#AskAConservator Day 2023

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Welcome, everyone, and welcome to this series of talks on Conservation and Preservation Projects that we have here at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. This is part of our activities for Ask a Conservator Day. Just quick reminder that Ask a Conservator Day commemorates the dramatic floods of Florence in 1966, which are at the origin of the creation of the field of conservation and specialized in book and papers.

We have three talks today and I will introduce the speakers. We'll have their talks, and we will have time for a little session of questions and answers after the end of each talk. And I would enjoin you to use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen if you want to ask any questions.

So our first speaker for today is Emma Ross Reuther. She is an intern in the conservation lab at Hoover Institution Library and Archives. She has a formal background education in biology, and she has taken also several courses in arts and art history in order to prepare for applications to graduate programs in conservation.

And without further ado, Emma, I will give you the floor. Thank you.

>> Emma Ross Reuther: Okay, thank you so much for that introduction, Laurent. This is a project that I am currently working on and have been for the last year or so, and it's being completed under the supervision of Laurent.

This album documents Frances Eugene Stafford's time in Shanghai, China. Stafford was an American missionary, but also a lithographer and photographer who was hired by the commercial press to manage a printing division in the early 1900s. During the onset of the Wucheng uprising in October of 1911, Stafford was on hand to capture remarkable photos of the Qing dynasty's collapse and China's transition from a feudal monarchy to a republic.

I titled this presentation a tale of two Shanghais to reflect a really interesting duality that is present in this album. So as you can see in the left photo, the first half of this album captures soldiers, battles and scenes from the revolution, while the second half of this album captures scenes from the commercial press used inside their printing factory.

And as you can see in the right photo, numerous beautiful examples of color separation printing. And it is upside down on purpose, as the album was meant to be read halfway through, closed, and then turned over and read from the other side. But in order to keep the foliating order, we documented it continuously.

Additionally, a brief topic that I will touch on is the presence of distressing images within a collection with a main collecting genre being war centric items. Here at Hoover, many of us are no stranger to some of the more disturbing things that can be present within a collection.

But when dealing with it for an extended timeframe such as treatment, I think it's important to handle it consciously. So I chose to interweave sheets of acid free paper here, as you can see, to cover up distressing images and also mark the pages that they're on so that I can only turn to those pages intentionally.

And then additionally so that I wouldn't have to have them out on my desk for hours on end, I covered the photos with smaller pieces of acid free paper. So this is the process that I found that works best for me. So it's just a reminder for those of you at Hoover that it's okay to nothing, be okay with it.

And you can find methods that protect you while also allow you to do your job effectively. So as you can see, these three sad photos that the album was in very poor condition when it arrived, was barely handleable. The cover needed treatment. The pages are extremely brittle and discolored, and numerous images need attention.

Additionally, a hungry little insect ate his way through every single picture on this, every single page in this album. And so about a third of the photos have a little feasting hole on them. So the first step in beginning a treatment is full documentation. This involved three steps, which was photo documentation, imaging every page, an image assessment of every photo and print, and creating a collation diagram of the book block.

Photo documentation is exactly as it sounds. We used our conservation imaging stand to photograph the entire album. This is to document its condition, but additionally mark where all of the photos are on every page so as to recreate it after once everything is repaired. The next step was to do a full image assessment.

This documented the over 200 photos and 58 prints present in this album. It included measuring every photo and print, identifying the process or technique used and assessing the overall condition, ranking on a scale of one to five, documenting surface dirt, physical damage, brittleness, chemical damage, biological damage, damaging repairs, losses with a comet section.

Here, you can see the various magnifying aids that I used to identify the nature of the object. This was only necessary for the prints, as the photos were all silver gelatin prints. Here are some of the close up images that I took with our danalite digital microscope, identifying a range of printing techniques.

So most of them ended up being letter-pressed halftone, which you can see on the left in both black and white and color. But there were definitely some photogravures, some steel engravings, a few intaglio prints, and there's one really beautiful hand painted image. And so this had a variety of different techniques used.

After this assessment was complete, the last step was to create a collation diagram to study how the gatherings were structured. For those unfamiliar, a gathering is a group of sheets folded at the middle and then sewn together to create the book block. And so here, you can see this is just one gathering.

And the collation diagram, essentially is this image on the bottom, but drawn. And so this step, in particular, was very helpful in achieving some sense of organization within the album. It revealed several pages missing or out of place. As you can see in the example in gathering five, the gathering was complete, but we found six loose pages.

And so having the other gatherings mark where missing pages were allowed us to give a starting point in reordering those into their correct place. So we forensically matched tear patterns to reorder them. And as you can see, in the left image, there was a cream colored page which did not match any of the other paper.

And therefore, we knew that it belonged in the front or the back of the photo album. So some of them were easier. And then some of them, like the photo on the right, only had a very few places that matched it up. And so we could kind of process some elimination those as well.

So there were also photos missing. And one takes to the first flyleaf, as you can see in the top-left photo. With pressure sensitive tape, had secondary support residue or paper residue in the back, indicating that it did not belong there. So we removed the photo and As well as the double sided pressure sensitive tape, and then placed a piece of mylar on top, as you can see in the bottom left window.

And I outlined the secondary support residue spots. And this residue diagram was then used to identify the original location of the photo in the album, so we could put it in its correct place when we put the photos back in. So once the correct page order and photograph locations were known and everything was documented, I could then remove the images from the album for treatment.

This was done very carefully and painstakingly with a spatula. And in most cases, it was impossible to remove the photos intact without some of the secondary support residue coming off with it. So we considered the fact that the paper was slightly acidic and very brittle. As you can see in the right photo, it sits at a ph of around five.

But its brittleness and the condition, we knew that it would need to be replaced anyway. So we would rather some of the secondary support residue come off with the photos to protect the photos and the prints. If the image could not be coaxed off with a spatula, we employed a 50,50 water ethanol mixture to humidify the back, the secondary support to loosen the adhesive and remove the image.

This technique is called backing removal, and this proved very helpful with some of the prints or some of the smaller images that tended to have much more adhesive on them in order to remove them to help prevent delamination. This is an example of delamination, and it happened much more with the prints because their paper was much thicker.

One exception to this was many of the prints that proved very difficult to remove, even with either method. And so for that grouping of them, we found removing them in water bath proved very effective. And so we then removed them, dried them underweight, and actually, they came off very cleanly.

