Library Work

When I was an undergraduate at Washington I got hired at the Reserve Desk in Odegaard Library.  Odegaard was a barn of a library built in the 60s out of millions of yards of concrete, but covered in brick to it didn't look as stern as it felt.



In the days before the internet the Reserve Desk was where professors could photocopy articles for students in their classes, or move books to that segregated part of the library. The students could then check them out for four hours, so there was quite the turn over as you can imagine.  It was one more example of The Man trying to keep students from hogging study materials to the detriment of their classmates.  But then this was the 80s and not the 60s so never mind.

I worked evenings mostly. Often from 7 to midnight.  Towards the end of the night it would get rather slow and after nine I was by myself mostly.  It could get rather boring at times.

The phone system allowed for transfering of calls, after all it was a professional establishment where professionals conducted their business.  Except when they weren't there. And when they left students in charge.

 If a call came that needed to be transfered the answerer could click the hook switch once and get a dial tone, could make a call and then hit the hook switch again and the caller could be connected with the newly called number. Make sense?  Actually, all three would be on the line until the person making the transfer hung up.

When things got slow I started calling the weather (one used to be able to call a weather forecast on the phone, you see.  This was some time after electricity was invented and before the cell phone.)  Once the weather was on the line I'd call a friend and then connect the two.  They'd pick up the phone and hear the weather forcast.

Fortunately this confused them and delighted me.  How did the weather forcast call them?  Why was it on the line?  What force had bent the universe resulting in this confusion?

But this wasn't enough after a while.  You know, like drugs always leads to something worse.

Eventually I figured out who took a while to answer the phone and who answered quickly.  I'd call the slow-to-answer friend and, before they answered, I'd call another friend and then sit in the quiet sanctuary of the library and listen to what happened.

The first friend would pick up the phone and hear ringing.  Their response was often, "What the f@*k?"  The second friend would then answer and then they'd try to figure out who called who. (Or is it who called whom?)  Most often they'd spend two or five minutes trying to figure out how the call had happened and then they'd hang up, confused.  I'd sit there and try not to laugh.  The hardest this was on any of the three involved in this was me who was trying not to laugh.

Needless to say I did this a lot, and never let on who was behind this.  A couple figured it out by triangulating who they were connecting with.

It was the best part of that job. By far.

I was too chicken to do this with random people, however.  And I had friends who would not have reacted well with this.  So I was completely responsible with my irresponsibility.

What's really great about this was that it was this job that led me to conservation and binding.  Why?  When I moved to Boston my library experience is what got me the job in the archives, which led to them asking me to repair books, which led me to school, which led me to everything else.

So, prank phone calls directly resulted in my election as President of the Guild of Book Workers. Remember that kids when you folks tell you to behave.

warming up

I'm ready to start posting here again.  There's stuff that's better done here than on Youtube, I think, and so I'll do both. For all of you twelve people who read this.  This is just a post to check on the posting mechanism and to check on questions about the template, etc.

We can be cool, too. (At least sometimes.)

 There's not too much in binding and conservation that would make us popular at parties.  Well, hardly anything actually.

But there is one thing that would, at least temporarily, make us part of the cool crowd:  paper splitting.

Basically paper splitting is taking a sheet of paper and splitting it in half.  Not tearing it in half, but splitting it in half so that a piece of reinforcing japanese paper can be inserted to strengthen the paper and make it usable again.  Needless to say it's pretty intrusive, and can be a bit nerve wracking, but under the right circumstances, and where there really isn't any other option it's fantastic in its utter amazingness.

This is a sheet of paper from a book of mine that I started working on about seven years ago.  I repaired it and resewed it, but the paper was so brittle that just touching the edges of the paper resulted in pieces breaking off resulting in a wave of anguish and despair.  The answer was (can you guess?) to split the pages and I've finally gotten to it.

Here is a page in the "before" state.  If you enlarge it I think you can see how fragile it is, especially along the fold where the sewing had been.  Really, I think if you look really hard at the page it'll break, and I think you should try that now.  It might take a few minutes, I'll wait.

The first step is to use a water soluble, heat activated  glue to attach two sheets of paper on either side of the bad paper.  I've been using kraft paper and hide glue.  It is preferable to use gelatin, actually, but I have a pot of hide glue sitting around so that's what I've been using.  First I glue out the page itself and lay it on the kraft paper, then I glue out the second side of the page and lay a second piece of kraft paper on top making a sandwich, where kraft paper is the bread and the page is the filling.

The key is to thin out the hide glue so that it doesn't tear the paper when it is brushed on.  You  need to work pretty quickly, and try to keep it off your fingers.  Or else your fingers will end up sticking to everything you touch.

After that step you put this sandwich in a press for a few hours.  Some say it should dry completely, but I have found with this that it's ready to go in three or four hours in the press.  I think a bit of moisture helps the paper to split, at least it's seemed that way.

You start at one corner and pull the kraft papers apart from each other and it starts doing this:

You just keep pulling and it ends up with what you see in the next two pictures.  You can see the text on the left side - except you are looking from the inside of the paper so the text would appear reversed. Most often one side comes off a bit more than the other, but not always and it doesn't matter if it does.

Again, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.  Here is what a compete split looks like.  The kraft paper extends beyond the page on one end and acts like a hinge so that they will line up exactly right when they are reattached.  Again on the left is one side of the paper, the other on the right.  There obviously is a bit more of the page on the right side, since you can't see the text on that side.  No big whoop.

A piece of thin Japanese paper is then inserted between the pages, using paste.  This is a special paper I bought some time ago from Hiromi which I used, well, because I had it around and I thought it would work well.  And I think it does.  The key is that it doesn't really need to be all that heavy of a paper in order to make a significant difference in the final result.  (I think was about 15 g per sq. meter.)

Here is the page after the Japanese paper has been inserted.  You can see it extends beyond the page, it'll get trimmed later.

Next I'll remove the excess.  Not all of it because I can't see the page I'm splitting but I  get pretty close.

The last step is to remove the kraft paper.  Remember it was a heat activated, water soluble glue that I used to attach the kraft paper.  So I boil some water and pour it into a tray. Then I pour in more water so that it is a bit cooler (I shoot for around 140 - 150 degrees, measuring it with my infared thermometer). Then I put the sandwich in and within two or three seconds the hide glue releases leaving just the page with the japanese paper inside.  

I take it out and press it under some weights, since it is likely that the paste will be a bit softened and I want to make sure it stays adhered.

It ends up looking pretty much like it did at the start of the process, except it is infinitely stronger.

There actually is a long history of doing this.  Bookbinding manuals from around 1900 describe the process, and the East Europeans did it a lot probably because so much of their paper was so bad it was the only way to preserve it.  There are also machines which completely automate the process but what's the fun of that?

I was shown it by Per Cullhed.  I don't think he used it to pick up women, but he could have.

It really would be a great parlor trick and could have completely transformed my experience in high school by making me, at least for a few minutes, one of the cool crowd.  Oh well, when I do this in the barn these days I'm sure the rabbits and other wildlife outside are really, really impressed.  I think I even heard an appreciative rattle after one particularly nice split.  And you know what?  It was nice to hear.