old does not mean it is valuable.  He provides a lot of step-by-step advice for evaluation and potential sale of books.  I’ve got 2 links here, both from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL, the first being a pdf leaflet, and the second a web link to the HTML version of the guide.

Next up, another PDF from the British Library called “Understanding and Caring for Bookbindings.” There’s a great cutaway diagram of book structure in this one, and more care info and references than you can shake a stick at.

When you wonder why the paper in some of your books is turning yellow, the Graphic Conservation Company will be of great help.  Their article, “Enemies of Paper,” details some of the reasons why paper seems to self-destruct on the shelf.  They use easy to understand section headings, i.e. “Acid is BAD,” and the equally graspable, “UV is BAD.”

How can you not love a resource called “Invasion of the Giant Mold Spore?“  SOLINET (The Southeastern Library Network) treats mold as the horror it truly is.  Preparation for mold defense sometimes sounds like a zombie survival guide (when viewing the zombie guide, replace “zombie” with “mold” and “human” with “book” and you’ll have a good idea for how quickly you need to move when dealing with a potential outbreak):

Don’t plan to wait out an attack without proper rations.  Zombies Mold may move quickly in the early stages of infection.  Don’t underestimate their speed.  Studies have shown that zombies mold react poorly to cold weather, causing them to become brittle and slow.

I had to have a Halloween link in here somewhere, right?

The Northeast Document Conservation Center has loads of preservation and conservation leaflets, and I’m posting the Photo Care one as an example.  You’ll be taking all your photos out of their old acidic scrapbook homes after reading this one.

Pete Jerman of TeMPeR Productions has thought WAY too long about Fangluing and I thank him for it.  His microscopic analysis of glue-binding appeals to my science-geek nature.  Part 3 of “Reflections on Book Structure” is the best of the bunch, IMO.

Lastly, the marvelous Book Model Collection of the University of Iowa.  After viewing the collection, it’s the only time I’ve wished Iowa was a little bit closer…

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During my stay in Seattle, the NYT featured an article whose lead image struck me cold.  This item from a collection of postal memorabilia and other ephemera is a gripping visual representation of the utter disrespect and atrocities inflicted on the Jewish people by the Nazis during the Holocaust.  What we see here is a section of a Biblical scroll that has been torn up and used as postal wrapping paper.  The creator of the collection, Ken Lawrence, said that scholars have told him, “it is among the most important surviving evidence of Nazi desecration.”  He has toured his collection on a small scale, at community centers and stamp collecting gatherings, but the collection has now been purchased by the Spungen Family Foundation, who will continue to develop it and tour it nationally next year.  It will even be coming to Billings, Montana, so check back for dates.

In more religiously related news, the Jewish Museum is about to reveal their Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit to the public.   My favorite passage from the article was this one, however:

It is discomfiting, too, to see photographs in which scholars — who pieced together fragments using scotch tape — smoke over them as destructive daylight streams onto tables.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find this photo, but the International Herald Tribune has a great article about the conservation team that oversees the handling of these items that are so fragile, they seem like they might fly to the four corners of the earth if you so much as looked at them slant-wise.

Lastly, if you have been under a rock for the last 2 weeks (perhaps hiding from the economic crisis), don’t miss Wired’s article about the amazing library of someone who obviously isn’t hurting for cash, Jay Walker.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to take home and share, and is archived for generations to come at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our award-winning broadcasts on public radio and the Internet. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.

StoryCorps is trying to get at least one story for each of those lost on September 11th.  In an interview on Democracy Now, founder Dave Isay said that collecting these stories was an attempt to get back to the days of grace that prevailed in New York City in the days just following the attacks.  It’s a remarkable act of peace and understanding and a touching memorial.  I’ve listened to a few of the stories, and hope you take a moment to do the same.

Copies of the recordings will ultimately be housed at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center and the future National September 11th Memorial Museum. 

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? - Where are those who were before us?

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