After the removal process, came the cleanup process. So all of that secondary support that came off with them that you could see in the left photo, needed to be removed because we didn't want to leave spots of acidic paper and adhesive residue on the objects. So testing was first done mechanically with the scalpel, as you can see in the right photo, then with a 50 50 water ethanol mixture, then with alpha amylase, subsequently denatured with ethanol.

And then with a methylcellulose in a 2.5% weight to volume ratio poultice, which ended up being the preferred method of choice. In many cases, I moved a portion with the scalpel, as you can see here, to reduce the amount of secondary support present and then I would employ a methylcellulose poultice.

This reduced the amount of time that the gel would need to sit on the photos in order to reduce their risk of cockling. And so here you can see the time lapse of how lengthy it was to even remove the photos. It was very careful with the spatula and very cautiously to help prevent delamination.

And so after finally removing the photos, then I would label them. And then came the process of removing some of the secondary support with the scalpel. This was time consuming, as you can see, the little secondary clock in the background is going. And so this was beneficial, though, because then the methylcellulose did not have to sit on the photo as long.

So after we reduced that, then I would employ a methylcellulose poultice where I would lightly place methyl cellulose on the secondary support with a small square of mylar on top to prevent any humidification, evaporation or drying. It only sit on for a couple minutes or so in order to loosen up the adhesive enough.

And then it was very easily removed with a spatula, as you can see here. It's very satisfying to watch, in my opinion. So after the secondary support is removed, any of the remaining methylcellulose, you can see a little bit of gel residue on the back, was wiped away with a 50,50 water ethanol mixture on a piece of cotton.

And then the photos were dried under weight. So you can see from the before on the left and the after on the right, this method worked very cleanly and we were very happy with the results. Any delaminated portions were then pasted down with methylcellulose in a 2.5% weight to volume ratio.

And then the verso of each photo was surface cleaned with a soft bristle brush and a vulcanized rubber sponge. Throughout the process of removing all of the photos and cleaning them, there were a lot of really interesting finds, including many handwritten notes on the back and many with Stafford's initials.

And so I'll highlight one here, which reads a photo of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen taken at the Shanghai Nanking rail depot in Shanghai on the afternoon of December 24th,1911. Dr. Sun took the train here for Nanking, where he was elected the first president of the Republic of China. He took the oath of office on January 1st, 1912.

And so on the left, you can see that Dr. Sun Yat-Sen at the rail depot, and it says, return to FE Stafford. And so that was a really exciting find. We didn't know that there might be text on the back of any of them, and it really helped us understand a lot of the many historical events that this album is capturing.

So, additionally, we found multiple photos that have been cut in half and pasted in different parts of the album. And so once all of the photos were removed, we were able to find the matches and read the complete captions. And again, you can see in the bottom right of that photo, MES.

The next step of this project was to treat the damaged photographs. So up to this point, everything has been documented. The photographs have been removed from the album, and the secondary support has been removed from the verso. And now they can be mended and stabilized. This was done on an image by image basis with the goal of minimal intervention, in which they were in danger of damage or loss.

Some were in need of humidification and flattening. And therefore, we treated in a chamber such as this with lukewarm water, taking care that no condensation or dripping occurred over the images, and then we dried them underweight to flatten them. However, most of the treatments involved tear mending and reattaching portions that had detached.

So here are you examples of the photos before and after treatment. So you can see on the left, we have flattened the portion that has been turned over, and then there is a mend of Japanese tissue stabilizing the back, the one on the right. Those pieces were actually held together with tape, and so we removed the tape, and then we were able to reattach them in a conservation method using Japanese tissue and wheat star paste.

Here is a great example of one that looked very bad before, but then ended up being okay after. All of the gelatin emulsion was there not much loss. You can see a couple spots of loss, but it humidified down very nicely, and we were able to stabilize it with Japanese tissue also.

The picture from the beginning, as you can see that they were pasted together, there was loss at the end. You can see there's a little spot of white here, but that one also came together nicely, stabilized well, and so that was also satisfying. So in the meantime, they have all been treated, and they are all hinged and organized by page.

Here you can see an example of hinging, this is how we are planning to reattach the photos into the album. So they're going to reattach with V hinges here, pasted on three corners to allow access under the fourth corner and for photographs with text on the back. We've hinged them on the side so that they will be able to lift them and read the text eventually.

And so here is a visual example of how hinging works. Part of the hinge is adhered to the photograph, and then it's folded over, and then it will be adhered to the secondary support for the album. So this is where all the photos are currently living, treated, hinged, and organized by page in house of three folders, ready to be put back in the emblem.

So the last step before reattaching the photos is to treat the book block itself and the album to cover. It had a large piece of black gaffers tape completely covering the spine. I was able to remove it carefully, die ethyl ether and cotton Q-tips under a localized fume hood, and the gaffers tape was holding the cover to the rest of the album.

But with that gone, it made it easy to access and analyze the sewing structure. So I was able to replicate the sewing station measurements in this diagram here, recording the link between each sewing station in order to replicate it in the new book block that we will sew with new paper.

And so to practice first, before doing the first replication, I made a model of the album. This is created at a one-fourth scale, replicating the gatherings and their measurements exactly, and sewing it with four stations and two cords like the original album. This brings us fully up to date with the current status of the project.

And our current task that we're working on is to source paper for the new book block. It's proving quite difficult to find paper that is conservation-friendly, suitable for conservation, and in the same weight and thickness and color as the album. And so, as you can see, these here, they have a similar weight and texture to the album pages, but none of them have a color that matches quite exactly that we're happy with.

And so we are currently brainstorming and are considering having paper custom made by a local paper maker. But once the paper is sourced, the new paper will be used to sew a new book block, replicating the original. The sign of the album will be repaired, and the new book block will be reinserted into the original case cover and reattached.

The hinged photos and prints will be reattached in their correct locations with a marker for missing images added. And then we will put silicone release sheets between them for protection, and the album will be then stored in a drop front acid free box and stored in our archives here.

With a mean temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit and a mean relative humidity of 48%. So if I have piqued your interest in any way, you can access the Stafford photographs on the online archive of California, which I have QR coded here to the Stafford collection and you can search Francis E Stafford if you access from another method as well.

So you can click here, view online items and then that will take you to the list of albums that we have. So this particular album is album C, photographs of the Chinese revelation. This QR code will take you directly into that photographic collection for you to click through and view photos.

Please keep in mind and consider that there is a content warning due to the presence of graphic and distressing images, but you can access them here. And we are hoping to get the album reimaged after this project is complete because all of the beautiful examples of color separation printing and all of the prints that are present in this album are actually not on this website.

