Filed under: Religion, Science Fiction, Travel, Wales | Tags: blogging, Cader Idris, CADW, Castell-y-Bere, Castle Wales, Cistercian, Cymer Abbey, Dolgellau, Hafod Eryri, jim downey, Minffordd Path, Rhyd Ddu, Science Fiction, Snowdon, St. Cybi's Well, travel, Tŷ Te Cadair Tea Room, Wales, Wikipedia, Yr Wyddfa
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
Some years back my wife Martha and I climbed Snowdon. This trip, my brother-in-law Steven and niece Haley decided that they wanted to do it. But being somewhat more into hiking than I ever was, they wanted to try a more adventurous path than we used, and consulted with an outdoors shop owner in Dolgellau they had made friends with to see what he recommended. After discussion, they decided on the Rhyd Ddu Path, which they were told would take between 2:30 and 3:00 hours for hikers in good shape to do.
So after keeping an eye on the weather, they decided to tackle it on Thursday morning of our second week in Wales. We dropped them off at the trailhead in the small town of Rhyd Ddu:
Snowdon in the distance.
My sister Celeste, Martha, and I took a leisurely drive over to Llanberis, where we’d arranged to take the Snowdon Mountain Railway (SMR) up Yr Wyddfa. The timing on this was a little tricky: your ticket for up and back only allows a 30 minute stay on top of the mountain. And our plan was to meet Steven and Haley there, and to have them get stand-by tickets to take the train back down with us … if there were any. Because there frequently aren’t, and they’re only sold on a ‘as available’ basis. One additional possible complication: even under the best conditions, the weather on top of Snowdon is very changeable, and the SMR will only go to the very top (where the station is) if visibility it clear.
But Steven and Haley were confident that they could do the hike in the time allotted, and if worst came to worst, they could also hike back down and we could then pick them up.
So, we drove to Llanberis, enjoying some sight-seeing along the way:
Snowdon is the peak in the middle.
Well, the plans worked perfectly. Steven and Haley made it to the top of Snowdon in just 2:15, and got their names on the top of the stand-by list. The train made it all the way to the top, where we joined them at the Hafod Eryri, the station/visitor’s center which was new since the last time I had been to the top.
The path heading up from the lake is the Miner’s Path, which Martha and I climbed previously. The one above it is the PYG Track, which is the way we went back down.
Yeah, it’s that wonderful. You should go sometime.
One the way back to the cottage we stopped at Cymer Abbey, just outside Dolgellau. Cymer is a late 12th century Cistercian ruins, but still quite charming:
The next day we decided to visit one of my very favorite places in Wales: Castell-y-Bere. It’s one of the native Welsh castles, dating back to about 1220, and was brilliantly designed to take advantage of the natural features of the site, as can be seen in this image of the ruins on CADW’s site:
You can see a rendering of what the castle may have looked like in the information plaque there at Castell-y-Bere:
And here are more images from our visit, but I would also recommend the Castle Wales entry.
After a nice long visit at Castell-y-Bere, we stopped off at the entrance to the Minffordd Path up to the summit of Cadair Idris and had a pleasant late lunch at the Tŷ Te Cadair Tea Room. I love this tree-shaded little road leading up to it:
It was a good day.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Faith healing, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Travel, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: architecture, blogging, CADW, Caernarfon, Communion of Dreams, jim downey, Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, lych gate, movies, Pennant Melangell, photography, Pistyll Rhaeadr, rood screen, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Tanat, travel, video, Wales, Wikipedia, writing
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
“Water and old stone” pretty much sums up Wales, for me, I think. But I have an admittedly biased perspective.
We started the next morning with a trip to Pennant Melangell, a small pilgrimage church in the Tanat valley in north Wales. Here’s the preamble I use in the first chapter of St Cybi’s Well, which is titled ‘Pennant Melangell’:
Melangell was a female saint of the 7th century. According to tradition she came here from Ireland and lived as a hermit in the valley. One day Brochwel, Prince of Powys, was hunting and pursued a hare which took refuge under Melangell’s cloak. The Prince’s hounds fled, and he was moved by her courage and sanctity. He gave her the valley as a place of sanctuary, and Melangell became Abbess of a small religious community. After her death her memory continued to be honoured, and Pennant Melangell has been a place of pilgrimage for many centuries. Melangell remains the patron saint of hares.
