Examples of toy theaters after conservation treatment. Left: Eine Reise durch Afrika (A Journey through Africa),1889, DT11 .R45 1889. Right: Märchen-Panorama (Fairytale Panorama),1890, PN1979.T6 M37 1890. Images: Conservation Division.   The following is a guest post by Gwenanne Edwards, Senior Paper Conservator in the Conservation Division. Before television, toy theaters were a visual way to bring stories to life in the home. Incorporating a miniature stage, scenes, and puppets, the theaters made acting out plays and stories readily accessible to children and adults alike. Popular thro ..read more

The following is a post by Cindy Connelly Ryan, Preservation Science Specialist, Preservation Research and Testing Division. Cindy analyzes, identifies, studies the chemistry of, and makes reconstructions of historic artists’ materials. Hues of green surround us in the natural world, and the human eye has evolved to discern subtle differences between greens with extra acuity. In honor of spring, as green sprouts re-emerge from the snow and ice, this post discusses some of the pigments and dyes that have been used over the centuries to make the green colors found on items in the Library of Cong ..read more

The following is a guest post by Cindy Connelly Ryan and Meghan Hill, preservation science specialists, Research and Testing Division, and team members of the Inks and Skins project. “Thirteen hundred years of Irish manuscripts, in a day, at the Library of Congress! What a marvelous event!” said Eugene Flanagan, Director of General and International Collections. The Inks and Skins collaboration bridges heritage science and humanities approaches to studying the materiality of late medieval Gaelic language manuscripts. Team members from University College Cork (UCC)’s Department of Modern Irish ..read more

The following is a guest post by GCCS Intern Mary Lawrence. Mary recently earned her Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she focused on coursework in librarianship and preservation. After this internship, she will be moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan to be the Librarian for Western European Studies with Germanic Focus at the University of Michigan Library. In the fall of 2022, I was enrolled in my third semester of graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and taking a survey course of book, paper ..read more

This is a guest post by John Bertonaschi, Senior Rare Book Conservator in the Conservation Division. In part two, I acquainted you with the history and condition of our 13th century Law Library manuscript, Decretum Gratiani. I told you that, as part of a restoration in the late 19th or early 20th century, the spine was coated with liquid hide glue, which caused the parchment text block to distort and the spine to become rigid. The book could not be opened fully, making the script on the inner margins inaccessible. Now, I will write about our efforts to alleviate these problems and repair some ..read more

The following is a post by Cindy Connelly Ryan, Preservation Science Specialist, Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD).   Many of the drawing and painting manuals printed in the 17th-19th centuries were expensive, beautifully made editions, produced for a wealthy and literate upper-class readership. This has led some scholars to conclude that these books were received and read primarily in a literary manner, as part of the broad cultural education of fine ladies and gentlemen, but largely not used for much practical application, and certainly not intended for, or used in, the ..read more

The following is a guest post by Preservation Specialist Leslie Long in the General Collections Conservation Section. She conserves bound materials and pursues ongoing research in nineteenth century book cover design. Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944) was one of the most successful book design artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She designed more than three hundred covers, mostly for Scribner, but for other publishers, too, including Putnam, Bobbs-Merrill, Crowell, Harper, McClurg, Dodd-Mead, Church, Appleton, Pott, Houghton Mifflin, and MacMillan. She was the eldest of ..read more

This post is co-written by Jacob Nadal and Dan Paterson. Jacob Nadal is Director for Preservation, and his work focuses on creating a sustainable plan for keeping the Library’s collections available. Dan Paterson is a senior book conservator in the Preservation Directorate.  He works on materials from the Asian Division and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, providing conservation treatment primarily for early printed books and manuscripts.  He has been a member of the Jikji to Gutenberg team since 2021. On April 13th and 14th, the Library of Congress hosted From Jikji t ..read more

The following is a post by Meghan Wilson and Cindy Connelly Ryan, preservation science specialists in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, with Marianna Stell, reference librarian in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Given as tokens of affection, discarded as outdated, scribbled upon because a pen was dry, annotated heavily as part of a scholarly project: every book has a story beyond its text. This fall, staff members in the Preservation Research and Testing Division at the Library of Congress have been helping curators and scholars to uncover traces of those stories ..read more

The following post is by Cindy Connelly Ryan and Meghan Wilson, preservation science specialists in the Preservation Research and Testing Division with Marianna Stell, reference librarian in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division Advances in scientific instrumentation permitting non-invasive micro-scale analysis are bringing a revolution to the scholarly understanding of the texts and images of medieval manuscripts, wherein investigating the materiality of the original object unlocks new information about its current condition, its original making, and its meaning. A dramatic example ..read more