Civil War diaries

On some level I don’t really think what I do is about books and paper.

To me it’s really about history and culture and people. I’m repairing books, of course, but they’re just the object that gets to the real point. 

And that is what I find exciting, fun, and challenging. How to keep a story alive for another 150 years or more.  How to better preserve a family history to show family members in the future what their great-great-grandmother was like. How did she live? What did she enjoy? Who was she? Look through an old family cookbook and you’ll find answers to all those questions.

In honor of the 4th I wanted to share this project:

Some time ago a gentlemen brought in two Civil War diaries. They were from the same soldier. The story is that the soldier kept up two diaries because he didn’t think he was going to survive the war. He could send home the larger sheets as he finished them and kept the smaller one in his pack. He assumed he would be killed and the smaller one would be lost.

I can’t imagine.

The smaller one no longer had a cover. Or end sheets. So there was no way to know what the original binding was, or how it looked. They came like this:

The first thing I did was to repair all the pages in the smaller diary and then sewed it back together. For the covering material I used airplane linen. I liked the look of linen as a cover for this and thought it fit the spirit of the book.

In the end it became a book again. The advantage of a binding, versus loose pages, is that it protects the pages of the book by covering them because it is easier to leaf through pages when they are bound versus when they are a pile of loose sheets.

For the larger diary I encapsulated the pages in mylar. Well, not really mylar because mylar doesn’t exist any more but let’s just call it that because I’m getting older and it’s a hard habit to let go of.  

The pages are not laminated! Lamination involves attaching the pages to a plastic. It certainly protects the item you are laminating but it also destroys it at the same time because it can be extremely difficult to remove the lamination. 

The work I do is all about reversibility! In a few hundred years, someone should be able to take apart a book I’ve repaired without causing any harm to it. This goal is not totally attainable, of course, but I think we get pretty close.

These pages are floating between two sheets of an inert polyester using a 3M double sided tape. No tape is touching the pages and they can be removed from their housings in seconds.

In the end I made a box to hold both items. The rebound, smaller diary went into an opening in the box, which left a shelf for the larger pages.

The box was a drop spine box. Sadly I don’t think customers really appreciate how important a drop spine box can be in preserving books and papers. When I offer it I get the sense that some think I’ve turned into a used car salesman, which is unfortunate. Or sad. The are many, many stories of items in these boxes being protected during fires or water incidents, let alone the general protection from sunlight, dust, and other nefarious things waiting to descend on books and papers.

Maybe if I could create a meme it would help with the acceptance and advancement of drop spine boxes among the general populace. But I’m not really sure what a meme is, so that’s a bit of a sticking point with that idea.

I tell folks that every book they care about should be in a box. And I believe it. I’m grateful that I’ve taught enough classes in drop spine boxes that I’m pretty much there myself. Otherwise I’m afraid it’d be like the cobbler’s kids having no shoes.

It’s a privilege and a thrill to work on objects like these. I wrote a post earlier that said that I feel like I’m working for the grandchildren of my clients rather than the clients themselves, which helps me make better decisions.

But in this case I think I’m working for the soldier who wrote these, who was the great grandfather of my client. I’m sure he would be happy to see his record preserved.

Happy 4th of July.

The perfect baby gift

When three of my nieces and nephews were going to have children very close together we had to decide what to give them as a baby gifts.  To me the key phrase in that sentence is "baby gift."  A gift for the baby.  As opposed to a gift for the new parents.  It always seemed to me that giving baby clothes was a gift for the parents, which is fine - there's nothing wrong with giving gifts to new parents, but then call it a parent gift, not a baby gift.

My idea, and Diane agreed, was to give each child a drop spine box like this one, with their name on the cover:

Inside we filled it:

In each box was a New York Times and a Seattle Times, from their birthday, along with eight or so magazines that were on the news stands when the child was born.  We picked magazines which would cover culture, fashion, sports, computers, technology, news, music and others we thought would be of interest.  I think Diane put an architecture magazine in one of them!  We tried to think of magazines that would evidence the greatest change over the next fifty, or hundred, years.

What I particularly like about it is this:  it's kind of worthless now, it's just a bunch of magazines.  But in thirty years it'll start being kind of interesting.  In fifty years it'll be pretty cool, and in a hundred years it'll be amazing.

At least we hope!

To make the box I made a drop spine box the size of the newspapers and then infilled the lower part of it so that the magazines wouldn't jostle around too much.  And that's the important thing here, the box can't allow the movement of the magazines or newspapers.  And it needs to be made of proper, acid-free and durable, materials.  You can see the structure in these pictures, and in the picture above:

On the inside of  the other tray is a letter from Diane and myself explaining why we did this.  Diane wrote it, so it is prose that reads as poetry.  

What struck me after we had done a couple of these (this is the third one) is that even having a newspaper will be interesting in a few decades.  News of the Picayune going to three days a week is pretty hard to hear for someone like me who loves newspapers. Especially Sunday newspapers.  You also have to wonder how long printed magazines will last as well.

I often get asked what I think of Kindles and Nooks, with the expectation of I'll start screaming or yelling about how they are the end of civilization and decency.  But really, the main thing I think we lose with electronic books is the loss of cultural history.  You won't be able to pass down grandma's Kindle in the same way you can save her cookbook.  And the stains on the pages of the cookbook, even more than the words on the page, say a lot about grandma, what she liked to cook, and even how careful of a cook she was!  Same for Bibles, or favorite children's books.

Sometime you should leaf through the pages of Copernicus' books, and see all his marginalia.  Reading his notes means you can see his thoughts as he read a section of the text.  His unguarded thoughts.  Sure todays' Copernicus can make notes on his or her Kindles, but you won't be able to read anything off a fifty year old model.

Maybe that's why I like this gift so much.  It's saving a bit of culture in a way that will allow it to be experienced a century from now.  In that way, it's perhaps more of a gift to Phoebe's grandchildren than it is for her.

Of course part of the key to it, I suppose, will be to keep it out of their hands until they are old enough to  understand what it is.  And hope they find it interesting enough to take care of and save.  We'll see...