It only contains the photographs. So I would like to acknowledge and thank the Hoover Institution for allowing me to work on this project and learn so much through it. To Lisa Nguyen, who saw value in it from the beginning and accessioned it into our collection, and to supervisors and colleagues, Laurent and Curtis.

Without their generous knowledge sharing and patience to answer my many questions, I would not be presenting this project. So thank you all so much for listening and are there any questions?

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Thank you very much, Emma. That was a fantastic presentation and I can't wait to see the album finished and completed.

Of course, because I've been following the step by step, I don't have any question. But I do have a comment about the making of a new paper for the album, which is a project that I would like to add to this project. Which is to actually use the original paper and pulpit, adding, of course, all the additives that we need to make it, as you said, conservation friendly in terms of alkalinity and in terms of color.

And we would like to involve a local paper mill in San Francisco to be able to do that. And I think it's like the final cherry on top of the cake to even involve local producers to make the paper for this album. Another comment was that this was kept as this is part of the archive.

So normally, an album in such condition would probably not be kept as an album. But because it documents in a very specific way the way those transitions happened and also the way the very early printing in color was done in China, I thought it was also important to keep the experience of going through an album as an album.

Hence, spending so much time on this one object, which is not very common within the work that we carry at Hoover. And I have a question here. Several questions popping in, great. Why is it important for the new paper to have the same weight and size? Why not just find conservation-friendly paper?

That's interesting. Do you want to address that, Emma?

>> Emma Ross Reuther: Sure, I can give my initial thoughts and then Laurent can, I'm sure, round it out with more colloquial conservation terms. I think if we're going to take the time to rebind it to preserve the original experience, then we want to aim to create the most original experience that we can.

Additionally, we are hoping to sew it back into the original book block, that blue cover. And if we choose a paper that is much too thin, it will not withstand the weight of all of the photographs being turned and used. And if we choose a paper that is much thicker, then there's a chance that once we sew all of the gatherings back together, it doesn't fit into the original book block.

And so we had used digital calipers to measure the width of the paper, and that's what we're aiming for so that it will fit exactly into its original paper. Laurant has anything to add.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: It's a perfect answer. You're the perfect intern. I have yet another question here.

What would have happened if you didn't do conservation on this album? And that maybe I can answer, because what would happen is that the album in its original state was not handleable. So our big aim at Hoover is to make things accessible for the public and for researchers.

And in its original state, it wasn't possible to serve it. And I had actually a researcher coming from Italy to see the album, and we had to invite her to come to the conservation lab so that I could handle it for her because some pictures were falling off, some Pages were falling off, and then we had a lot of warning signs inside.

Attention, do not flip this page, or attention, loose pictures after, etc. So it was not possible. So if nothing had been done, then it would have been kept in a state that requires the intervention of either an archivist or someone from conservation to show it each time, which is not exactly desirable for the best access.

So that's why we decided that some intervention was needed. And we had a choice in whether treated like an archival object, which is just remove all the pictures, put them in envelopes and in folders, and then discard the original binding, which is a commercial binding that has little interest in terms of its physical materiality.

But we would have lost the experience of someone carefully putting it together, writing things down, and having a very specific narrative, which is an an experience that you only get when you have the album. So that's why we took the extra steps to go there. And also because it is such a significant testimony of major, major changes in Chinese history.

And also it's probably a little bit more geeky, but it's also a very important testimony of very early separation color printing systems in China. And unfortunately, the album originally contained more hand painted illustrations that were used to reproduce color prints so that you could match the original print with its imaged and printed counterpart.

There is, unfortunately, just one left, but it's a beautiful one. I wish you had an image of that one, but it's a couple of deer on a little prairie, and it's a very endearing little image. So that's what would have happened if we had no intervention at all.

We were quite stuck without doing anything. I don't know if there are any more questions in the chat room. I do have maybe a question. How are you gonna make sure that the new album is sewn in the same way that the previous textbook was?

>> Emma Ross Reuther: We've created a sewing diagram, so once the gaffer's tape was removed and the cover could just drop down, we could see the entire spine.

We did create a sewing diagram, and so we looked and we followed the threads and the exact way that they were sewn into the albumen in order to create a model, and that's what we will follow. That's what I followed in my one -ourth scale model, and that's what I'll follow when I sew the new paper together.

And so the measurements will be measured out exactly in the same spacing, and then they will be sewn in and out in the exact same sewing method.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Are we keeping the materials or all the parts that are removed from the object for people to see?

>> Emma Ross Reuther: Yes, we will keep it all.

 

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Yes, you will probably if you can have a look at the questionnaires, the question and answers things. Do you have a question for yourself that you can answer offline? And yeah, so I would like to thank you again not only for this brilliant presentation, but also for all the work that you've been carrying on the album, as well as all the other things that happen in our conservation lab.

I must stress that it is very uncommon for a single object to go through such a big undertaking, and so I wouldn't like people to have the idea that it's the only kind of work that we do, but it's indeed a very important object for us.

>> Emma Ross Reuther: It is.

 

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Okay, do you want to add anything? You have one minute.

>> Emma Ross Reuther: No, I'm okay. Thank you so much for your time.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Great, well, thank you very much, Emma. I welcome whoever has joined us right now for our second talk of our ask a conservator day presentations.

Our second intervention is by Laura Abada. She works in the development department of Hoover Institution. She is the fundraising database administrator. She has formal training in arts, and she has experience in fundraising management and gift management. And this is what she is currently doing at the Hoover institution.

She is talking to us about what happened a year ago for ask a conservator day 2022. And without further ado, Laura, I will leave the floor for you, thank you.

>> Laura Abada: Thank you very much, Laurent. And as he said, I'm working in the development department at Hoover, and I'm here to talk about the wonderful journey that I undertook to conserve a treasured item that I discovered many years ago.

This is a story. So first, I wanna say thank you to those who made it possible for me to embark on the journey to conserve it. I wanna say that I'm very grateful to the Hoover institution, which allowed me this amazing opportunity to grow in a direction that interested me and inspired me.

The most important thank you is to Laurent Cruveillier, who invited me into his domain and shared his knowledge with me so generously. He's an amazing teacher, mentor, guide, and friend, and I can't thank him enough for his patient instruction and careful guidance. I also wanna thank Rayan Ghazal and Colin Stewart, who approved of, encouraged, and saw value in our spending our time on this project.

