We were delighted to have Dr. Cathleen Baker come to UC for 4 days to teach us all about paper, paper making and printing in a collaborative programming and outreach workshop entitled Identification of Western Hand- & Machine-Made Paper, 1750-1900. The workshop included Preservation Lab staff, staff from UC Libraries Archives and Rare Books Library and the Content Services department, and Kathy Lechuga from Signature Conservation.
With Cathy’s teaching and guidance, we soon discovered some of the key characteristics is in handmade paper and how the introduction of machine-made paper just made everything more complicated. Oof, that dandy roller… But it was so exciting to make discoveries in the paper and learn new tips for paper identification. This will be particularly helpful for Preservation Lab staff when we do our examination of items for treatment proposals.
We are all beyond grateful to Cathy for sharing her immense knowledge and expertise with us. We all learned so much about handmade and machine-made paper and printing. Here’s just a taste of the workshop and us examining special collections items from the ARB Library and the Science Library collections:
We also took a field trip to the Cincinnati Type & Print Museum to get a paper understanding of printing. It was a fantastic experience! A big thank you to Gary and his staff for a wonderful time printing and a great tour.
It’s been a busy year in the Lab, and frankly we kind of lost track of our usual Halloween festivities this year. So in lieu of something big, new and grand, I thought I’d share some of the fantastic content we’ve created in years past.
Our Halloween Instagram festivities truly began in 2021 when we hosted five days of Preservation Horrors, complete with a skull rating system and everything!
In 2022 we had another multi-day event called the Haunting of the Preservation Lab where we highlighted tools, equipment and materials that appear in horror movies, but that we also use daily in the Lab. Followed by a fun “actual” haunting of the Lab!
Don’t forget to check out the Haunted Stairwell, a ghost story from our much loved colleague Mike Braunlin at the Classics Library.
Then last year we created Halloween Costumes: Conservation Edition, which included last minute costume ideas featuring things you could find around a conservation lab.
Fun fact, we still have the Vigo painting in out back supply room and occasionally it will scare non-team members or new students and we get a chuckle out of it!
It’s amazing the different ways books can tell us stories. There’s the obvious: the words that are written on the page and create the story the author wanted to tell. But there’s also what lies beneath the surface — the wear and tear of the book, how it was bound, what materials were used to make it. There’s the outright story a book was meant to share, but there are also context clues, and deeper ways we can dive into the history of a book.
Sometimes, a book just outrightly tells its story through notes left by previous owners. A handwritten message about where it was bought, a book plate of whose library it came from, or an inscription with notable information about damage to the tome are all ways prior owners can document what the book has been through. This latter suggestion is the case for a two-volume set of Cajus Julius Caesar by Georg Brandes.
Pictured: volumes I and II of Cajus Julius Caesar.
These books were published in 1925 by the Erich Reiss Verlag publishing house. On the fly leaf of both of these volumes is a handwritten inscription which reads “The water stains in this volume are due to air raid damage. London, 1941.” In graphite. What a big journey for two books, from Berlin, Germany, to London, England, and then to Cincinnati, Ohio!
Pictured: inscription in Julius Caesar Volume I.Pictured: inscriptions in Julius Caesar Vol. I and IIPictured above: signs of water damage on the book.
The water damage to the books is there but it isn’t too drastic. There is some obvious staining and cockling to the pages, as well as some warping of the covers. These books were treated with v hinges on the front and back fly leaves to prevent further separation of the cover from the text block and were also put in Colibri covers to help keep them protected on the shelves and during use.
Pictured: both volumes of Julius Caeser being treated with v hinges.
These books needed minimal treatment, and then will return to their home at the Classics library. With some care from the preservation lab, these two volumes can continue to tell their story for years to come.
This is a lovely leather-bound volume that came to us in need of a cloth-covered clamshell with some gentle compression. Unfortunately, it has a bit of an odd shape, meaning we had to solve the problem of the open space in the enclosure.
Figure 1. The problem: a wedge-shaped volume
Our solution: a wedge to secure the volume and spread the pressure of the compression. We opted for mat board as opposed to book board, both to keep the enclosure from getting to heavy and to give the wedge a little bit of flex.
Thanks to a little math and a little mat board, this volume will be safe and secure and protected from temperature and humidity changes in its home on the shelf!