– St Melangell’s Church website
It’s a wonderful little place.
Here’s the entrance to the churchyard, with the classic lych gate:
Interior of the church:
The 15th century rood screen.
Chancel, with the (reconstructed) 12th century shrine of St Melangell.
Detail under the shrine.
Inside the Apse.
Back of the tympanum, containing a plaster panel with The Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments, all in Welsh.
In the churchyard:
I love this place. Maybe it shows:
We got some lunch in the charming little town of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant (where parts of this favorite movie was shot), then went to visit Pistyll Rhaeadr, one of the “seven natural wonders of Wales.” The waterfall is mentioned in Communion of Dreams, and one of the major chapters of St Cybi’s Well is titled ‘Pistyll Rhaeadr’. Here it is:
That’s almost 250′ tall.
My sister and her family before we climbed to the top.
Up on top.
Steve, getting some images of the falls, looking down.
I did the same:
Here’s a description of the top of the falls, taken from St Cybi’s Well:
As he came around past the rock outcrop, the sound from the falls increased. There was the distant rumble from the bottom of the first long drop, but closer now were the sounds of water scrambling over rock and root, gathering in the small pools at the top before the plunge. Darnell made his way to the last of these pools, near the edge of the cliff, and stood there, listening.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and relaxed, opening himself as he had tried to do at St Cybi’s and St Seiriol’s, allowing rather than reaching, feeling rather than thinking.
And he felt something. A whisper in his mind. A whisper as though someone were speaking his name. A whisper of invitation, to step through the wind and over the edge of the cliff, to come to freedom. It was a beckoning, a subtle and supple call to pass through to the other side.
This was the thinness Megan spoke of. He understood it now, at least a little.
Releasing the breath, he slowly opened his eyes, then knelt down to the pool in front of him. The silver-grey sky reflected in the pool had a new shimmer to it, an intensity he had not seen before. He reached out, as he had done before, and placed the palm of his hand against the surface of the water.
There was no slight electric thrill, but neither was there just the crisp coldness of a mountain stream. Rather, there was a vibrancy, almost a … depth … there, more than the few inches of water in the pool would suggest. And while the roar of the falls to his left called loudly, it was the trickle of water coming from his right which whispered to him. He stood, and followed it further up the mountain.
After hiking back down to the base of the falls, we enjoyed a snack in the little tea shop, then headed back to our cottage. The magic of the day continued, as we watched clouds form midway down the mountain:
The next day we decided to visit Caernarfon castle, the massive fortress in the north Wales town of the same name. This one:
Some of my images:
And from displays inside one of the main towers:
Time enjoying the castle was followed up with lunch on the castle square:
That afternoon, we went to St Cybi’s Well, itself:
The main bathing pool.
The well source, itself, behind the bathing pool.
“Author’s selfie.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Gardening, Travel, Wales | Tags: Anglesey, Betws-y-Coed, blogging, Bodnant Garden, CADW, Conwy, Din Lligwy Hut Group, jim downey, Laburnum Arch, Lligwy Burial Chamber, neolithic, Penmon, St. Seiriol’s Well, Swallow Falls, Wales, Wikipedia, Ynys Môn
That’s the famous Laburnum Arch at Bodnant Garden in North Wales. Calling it an ‘arch’ is somewhat misleading, since it’s actually 55 meters long. Here’s a better image of it from Wikipedia:
We decided to kick off our week in North Wales with a trip to Bodnant Garden, particularly since Martha knew that the Arch would be in bloom. She’s wanted to see it in it’s full glory since we first went there almost 20 years ago.
And much of the rest of the garden was in bloom, as well:
If you plan a trip to Wales, particularly anywhere in the north, you really should include Bodnant in your itinerary.
After enjoying the garden, we decided to pop into Conwy for a bit of lunch, enjoying the old town, and seeing the amazing City Walls:
(Not my images, found on Google.)