In addition, I wanna thank two people in the conservation who gave freely of their help and friendship. And that's Emma Ross Reuther, who just spoke, and Kurtis Kekkonen. And one more grateful acknowledgement to Hiromi Okazawa, who kindly researched and translated some of the text to decipher the specific play that's depicted by the artist, as well as sending helpful links to the play and photographs of the current productions.

So the story begins, and I'm hoping you're seeing that properly with a trip that I took to Japan in 1984. We went there for five weeks after graduating art school. I mean, I went there for five weeks after graduating art school. I've always been drawn to Japanese art and prints, and while in Kyoto, I came upon a bin of old books displayed outside of a bookstore.

Leafing through this pile of hand cut Japanese text printed books, I thought, well, I'm a printmaker and this would be a nice souvenir to have from Japan. And even though I can't read them, they cost equivalent of $15 fit my limited budget at the time. And as I looked through them, debating which one to choose, not that it mattered much since they were all text, like the picture in the right-hand corner, that's pretty much what they looked like, I couldn't make out a difference between them.

I did actually see one that was, in fact, different from the others and realized that it was an artist's sketchbook. So my heart skipped a beat, and as I looked through it, I realized it was filled with lovely, delicately drawn Drawn and painted figures and scenes, and the unique personal nature of this sketchbook was far more desirable to me than the printed book, actually.

So despite being badly damaged, as you can see from the photo of the book, prior to conservation, I purchased it and brought it home. I saved the bag from the store I purchased it from as well on the left. I used Google translate on the bag, and it came up with trendy ancient art museum, a color photograph of realism, Japan's first ancient art series.

And I have no understanding of what the context for this is, but that's what it translates to. I was fortunate to have a connection with the curator of the Asian collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art, who told me three important things about it. It was a book of no theater.

The Kanji character on the cover that you see is the word noh. Number two, she told me that insects were not still alive and eating the book. And number three, that to stabilize it, I should wrap it in acid free paper and keep it in a cool, dark place.

And that's just what I did. It stayed in a box in my closet, rarely seeing the light of day for close to 40 years. That is, until, serendipitously, I met and chatted with Laurent, Rayon, and Roxanne in librarian archives in September last year at the staff appreciation event.

And that's where Laurent mentioned that they were going to have the first ever Ask a Conservator Day at Hoover in November. And this sparked my interest. And I mentioned that I had an item I wanted to bring. I was really excited about this because I actually am sort of an avid watcher of Antiques Roadshow, and this seemed a little bit like that.

So when I brought my sketchbook to the Ask a Conservator Day, Laurent carefully examined my treasure and said that I should have it conserved. And I agreed, but said that wouldn't it cost thousands of dollars? And Laurent asked me if I was good with my hands, and I consider that true.

So I said absolutely, and he said he could teach me how to conserve it. And this idea that I could do this under expert supervision was really exciting to me, and I jumped at the opportunity. After receiving the appropriate blessings, to proceed with this, we began the project in earnest in January.

And Laurent invited me to educational talks and demonstrations, photography for conservation, how to make a condition report, ink properties, and a workshop on creating a Japanese stab bound book, which is the style of the one that I was conserving. So I'd like to pause and just mention briefly what noh theater is, since the drawings in the album are concerned with the prop, sets and masks of noh theater.

I think that many people have heard of kabuki theater, but few have heard of noh theater, even though it predates kabuki and is still actively performed today. It is classical Japanese dance drama performed since the 14th century, which combines music, dance and acting and communicates stories with Buddhist themes.

One difference between kabuki and noh is that in kabuki, actors wear makeup and in noh, actors wear masks, although that isn't the only difference, though. So Hiromi Okazawa, who's a library specialist at Hoover, discovered through her research she was helping me out that the props and sets in the album are from the noh play called Arashiyama.

It describes the story location of the play, as well as no characters, costumes and props used for the play. She said that the translation of the writing in the orange boxed areas all say Arashiyama. This character looks like that when it's not looking very cursive, the way that you see it in the book.

There are also some translations that she put on there for artificial birch and artificial flower. Arashiyama is the name of the place in Kyoto, and the no play Arashiyama is performed in spring. You can see that the drawing of the carriage on the left is very similar to a photo of a prop from a contemporary production of the same play.

And here's another character depiction on the right, I mean, on the left from the book, and a contemporary version of the play, a photograph from that, a contemporary version. And you can see they're very similar. So Arashiyama is a place in Japan, near Kyoto, known for its beautiful bamboo forest.

The play is about Arashiyama during the cherry blossom season. And in April 2019, my husband and I went to Japan during cherry blossom season and visited Arashiyama. So when I found out that the the book was about Arashiyama, it was a really nice connection for me. So on to conservation, I learned that the first step in conservation is to do a condition report and a condition assessment of the object, detailing the dimensions, materials used, style of its fabrication, an estimation of its age, where it came from, and what condition it's in.

In the case of this sketchbook, it's a Japanese stab bound album. The pages are literally stabbed with an awl, and the silk threads that you see on the left are sewn together through the holes. The secondary support pages, and here, I just wanna stop and explain. This was confusing to me.

The secondary support is actually the construction of the book itself. Conservation wise, they consider, because the drawings are on a separate paper attached to that, that the primary support for the drawings is actually what I would think of a secondary. But they are the primary parts. So the secondary support pages are handmade of a thin, low quality kozo mulberry bark on the left.

The texture and thickness are not consistent, and there are occasional seeds and stems in the paper, which is not uniformly thick. There are areas that are so thin, as you can see here, with the hole in the middle of the paper, that there are. It's created holes. It's just not very finely made.

And it appears that this is the reason that the sketches are mostly done on a separate, more uniform, higher quality kozo laid paper on the right and then adhered to the secondary supporting pages. You can see the regularity of the texture of the laid lines on the paper on the right.

And on certain pages in the album, the drawings are done directly on the secondary, lower quality kozo paper. So the cover consists of two thicker kozo fiber papers. The outer is thicker than the inner. There is water damage as well as very significant insect damage throughout the book as you see in the photographs.

The condition was very unstable with shedding of the paper, a very likely Possibility any time it was viewed. There are 19 pages with drawings on primary laid paper affixed to the secondary support paper, and 2 pages with the direct painting on the secondary support paper, And then 11 empty pages.

And then there's one page at the last page of the sketchbook that looks to me like a signature with a little face that the artist has put on, and it's this little touch that is really very personal. And really, I felt a strong connection to the artist just because of that.

I felt like it was super personal, and I'm almost certain that's a signature. So I don't know for sure. So, after conditioning the album, the next step is to photograph the object in its current condition. And at Hoover, this means using a state of the art, high resolution camera setup.