Figure 2. The solution: a cloth-covered wedge to spread the compression and fill the empty space.
Figure 3. The completed wedge. A perfect fit!
Hyacinth Tucker – Conservation Technician and Bindery Processor
I recently created a cloth covered clamshell enclosure for this small leather volume from the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library. The volume has eight full color miniatures which received surrogate photography. The surrogates were printed to roughly 5×7 inches, making them substantially larger than the text, so an insert was created within the cloth clamshell to house the smaller volume.
Interior tray of the cloth clamshell enclosure with the surrogates placed on top of the small leather volume housed within the custom insert.To build up the enclosure to the size of the surrogates, an insert was created using archival corrugated board covered in Cotlin bookcloth. I lined the portion of the insert where the volume would rest with thin Ethafoam sheeting, so the fragile leather edges wouldn’t be abraded.To aid in lifting the volume from the enclosure I created a partial polyester wrapper of sorts. Part jacket, part sling. A faux jacket-sling hybrid, if you will?A closer look at the polyester creation, with rounded corners.
Overall, I think it’s a quick and easy solution that could be beneficial in future situations where a simple modification of an existing enclosure is needed, but space within the enclosure is at a premium.
Back in October of 2024, we received something slightly more unusual from the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, a 15-foot-long, hand-drawn rolled map of the Allegheny River. Yes, fifteen feet. This map was created by joining smaller sheets edge-to-edge, forming one continuous scroll that looked more like a treasure map than your typical library item.
A dilemma quickly followed, how do I create a housing solution that’s safe and functional, but won’t turn future handling into a logistical nightmare? Like many libraries, they didn’t have a 15-foot shelf just waiting for this (because who does?), so storing it flat was out. Storing it rolled became our only real option. The enclosure needed to be secure and protective for the map, and ideally, easy and elegant to display when needed.
First things first, some stabilization treatment. Before tackling the housing design, the scroll underwent conservation treatment to mend small tears and fill losses, particularly at the “beginning” and “end” (depending on which direction you follow the river). Once stabilized, it was ready for some housing trials.
Before Treatment – Large loss and tear at one end.After Treatment – Large loss repaired and map rolled around the polyester cylinder core.
While researching solutions online, I stumbled upon a fantastic blog post by J.M. Iacchei from the Cornell University Library Conservation Lab (link here). Their approach to scroll housing was clever, practical and elegant, and it just gave me the spark I needed to create our own version.
Here is how we rolled:
A support core – To give the scroll structure while rolling, I created a polyester cylinder core with a polyethylene sling. The sling supports one end of the scroll as it begins to wrap around the core, providing gentle guidance and protection as you start to roll the map. The map can be easily inserted into the sling to begin rolling.
Polyester cylinder core with a polyethylene sling to secure one end of the map.The end can be easily inserted into the sling and supported as the map is rolled around the polyester core.
Protection of the ends – The opposite end of the scroll was placed into a soft, transparent polyethylene pocket. It’s flexible, unobtrusive, and doesn’t need to be removed, even during after treatment photography.
The other end of the map is protected with a polyethylene pocket that is flexible and offers support to the fragile end of the map.
Keep it rolled – Once fully rolled, the scroll was secured with a polyester belly band. The polyethylene pocket helped protect the scroll surface from any abrasion caused by the belly band.
The rolled map is secured with a polyester belly band.
Display ready? – For display,I built a removable tray that cradles the rolled scroll without letting it rest directly on a surface. This tray doubles as a mini display platform, so the scroll can be partially unrolled and supported during handling and exhibit. Functional and elegant.
Display tray that offers support to the rolled map for long term storage.
I also tested a few other methods along the way, like supporting the entire scroll in a single 15-foot polyester sheet or sandwiching it between two. But the seams where the map’s original sheets were joined caused additional creases with those solutions. In the end, supporting the scroll in its entirety just wasn’t viable, so I pivoted to protecting the ends and letting the core do the heavy lifting.
Also: cutting two 15-foot-long sheets of Mylar by hand? Let’s just say I don’t recommend it… and I definitely don’t miss it.