From there, we decided to drive back to our cottage in Dolgellau via Betws-y-Coed, so we could check out Swallow Falls:
And here’s some video of it:
The next morning we headed to Ynys Môn, more commonly known in English as Anglesey. The first stop was St Seiriol’s Well, Penmon. We visited the well:
Then checked out the medieval dovecot, and went out to the beach for a nice stroll. We drove further inland to check out a site I had again *thought* that I had visited previously, but that turned out to be only in my fiction: the Lligwy Burial Chamber, a neolithic burial site. And nearby is the Lligwy hut group, a Roman-era defensive village which is really quite delightful, even if it is only foundations:
After the Hut Group, we stopped at a roadside pub for some lunch, then went exploring Anglesey, taking in the views, hopping fences to get up close to some wind mills, and enjoying the many scattered Standing Stones.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Religion, Science Fiction, Travel, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, CADW, Caerphilly Castle, Castell Coch, jim downey, Kidwelly, Science Fiction, St Anne's Well, St. Cybi's Well, technology, Tintern Abbey, travel, Wales, Wikipedia
Part 1 can be found here.
We drove over from Avebury and crossed into Wales, headed up the Wye River valley north of Chepstow. You get your first glimpse of the abbey as you come around a bend in the road, something like this:
Yeah, Tintern Abbey, another World Heritage Site. One of those places where you can feel almost a thousand years of history surround you, wrap you up, hold you close. To walk in that space is to somehow find a part of yourself you never knew was missing. There are a number of places in Wales which make me feel that way. Probably why I keep going back there.
Others in our party experienced the same thing:
After a time we left the Abbey, and I begged an indulgence of the group to visit a small site nearby: St Anne’s Well, Trellech. Everyone was game, even though it wasn’t someplace we had discussed previously. But my wife (who is an excellent navigator, and had done extensive research & preparation for our trip), looked at her maps and said “I don’t know how to get there.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “I do.”
See, I had been there multiple times before … through the technological miracle of Google Streetview. I was fairly sure that I could get us there without reference to a map.
And I did:
St Anne’s Well, also know as the “Virtuous Well”.
I wanted to visit the site because there’s a small but fairly important scene which takes place at the well in St Cybi’s Well. Here’s a bit of it:
Darnell looked from her, back at the well. Here and there on the short wall surrounding it were small objects. And hanging from the limbs of the tree above it were dozens of different strips of cloth in varying hues and conditions, some worn to just loose fibers. He nodded towards those, asked, “What’s with the rags?”
“Hanging from the whitethorn? They’re called clouties. It’s an old tradition for those suffering an illness: dip a length of cloth in the water of the well, then tie it to the tree. As the cloth slowly wears away, so will the illness.” She sipped at her own mug. “The believing makes it so.”
You might be able to see some of the clouties in the image above. In this one, you can at least easily see the white strip I hung in the tree after immersing it in the well water:
We drove on to our B&B accommodation in Cardiff.
The next morning we decided on a pair of nearby castles for the day’s enjoyment: Caerphilly and Coch. As a bonus, Caerphilly was playing host to a couple of dragons …
Dewi and Dwynwen, and their eggs (since hatched).
We’ve been to Caerphilly previously, but it is always a great place to visit. And this was the first real castle for my sister and her family, who were impressed with the size and scope of the fortress, even though it had been slighted during the English Civil War.
Out for a stroll along the top of one of the towers.
The unusual companion castle to Cearphilly is Castell Coch. Unusual, because while the two share some history (having both been built by Baron Gilbert de Clare, lord of Glamorgan, in the late 13th century), in many ways Coch is the antithesis of Caerphilly. Where Caerphilly was a massive fortress designed to use the latest military architecture of the time (concentric layers of defense and extensive water bodies), Coch is a small private castle, barely sufficient as a defensive residence. And where Caerphilly still stands largely intact with its 13th century design, Coch was rebuilt extensively in the 19th century to be a delightful (if somewhat bizarre) Victorian fantasy of what a medieval castle would be like:
But still, a nice place for a stroll …
… or a few moments rest. 