These photos are extremely helpful in documenting the condition of the object and for putting the object back together once it's been taken apart. I was invited to attend a workshop on how to use the special conservation photography area to take and record conservation photos. This is actually separate from the archives digitization project area.

And Emma, who just spoke, kindly assisted me in photographing many of the pages with this camera setup. I also took photos of the pages with my phone camera and photos at all stages of the process. The next step was a huge leap of faith for me. It was to take the album completely apart, and Laurent assured me that he knew how to put it back together, and I took him at his word.

This involved untying and removing the outer silk threads, which you see on the left, at which time we made an exciting discovery that there was an inner primary sewing, which was done with twined, reclaimed paper. And you can see the arrow is pointing at that. The metal awls in the photo, these metal bars that you see sticking down, are actually marking the placement of the outer secondary sewing with the silk.

And you can see that the inner and outer stitches are offset from each other they're not made through the same holes. The dating of the book to the late 1800s or early 1900s is based on the discovery of this primary sewing with twined reclaimed paper, the silk corners, and the type of silk thread used in the outer secondary sewing.

The excitement of untwining this paper and discovering that it had writing on it was like this major. It was like treasure hunting, finding a treasure, really fun to do. Laurent then showed me a couple of different techniques to repair the holes on the pages by adhering small pieces of new, similarly colored kozo paper.

And you can see the two different kinds of holes. One I already showed, which is the naturally occurring hole in the paper, because it's not a very high quality paper. And number two is a hole made by a tunnel boring insect. The first way of repairing these holes was to use zin shofu wheat starch paste prepared and diluted with deionized water.

So we tried that out, and then a second one was using methylcellulose, prepared and diluted with deionized water. After trying both of those out, the one that was the most expedient turned out to be the methylcellulose, so that's what I used primarily. But let's address the insect in the room, the tunnel boring insects that had caused all of this damage.

I kept looking for them, and Laurent suggested that I purchase a small digital microscope for looking closely at things, and, my gosh, what a toy. It's a wonderful, inexpensive little gadget that hooks up to your phone. And the one that I had was able to take photos at 10x and 1000x and it's really small.

It's about the size of a small flashlight. It took me a while, but I finally found the little bugs, and that's because they're actually pretty small. These are the culprits. Pretty gross, but actually smaller than a sesame seed, and dead, thank goodness. The insects were probably drawn to the starch in the paper, which is food for them.

So these are the holes that they chewed in the paper, and these are magnified quite a bit. The black areas are the saliva that's left by the bugs and acts as a kind of glue, sticking things together. And I spent quite a bit of time scraping many of these areas of discoloration before repairing the holes in the book.

It took me quite a while to take the folio pages apart, that's because this saliva was sticking them together. So Laurent lent me the tools and materials, and I also purchased a set to use at home. And I set up a workshop table at my house, and I did most of the repair work at home in the evenings and on the weekends, taking two or three pages home with me to repair and then bringing finished ones back to Hoover on Mondays and taking a couple more back home with me for the next week.

Here you can see in the picture all of the different materials that I used. The little box at the bottom is just an extra weight that I made to be used as the other weights. So the process is that I would tear many small pieces of kozo paper in varying sizes to have them ready to repair several areas of the page at a time.

And the technique is to brush on methylcellulose, choose a piece of torn paper that matches the hole being covered, lay it on the area, and then brush over it, adhering it to the surface. And each area that was being repaired was then sandwiched between blotter paper. Actually, first remade paper, a special polyester fiber called remade, and then a blotter paper, and then weighed down for a half hour.

Actually, then a piece of plexiglass, and then weighed down for a half an hour to keep it flat as it dried. That's what you can see here in the picture as you see the album paper, then a piece of the rime A paper, then a piece of the blotter paper, then the plexiglass, and then the weight on top of it.

And underneath the paper itself is also another piece of rime A paper and another blotter paper and the table, which makes a kind of sandwich for the repair. So to prepare the larger holes, the best method was to use remoistenable tissue made with Japanese kozo fiber paper pre-coated with the wheat paste on mylar.

This method requires repairing on both sides of the page. Because every sheet of the album is folded in half and is a bifolio, I made most of my repairs inside the bifolios, where they were less visible and not on the side of the sketches. You can see a larger hole in the red square that has a remoistenable tissue that is cut in preparation for repairing a larger hole.

I started working from the back of Of the album to the front, and that's because the back pages were blank and had less damage. My thinking was that I would get more skilled as I went along and should work first on the pages that had no drawings on them to gain the necessary skill level to tackle the more delicate, badly damaged pages.

And you can see here, I'm repairing several areas at the same time. There were a lot of holes. So this is a before and after repair photo of the same page. Before, I trimmed off the excess paper at the bottom, and the holes are still visible, so they don't go away.

But now it was much more stable, and when you look at the album itself, it's much less distracting to viewing the pictures. So once all of the pages were conserved, I moved on to the cover which was so badly damaged, I actually couldn't imagine how to approach it.

It's made from two sheets of paper, the heavier kozo on the outside and an inner, thinner kozo layer. But the damaged areas were intertwined with each other and around each other, and to me, it looked like an impossible task. This is the outer cover. This is the inner cover.

Laurent then showed me how the cover could be lined, each sheet separately. The first step is to separate the sheets by carefully wetting them down. And you can see that water is being sprayed on the sheets in the right-hand side. And then ever so gently, with both of us working really carefully with tweezers, just delicately unfolding and moving the fragile paper around until it was flat.

After that, Laurent laid a sheet of plastic over the top and peeled the inner layer off of the outer layer, as you can see here. And once that was done, then both of the pages were lined with new kozo paper using wheat starch paste diluted with deionized water.

And in the picture, Laurent is using a traditional wood vessel and traditional Japanese brush. And this is the finish. Okay, so here, you can see the lining being applied to the paper. And this is the finished lined cover, which was then put. Of course, we did both of them.

So separately, both of them were put between blotters to dry and pressed with weight and then trimmed, and then, voila, it looks amazing. It's beautifully stable. This is the outside. This is the inside. And then, of course, there is the silk threads. And in order to recreate the silk threads as closely as possible to the original, I purchased Japanese silk thread on the Internet, which you can see on the left.

When it came, it was too thin. However, Laurent showed me a technique of twining the threads together, which is what I'm doing in the photo. And on the right, you can see the crinkled up original silk threads that were removed and the nice, smooth, straight ones that we twined next to them, which I think are a really close look to the original and should last a lot longer, of course.