A housing treatment that I have recently taken on led me to getting some hands-on experience with one of the newer tools to arrive at the lab: The Hercules Cordless-Battery Operated Hot Wire Table from Hercules Cutters.
Figure 1: The Hercules Cordless-Battery Operated Hot Wire Table
The Difficulties of Cutting Foam
We have typically performed foam cutting at the lab using either a hand-held blade like an Olfa or scalpel, a board shear, or in some cases a hand-held saw. While these methods can be somewhat satisfactory, they are none without their limitations. Cuts with a hand-held blade often look sloppy, especially if the foam needs to be stacked; the compressible nature of foam makes it very difficult to make accurately measured cuts this way, and the inaccuracies become glaringly obvious when trying to stack multiple seemingly same sized pieces for thick fills inside an enclosure (something I often need to achieve!).
Figure 2: The minor inaccuracies of hand-cut foam become obvious when the pieces are stacked. Notice the unevenness along the edge of this stack of Plastazote foam. Plastazote, as well as a thinner foam called Volara, are among the most commonly used foams we utilize at The Preservation Lab.
A board shear is quick and offers a measuring guide to provide accurately measured cuts, but the edges where the blade slices through the foam often end up rounded or otherwise distorted.
Figure 3: The downward cutting motion of a board shear can often leave the edge of foam looking rounded or otherwise distorted, as can be seen on this piece of Plastazote.
Finally, cuts with a saw can leave a mess and the teeth can leave a sloppy looking edge on the foam.
Figure 4: This stack of Plastazote was cut with a saw. A saw’s teeth can leave a very messy edge when cutting through foam.
The Hercules Foam Cutter: Basic Features and Operation
The Hercules foam cutter uses a different approach. It heats up a filament wire that is pulled taught vertically through the device. While the wire it hot, foam is drawn through the wire to accurately and cleanly (with a little practice) slice through it.
Figure 5: A stack of Plastazote is pulled through the hot filament wire to make a clean cut.
The heat can be engaged in one of two ways: with the power switch turned to “On” mode, the wire stays hot until it is turned off; when the switch is set to “Foot pedal mode”, the wire only heats up while the included foot pedal is pressed. There is an adjustment knob allowing the user to control the temperature of the wire. In general, after experimenting a bit it seems that the thicker the foam, the hotter the wire needs to be.
Figure 6: The Hercules Cutter’s heat controls.
The cutter includes an adjustable guide rail to aid in accurate cutting. The position of the spool that holds the wire is also adjustable, allowing for angled cuts to be made.
Figure 7: Cutting position adjustments of the Hercules Cutter.
Finally, there is an attachment that can be placed onto the guide rail allowing for circular cuts to be made.
Figure 8: The circle cutting attachment: the foam piece is impaled by the point of the attachment at the center point of the desired circle. The distance from the point to the wire will be the circles radius. Once the attachment is in position for the desired size of circle, the foam piece is rotated as the wire cuts through the foam until a complete circle is made.
Advantages
The Hercules Foam Cutter’s ability to cut stacked pieces of foam is by far my favorite and the most practical of its uses in my opinion. As previously mentioned, cutting inaccuracies become very noticeable when trying to stack multiple same sized pre-cut pieces of foam. With the Hercules Cutter, the foam pieces can be stacked/attached to each other before hand, and then cut to a uniform size. I was pleased to discover that the heated wire doesn’t seem to have any trouble cutting through multiple layers of foam that have been adhered together using double-sided tape and/or PVA. With a bit of practice, I was able to achieve neat, uniform chunks of foam that were several layers thick. I have found, however, that when cutting foam adhered together using double sided tape it is important to be mindful of where your points of adhesion are inside the stack of foam. It is possible to end up with a stack of foam that doesn’t have any tape holding it together after cutting.
Figure 9: A cleanly cut chunk of Plastazote 4 layers thick. Notice that the section that was cut off has fallen apart due to not having any double-sided tape in this section. Fortunately, this is not the piece I needed from this cut!
Also remember that the thicker the foam, the hotter the wire needs to be. There is a decal attached to the cutter with heat setting recommendations based on how thick the foam is, but the instructions (and also myself) recommend doing a few test cuts with scrap foam first to see what works, as different types of foam will respond differently to various heat settings. It shouldn’t require much pressure from the user to push the foam piece through the wire, and too much pressure will cause the wire to bend or even break; if this happens, the wire isn’t hot enough!
