Volume 23, Number 2, Summer 2016



                        Books&People



    IN THIS ISSUE       A York and a Lancaster Rose:

                        A Treatment Story

          Book Funds

                PAGE 4  by Christina Amato, Conservator



      Summer Reads      In Books Will Speak Plain, Julia Miller calls the nineteenth century the “last great

                PAGE 6  period of the handmade book” because it was a period in which innovation and

                        centuries-old tradition were combined. Even as machines took hold in the book manu-

Receptions              facturing industry, books continued to be sewn by hand throughout the century, and

                        covers often show traces of the human hands that decorated them. The “publisher’s

                PAGE 8  cloth binding,” a hybrid of old and new technologies, survives as a book structure to

                        tell this story. By examining the materials, cover construction, decoration, and sewing

                        of these books, we can gain insight into the evolution of the book structure into its

                        modern form. For a book conservator, knowing the context of a binding’s creation is

                        also crucial in making an informed treatment decision. Our 1882 copy of A York and

                        a Lancaster Rose by Annie Keary is a typical victim of decades of enthusiastic readers.

                        Before diving into treatment, it is useful to consider the book’s Victorian roots.



                        Change was the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century industry. In the early

                        years, book production was carried out fully by hand, much as it was in the preceding

                        century. By 1900, books were almost entirely machine-made. For a trade that was

                        conservative and slow to change, this swift transformation was breathtaking,

                        and it happened as a result

                        of a perfect storm of causal

                        factors. The most obvious

                        was the Industrial Revolution,

                        which, of course, profoundly

                        affected many trades. Higher

                        literacy rates created a demand

                        for more and more books.

                        Innovations in papermaking

                        and printing vastly increased

                        the production of texts, which

                        overwhelmed the hand-bind-

                        ing industry. (The effect this

                        had on the quality of paper is

                        a story for another time.)

                                                         Before treatment: Broken into pieces and out of commission.