So what you see here in this picture is the restitching of the inner primary stitching, which was originally stitched with the twined paper. So this is being stitched with linen. Laurent is stabbing the book at the top there through all of the pages using an awl. And now, despite not having a cover yet, the book still is very handleable.

All that's left to be done is to sew on the beautifully lined cover. And if COVID had not intervened, it would have already been done. So now I'm gonna show you several slides of before and after conservation. Now, one thing I do wanna point out with this is that the difference that you see in the color is not coming from any change that we made in the book.

It's really just a photography difference. And if I had been a better conservator at the beginning of this project, I would say that my photos might have matched the second ones taken at the end better than they do now. But that's for the next project, I guess, beginning conservator mistake.

But you can see the difference in the pictures of before and after here. And I hope you getting a chance to look at the delicate, beautiful photographs. I tried to take a lot of them or show a lot of them. You can see a lot of the damage down in this area has been repaired up in the center part.

So thank you very much. I just wanna say thank you for coming to the presentation, and definitely thank you to Laurent. It's been an absolute joy to work with him and learn all of this. And I will have the album once it's finished, which should happen pretty shortly in my office.

And if you give me a call, I will show it to you, the finished product, at least for a while. So just let me know if you want to come by and take a look, so.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Thank you very much, Laura. That was really a fantastic presentation. It's such a pleasure to have you in our lab every Monday afternoon.

I am hoping that you will actually write that story down and that we will publish all the images on the Hoover website once it's done, including the one with the cover that is finished. I just want to make a little comment. We have about four minutes for questions and answers one little comment about the difference in photography.

It's not just a difference in setting and it's also a difference in cameras and phones. So you cannot expect to have similar images if you don't take them with the absolute exact parameters. So just different phones, different place, different light, different everything will cause precisely that. And I know that you have conservation before images as well of a few pages, and so we'll have to take conservation after images of those exact same pages.

I see there are some questions in the room. I will just try to see. What do you know now that you wish you did when you began?

>> Laura Abada: What do I know now? Wow, everything, I know way more than I did before that I wished I knew at the beginning.

I don't know. It's a journey of discovery, I don't think. I mean, you get to know it as you go along. I don't think I know anything more now than, I guess, I could have known it. I guess, the photography is the main thing. I wish I had taken better before conservation photos.

We do have some, but I don't think they're quite the same and I wish I had taken those a little bit better, so.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: I'm just gonna share. Those aren't properly questions from Amelia McSweeney says both presentations are fantastic. Thank you very much. And then from Jenny Pearson, super interesting.

Wow, thanks for sharing, Laura. Do I have more? Yes, there are more. Could the change in color in the drawing part partially be explained by the new layer of paper on each page. I think I can answer that one.

>> Laura Abada: Is it not really.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

No, the repairs are done behind. So, what you consider as a page is actually bifolio. So if you have a page like this, every page of the album is folded in half. And the repairs were done in the inner side of the paper, whereas all the drawings were on the outer side of the paper.

So there is no risk of the repairs interfering with the drawings, and we would not allow that anyway.

>> Laura Abada: Yeah, so there were a few that I had to repair from both sides, as I mentioned, with the larger holes. But if there was anything near a picture, I did not repair it on the drawing itself, if there was something that needed to.

 

>> Laurent Cruveillier: I will allow one last question. What was the most difficult part of the conservation process?

>> Laura Abada: Well, I think just the amount of time it took, it was a slog, really, going through every page. But the cover was probably the most interesting to me, and the process was fascinating.

I couldn't even imagine how it was gonna get done at all. And it was so delicate to take these things apart, the two layers. Very interesting.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Okay, well, thank you very much, Laura. We unfortunately reached the moment of the third presentation, which would be mine. I would like to greet all the viewers that are joining us now.

I can remind you that I am Laurent Crevelier, that I am the book and paper conservator at Hoover Institution Library and archives. I will now share my screen if I remember how I can do that. So thank you very much to all for being with us today. This is about the conservation of posters and the solutions that we use at Hoover, mainly.

So the Hoover poster collection gathers more than 100,000 posters from around the world. They document diverse national, political, wartime, and cultural sentiments of the 20th century and ongoing in more than 80 countries. Predominantly the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia and the Soviet Union, and France. And 33,000 posters are available to view online.

And currently, we are in the process of cataloging and imaging yet another collection of around 23,000 more that will be available soon. Our latest exhibition presents the transformative potential of archival materials by pairing covers of the Hoover Digest, almost always based on posters from the collection with the original posters that inspired their design.

It is an example of how posters can be used to produce eye opening results, and especially when repurposed for a new audience. In the physical exhibition, there are currently 15 posters in display, but the digital and online part of the exhibition, including interactive detective displays in the gallery, required we treated around 80 posters in the conservation lab.

So that together with our long experience in treating posters, brings us today to share with you the most common factors of degradation that are poster specifics. And I have to warn you, viewer discretion is advised. So let's start with chemical degradations that apply to all paper items, and especially those produced after 1830, and more particularly during war and revolution times when paper quality generally suffers, which is a large part of our focus at Hoover.

These wood pulp rich papers tend to have a high lignin content and become very acidic with time. The acidity leads to fragility and our best option is to wash and de acidify the paper using an alkaline solution. Most often we also line the works using Japanese tissue blind with wee starch paste, and you can see in the central video, during washing, that part of the acidity leaves the water.

And to give you an idea of how acidic it is, after a whole day of washing posters, you have lost your fingerprints. It's almost as acidic as pineapple. And you can see here how acidity leads to catastrophic brittleness, which puts the material at high risk, especially if it needs to be handled or displayed.

Also, chemical degradation, exposure to light for long periods can cause the paper to yellow, at the same time, it fades the colors. That photochemical degradation can only be treated with bleaching, which fragilizes the paper. And at home you can observe the phenomenon when you're enframing objects and you see that the part hidden by the window mount has remained lighter than the exposed part in the bottom right corner.

And bleaching, unfortunately, is tricky and it does not apply to all paper because it can darken certain ones, and especially the ones used for newsprint, which is fairly common in poster printing. Now onto physical damage. The most frequent condition we find is surface and ingrained dirt that we can remove using soft, brittle brushes and vulcanized rubber sponges.

If needed, we can resort to using elastomer, eraser crumbs, and even a museum vacuum. You can see here my colleague Curtis cleaning the edge of a poster using one of these sponges. As large formats, posters are often folded. So you think that folding a poster is a good idea?