Figure 10: It is difficult to see as the wire is so thin, but it has snapped. The wire wasn’t hot enough and I had to apply too much pressure to pass this stack of Plastazote through it. Fortunately, there was plenty of wire remaining on the spool, and it was easily threaded back into its port.
I found the foot pedal to be a beneficial feature as well. Some types of cuts require the user to adjust their hand position mid-cut, and it is helpful to have the option to stop the flow of heat into the wire if such an adjustment needs to be made. The wire both heats and cools down almost instantaneously, which is also a nice touch.
Finally, the circle cutting attachment proved to be useful during a recent housing treatment. I needed to create a compartment in a piece of foam to store a commemorative medallion, and my attempts to cut a circle using a hand-held blade did not look good. I was very pleased with the results I achieved using the attachment, although it took several attempts to get my circle to have the correct diameter.
Figure 11: A circle cut into Volara foam using the circle cutting attachment with my previous attempts to make the cut by hand using a scalpal in the corner of the image.
Drawbacks
It should be noted that many components of the Hercules Cutter are made of plastic. While this makes it lightweight and portable, it causes some problems. The guide rail feels rather cheap, and even with all the screws secured tightly, the rail still has the potential to wiggle around a bit. This can make getting accurate cuts difficult. I did find that cuts still look better using the rail than doing them free hand, though.
Figure 12: Most of the components of the adjustable guide rail are made of plastic, giving them the potential to move slightly during use, even when tightly screwed down.
Another issue I had with the cutter lies in its cutting platform. There is centimeter grid on it for measuring/setting the guide rail which is a nice idea; however, I feel it would have been much more helpful to have millimeters indicated somewhere like board shears often do, as precision cuts rarely fall exactly on nice round centimeter measurements. The user is forced into one of three solutions: 1) measuring the foam and adding a tick mark to it, which is not as easy and one would think as foam isn’t very easy to make discreet marks in; 2) using a ruler or other measuring device to set the guide rail, which defeats the purpose of the cutting surface containing a measuring grid to begin with; 3) eyeballing the correct measurement between the grid marks. This parred with the already wobbly nature of the guide rail makes it somewhat challenging to make precision cuts.
Figure 13: Although the numbers represent millimeters, the grid lines on the cutting platform appear only every centimeter.
Finally, as the Hercules Cutter operates through a wire essentially melting foam, it can produce a somewhat unpleasant burnt-plastic smell while in use. It is recommended to use under a fume hood, outside, or in another well-ventilated area if possible.
Final Thoughts
As with all other methods of cutting foam, the Hercules Foam Cutter is not perfect. For making simple cuts in a single layer of foam, I still find using a board shear to be my preferred method; it is quick, easy, and the rounded edges left by the blade don’t bother me much if it is only a single layer of foam. However, the Hercules Cutter has become the default tool I use to cut stacked foam and to make circular cuts. It has been a fun tool to test out, and it is always possible that more practical uses for it will arise as I continue to make more custom and specialized enclosures.
Matt McCoy — Senior Library Conservation Specialist
This past Friday two of our Conservation Student Assistants received their bachelor’s degrees from UC! Congratulations Linh (Psychology) and Kristopher (Art History)!! We are so proud of both of you!
They both started in the Preservation Lab in January of 2022 and it has been so exciting to see them grow as students, members of our team and people over that time period!
On Friday I was tickled when Linh, who is leaving UC for grad school in Illinois to pursue a future as a therapist, reached out to me asking to come down to the Lab for a picture. I immediately let Kristopher know, suspecting that he might want to join in. Kristopher will be continuing on with us in the Lab, continuing his education at UC’s law school.
Linh and Kristopher then asked if I could snap some photos of them around the Lab…a request I could not turn down.
Moments like these are the true reminders of why being a student supervisor is so rewarding. To see students graduating, on the precipice of something new and big, and looking back at their time in the Lab with such fondness is really special and powerful. Congratulations to two amazing students! We wish you a smooth journey ahead through graduate school!