Well, think again. The gradation of damaged severity ranges from folds that can be flattened to creases that can be consolidated, to tears that need mending. But folding also breaks the fibers off the paper and make it more porous to the gases in the environment. And we often see discoloration, like the image in the middle, along the edges, happening along the folds, which is the same phenomenon that happens around the pages of old hooks.

So instead of folding, why not rolling the poster instead, right? Well, think again. Rolling posters cause several issues. First, the outer part of the scroll is exposed, so it can suffer mechanical damage, but it also gets dirtier and it's exposed to the light, as you can see on the left.

Also, if the scroll is jugged or bumped against the hard surface several times, we will end up with a crimpled and damaged long edge, generally only one, like the poster in the middle that has a beautiful straight edge on the right and a crumpled edge on the left.

And in this video, you can see, again, our colleague Curtis painstakingly humidifying using an ultrasonic humidifying mister, all the little bits and bobs of that edge. Another consequence of rolling posters are creases, most often seen in thicker papers, like in the middle. Where thicker papers always are happy to be rolled but very unhappy to be unrolled, and where there is fragility in the pulp, you will end up with a crease.

You can also see When the roll is crushed or flattened, repeated crease patterns, like the one in the left, or what we call iterative staining, in the case of the poster on the right. That was leaning against a damp wall while rolled, and where the damaged staining caused this rather gothic looking repeated border.

Now, because posters are meant to be posted, we often find pinholes at the corners and sometimes along the edges. This is part of the object's history, but can also cause fragility. We try not to hide the holes, but we often need to consolidate the corners. And if we find oxidized metal residue from the pins, we sometimes need to use chelating solution, and we especially use EDTA, which is ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid.

But we might not go into those details, to remove the metallic particles. Also an interesting result of folding posters. We find very long upper or lower edge tears, most commonly in the middle. And I inserted here a piece of white paper in the tears to make them obvious so that you could see.

That happens when a rolled poster was tied, and the outer edge was cut by the tie. It can be tape, cord, or dreadful elastics that melt and leave residue, you name it. So, on the left side you had a bottom tear, and on the right side, a top tear according to how the poster was rolled, but at least it tells you how the poster was rolled.

Losses also occur most commonly around the edges for the reason we mentioned, but also at the corners as the result of hanging the posters, we have several options to treat those losses. We can consolidate the edge of the paper to prevent further tearing. We can do a neutral infill with a natural color paper, or we can do toned infills to provide continuity in the image.

The idea is to prevent the eye to focus on the damage, instead of the image. And in the middle, you can see three options, all in one poster, according to the curator's decisions for exhibition or imaging. You have the first one where we just have lines that continue the pattern, or we can unfold that little contraption, to leave the poster with no infill.

Or, fold it again, and show a neutral background, just so that at least, if not the drawing, the sheet of paper is complete. And on the right, there was a loss on the edge, and you have the poster on absolute right. And then, I have, this photo of my colleague spending about ten minutes trying to find where the infill was.

In certain cases, we can do digital infills using a picture taken from an adjacent area, printing it on acid-free paper, and using it to feel the loss. Now, let's talk about nature. You know that mold is everywhere. You're probably all breathing mold spores right now. In the case of posters, it often develops inside the frames of items that have been hanging against walls.

And here we want to make sure that it's not active first. And then we brush off the growth in a fume hood or using a snorkel. And then we treat the area with a solution of deionized water and alcohol, which is a commonly accepted protocol. If you don't want to go into gamma radiation, which is not very accessible.

If mold stains the paper, though, there's generally very little we can do. Let's move on from vegetable to animal. And let's talk about pee, most often from pets or rodents. And the super cool thing about pee is that it glows in the dark under UV light. But the less cool thing about it is that there are health issues to consider, especially because of the hantavirus that is carried by some animals, including rodents.

And it can cause very serious respiratory diseases, including death. So, one has to be careful with rodent detections. The treatment here consists in cleaning the area, mostly using enzymes, either on a gel or in a liquid environment. And they're fairly tricky to use because they require the right pH, they require the right temperature, et cetera, and especially the ones that break down proteins.

We need conditions that mimic digestive conditions. After defacing our material, our little friends are happy to feel at home and to help themselves for a meal. This is common to find insect and rodent grazing along the edges of posters, or even on the back of posters, in particular if they have been stored at floor level.

That is because either they are after food, that could be the starch using the paper, or to buy the poster, or if they use it for nesting material. In this case, we treat the posters as if it were a loss, and we provide support. And sometimes we can make an infill, in the case of this poster with storks from Sweden.

So you're thinking, let's trust a framer, and he'll do the right thing with my poster, I'll think again. Many of our posters present damage from previous framing using acidic materials and adhesives. And in the lab, we use the same methods as used in national museums. And you can see on the right, with the posters that are lent currently at Lacma Museum for their imagined fronts exhibition.

Which is about to open very closely, that we use only reversible methods and hinges.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: So, storing posters in tubes or over cores is also problematic because of acidic migrations, which are the same phenomenon you can observe at home when you see mount burns around your prints. Either don't roll your posters, use acid-free tubes or interleave the paper with mylar.

Otherwise, we might need to do localized bleaching, which is quite fiddly as well. So, how about hanging files or binders? Do I need to say it? The annoyance of perforations is that they follow a regular pattern that is very distracting. And here, for example, we had to hide the holes to provide the correct reading of this chinese propaganda poster.

So sometimes we find extra elements stuck on posters. We then have to assess whether they are intentional, if they are disfiguring, or if they are hiding text, and if they are damaging. And we will remove them accordingly. Like in the case of the poster on the left, that needed a little spa treatment in warm water, to remove a whole band in the bottom part that was obliterating some text.

 

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Okay, so what about lining a poster with cloth? Well, you guessed it, think again. Paper and cloth, contract and expand at the exact opposite rate with humidity variations, especially along the warp. And so you will end up with creases, tears, and catastrophic shredding in parallel bands, as you can see in the image in the middle.

And when we cannot do in situ repairs we would have done for the image in the lower corner, then we have to remove the cloth, and line the poster again with. Japanese tissue, it becomes inevitable. But a lot of posters that have been lined in cloth are unfortunately lost.

Okay, so you tell me, what about laminating? Think again, it is a dead sentence. It is almost irreversible. It's like sous vide. You're cooking the document in its own very acidic juices. With self adhesives, we may be able to use heat and solvents. But in the case of fused plastics, like the one you have in the image, which didn't even bother unfolding some corners or removing the adhesive, we need to bathe the whole document in acetone or even nastier solvents that have health and safety issues.

So it's very annoying, it's very time consuming, it's extremely expensive, and the result is still a lottery. So don't laminate anything ever, conservators saying. So how about repairing your own posters, at home or at the office with commercially sourced glues or adhesives? Well, you're right, think again. Vinyl glue and rubber cement are irreversible and sticky tape yellows, and the adhesive migrates into the paper on top of becoming crystalline, so even sticky notes leave residue.

And we have a hard time removing those using heated spatulas and solvents, and we sometimes even have to use a suction table. So to preserve posters and make them available for research, Hoover has conducted documentation, conservation and imaging protocols over the decades. One critical protective choice has been poster encapsulation, in which the material is encased in inner polyester pockets over a sheet of microchamber paper, which is a paper that contains several, let's call them pollution scavengers, if you wish.

And the poster and the sheet of microchamber are sealed with an ultrasonic welder, leaving ventilations on the side. And this protects the paper from being torn or soiled during handling and storage. And the sealed edges can easily be cut away to access the poster. In the case of the 23,000 new poster collection, each one is carefully prepared for handling, QR coded, inventoried, folded and filed by geographic region, and later sent off site for high resolution imaging and storage in flat files.

In the case here, you can see on the left one of the new entries, which is an Italian poster. And this new collection integrates a lot of nonprofit and charity organizations, which is fairly new. So that's it for me today. I would like to share a few links with you if you allow.

First, our current online exhibition, Dynamic Design, which you can also come and see in person until the end of December, I would say late December and the link to our main digital collections repository, where you can find about 33,000, 33,512 results for posters only. And I have to say that Hoover has one of the largest poster collections in the world, by the way.

And finally, a link to our beta repository for the recently produced high resolution images of our collections, which includes many posters and namely all the ones featured in our exhibition. I would like to thank you all very much for your attention and give you a few last recommendations.

Doubt means don't. I learned that from Oprah, at least in that formulation. If you have to deal with heritage materials, use acid free materials to store them in. Don't use tape or glue or rubber bands or any commercially available adhesive. They will end up damaging your documents. Please do not laminate anything and don't trust your average framer.

But every year, ask a conservator. We will be happy to answer all your questions. Thank you very much. And I will now have a look at our q and a to see if we have questions. Why is acidic material so bad for paper? Well, that's an excellent question.

If you can imagine, paper is made of fibers of cellulose. You have a conjunction of several fibers that are long and that are happy together. And as they are bound, they form a solid, what we call a solid substrate, and that forms your paper. And with time and with the presence of oxygen, the presence of hydrogen, the presence of pollutants in the air like sulfur dioxide, which is everywhere.

With the presence of light, those beautiful molecules end up breaking a little bit, and you have a little bit out, and these may release little radicals that are acidic very often if they're not a different size. I don't wanna go too much into detail. The acidity, in its turn, will go and will damage the following next little molecule and break it down.

And so as this happens, you will break and break and break and break, and so the fibers of your paper become shorter and shorter and shorter, and that what creates the brittleness in paper. So you are no longer able to fold the paper naturally. If you fold it too much, it breaks.

The other phenomenon is that the paper will reflect the light in a different way and it will start reflecting. It will start actually absorbing the part of the spectrum of the light, which is beginning in the reds. And that's why old paper, when it ages, begins to be reddish and orange and yellow.

That's why acidity is bad for the material. And unfortunately, earlier papers are more solid than more contemporary papers. And a big challenge we face at Hoover is that a huge part of our collections is not only recent paper, but is wartime and prices time paper, which is made with all sorts of material, but a lot of wood pulp.

I hope I answered that question. What is your favorite type of thing to conserve? That is a great question. Thank you. Someone actually asked me this question today during the open doors we had this morning for the Hoover staff. I think my favorite thing is the thing that looked the most damaged, when really you have two opportunities here.

The first one is to have the pleasure at the end to reveal the after picture, and to see the satisfaction on whoever needs that document be conserved space. So the satisfaction of the other is one of my big drives, I would say. And the other one is the complexity that will trigger the need for creativity and finding solutions, because applying the same method all the time is interesting.

But finding new solutions or making forensic discoveries is the part that is more exciting. And also, whenever an object is new, there is always so much historical context around it that the latest item is also the most interesting one. I also invite you to send us any more questions, if you have, or if you want to send them to me, I'll be happy to take your questions.

I'm gonna type my email address in the chat room.

>> Samira Bozorgi: Laurent, there's one question in the chat.

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Okay, I'll go there, thank you.

>> Samira Bozorgi: I can read it out loud if you'd like. What are some forensic discoveries you've made?

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Give me one second there. Say that again, please, Samira?

 

>> Samira Bozorgi: What are some forensic discoveries you've made?

>> Laurent Cruveillier: Some forensic discoveries are, well, for example, in the presentation that we just had with Emma, that we didn't know there was text hidden behind some photographs. But I just had the case in the lab of a recently acquired book printed.

It was actually a manuscript that was bound within the Troubetzkoy collection, and it was in a very bad shape. It was not a very specifically nice binding, and we were probably going to discard the binding. But then we discovered that underneath what's called the paste down, which is the decorative paper that is pasted on the inner side of the cover.

That underneath that, there was reclaimed paper, and that reclaimed paper, on one side was Georgian, and on the other side was French. And so we have now a new open field of discovery and an investigation to find at what point in time or where any binder would have had access to newspaper printed in Georgian script and in French at the same time.

So that is a forensic discovery here. Sometimes it's more about production techniques. If you are following us on Twitter, or I should say, X, formerly known as Twitter. You will see several tweets that include some forensic discoveries about making techniques in modern, I would say, early 20th century Japanese bindings made with previous Japanese techniques.

So there's that. And so our tweet has about, I would say, 10 or 11 stories that you can follow and get us from the day. Okay, and that took us to almost time to say goodbye, and thank you very much for attending our three presentations. I would like to thank again, Emma Ross Reuther and Laura Abada for taking the time not only to work on their objects, but taking the time to work on those really, really high-quality and riveting presentations.

I hope mine was useful for you as well. And if you have any questions, please ask a conservator. That is, every year, around November 4th, is when Ask a Conservator ask, but you can always direct your questions to a conservator near you. They are always happy to help you take good care of heritage and conserve your own personal papers and photographs and books, etc.

And with that, I think I will end the chat now and our seminar, unless last minute hand raise, no? Okay, well, thank you very much, and see you next year for Ask a Conservator Day.