On Monday, April 7, the Archives and Rare Books Library along with the Elliston Poetry Room hosted a workshop with Rich Dana. Rich is a copier artist and founder of Obsolete Press, and he teaches at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and the Center for Book Arts in New York. The workshop covered obsolete duplicating technologies, which covered the mimeograph and hectograph.
The hectograph set up, Leisha Stanek demonstrating how it works!
Along with his assistant Leisha, a performance poet and publisher herself, Rich talked us through how to use these machines. The hectograph, also known as a gelatin duplicator, used gelatin in trays as the matrix. Master copies were created using spirit tattoo paper, then the master was pressed to the gelatin matrix. Once the design was down on the gelatin, a fresh sheet of plain paper was pressed to the gelatin matrix, and the design transferred over to the paper. This method can be used multiple times — we made at least twenty copies off it, and the fading was minimal!
The mimeograph we printed on. Rich applying ink to the mimeograph.
The mimeograph is an upright machine with a crank that picks up the paper and rolls it through the stencil. With a big roller that holds the stencil, the machine forces ink through the stencil and onto paper to create copies. The user must manually put ink on this machine before using it.
Getting to play with these two technologies was so much fun. We got to create our own stencils that we then made copies of and turned into a zine! We were able to use typewriters or styluses, stencils and our own creativity to create our stencils for these pages that we printed. It was amazing to see technology that’s not so modern still in use and working, and to play around with that technology and still use it to create was inspiring.
An alternate title to this blog could be, “That time we X-rayed medieval choir book at the UC Medical Center, and then the pandemic happened I forgot to write a blog post about it”. Oops!
Let’s rewind the story back to mid-2019, when our Associate Conservator, Ashleigh, expressed interest in radiography on a beautiful, oversized choir book from the Classics Library. I, at the time, was the Photographic Documentation Specialist and had never carried out or assisted with any radiography projects, so I was very keen to start reaching out to anyone I could think of on West and East campus who might have access to such equipment. The most logical answer, UC Health, proved to be the winning one when finally the Director of Diagnostic Radiology put me in contact with the Enterprise Director of Imaging, who said yes to my request, and ultimately put me in contact with my main contact for the project, the Radiology Manager at UC Medical Center.
The date was set, October 22, 2019. Ashleigh, Holly and I packed up the heavy, choir book and carefully transported it from West campus to East campus to be imaged. The UC Health staff were beyond friendly, and I think they got a kick out of imaging the oversized leather volume. The technician really worked with us to adjust the intensity of the radiography depending on what we were trying to capture, whether it was the cover, the sewing and the supports, or the illuminated text (which was a little harder to capture with their equipment).
Aligning the bookViewing the first imagesPositioning the coverThe technician position the equipment for the optimal scanAttempting to image the illuminated textRepositioning the volumeImaging the spineRepositioning the volume to image spine
Overall, we discovered…a lot of nails, split thong supports, and on the lower board, four mends to the wooden board that appear to be bracing a split in the wood that is running vertically.
Detail of lower board with cover openDetail of lower board with cover open
The larger red arrows indicate metal braces while the smaller red arrows indicate the crack in the wooden board.
Image of the spine which allows you to see the split thong supports and you can even see the tattle-tape security strip!
Then following the radiography session, they were kind enough to ask if we would also like to place the volume in the CT scanner. Since the scanner could easily and safely accommodate the volume while keeping it wrapped in foam, we jumped at the chance!
We received all the imaging files on two CDs from UC Health, and then I went about making heads and tails of it. The radiography images were fairly straightforward. For the most impactful imaging, namely of the spine, upper and lower boards, I created composite images using the panorama feature in Photoshop to merge the images. For example, each cover consisted of four separate images.
With the CT imaging, the CD came with a reviewer software (Sorna) to view the files. Frankly, the CT scans were a little bit harder to comprehend, but nonetheless interesting. Ultimately the CT scanner allows you to view the various materials within the object. Whereas normally for the equipment that was used that would mean bones, organs and tissues, for the choir book that meant metal material like brass, leather, ink and pigment. Within the viewer function there was also an interactive component to the CT data as well, which allowed you to manipulate various levels to see various intensities, but even after a lot of trail and error and experimentation I found it very confusing, though I did get some interesting, and some less impactful, results. Let’s just say, I do not have a future as a CT technician! I’ll stick to my day job.