We left SE Wales, and headed west, to our B&B in Kidwelly.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Travel, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: Avebury, blogging, Bruce Nauman, jim downey, Kingly Vale, London, Magna Carta, Millennium Bridge, Salisbury Cathedral, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Stonehenge, Susumu Koshimizu, Sutton Hoo, Tate Modern, technology, UK, Wales, Wikipedia, writing
From May 13th through June 5th, my wife and I enjoyed a great vacation in the UK, mostly spent in Wales. For the first couple of weeks of the trip my sister and her family joined us.
It was a good chance to get away from things a bit. Spending time enjoying Wales always seems to help me clear my head and get some perspective, even when I don’t necessarily feel like I have pressing matters to ponder. In the coming couple of weeks I’m going to share some of my thoughts and experiences, and probably a fair number of images, from that trip. It’s not going to be like previous travelogues I’ve done, but I hope it will nonetheless be enjoyable. And for those who have been patiently waiting for me to finish St Cybi’s Well, there will be some particular treats in visiting locations in that book.
So, take a little trip with me …
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
London is one of the world’s great cities. And even though as a general rule I don’t like cities, I can usually spend up to a week at a time in London without starting to go stir-crazy.
Here are some quick random images to explain why:
From a recent mosaic near the Millennium Bridge. Not exactly a celebration of peasant revolts, but also not really a criticism of them, either.
Take a walk on the wild side.
Dr Hoo?
The Tate Modern also had a completely magical audio sculpture in the Turbine Hall by Bruce Nauman which I and my brother-in-law Steven thoroughly enjoyed.
And of course, to have a full London experience, you have to have at least one good evening in a traditional pub …
Steven, my sister Celeste, and their daughter Haley.
The next morning we drove to the south coast to Kingly Vale, where we enjoyed the 400 acres of ancient uncut forest in the rain:
Yew know what I mean?
That evening we made it to Salisbury, and did some sight-seeing in the area the next day:
Yeah, one of the four copies known to exist. I was happy to see that they had upgraded both their security and their presentation from the last time I saw this copy.
And of course, a bit north of there is this old place:
Yeah, Stonehenge.
Crows don’t care about the rules.
Slip inside …
That last image is the same one I envisioned as the approach Darnell takes in this excerpt from St Cybi’s Well:
As he crossed the earthen ditch which surrounded the stones some 20 meters out, following the usual paved walking path, he noticed that the shaping of the sound somehow changed. Perhaps it was the mass of bodies crowding in around the stones. But it seemed less to be coming from one particular place, and more like it was just coming up from the ground all around him. Then he stepped off the path, and onto the grass, and he could feel the sound more than hear it. It strummed through his heels, up his legs, vibrations caressing his entire body. It was the springiness, the resonance, which he had felt at St David’s, but infinitely stronger.
Stronger, and shared. Shared, he knew, by every person who walked this ground. By every person who had ever walked this ground. It was as though the earth itself were a drum, and this the taut, shimmering skin which they skittered across.
Slowly he made his way into the circle, almost in a daze. Others moved past and around him, making contact, sharing a smile, a laugh, tears. He had never before been this close to the stones, had never come on those rare occasions when the site was open this way. They seemed impossibly tall, impossibly old. He stepped past the first great upright before him, then paused, and gingerly reached out to touch it. Cold stone, rough weathered, aged lichens. A woman standing next to him had her eyes closed, the palms of her hands also on the stone, and for a moment he felt her mind there, the contact of lovers sharing a glimpse of the eternal. It caught his breath, he stepped back, turned in slight embarrassment and stepped further into the circle. Further into the crowd.
Now the press of people was greater. There were people everywhere, holding hands, praying, chanting, caressing. They were on the fallen stones, pressed up against the standing sarsens, moving. He felt himself drawn further in, pulled in by the sound vibrations filling the space, which became deeper and stronger with every step. He passed the inner sarsen, stood there in the inner circle, the sanctum sanctorum, the Garbha griha, the sacred center of everything.
Around one of the fallen stones there in the center was a space, an opening in the crowd. Everyone peered in, watching a woman in white robes. She was kneeling beside the stone, but not in prayer. Kneeling so that she was at the proper height to reach out and strike the great stone. To strike it with stone-headed mallets. And with each strike, the stone gave a deep, resounding gonging which echoed from the earth, then spread out from the center to touch everything and everyone in a growing, encompassing spiral.
For the third time that day he felt himself grow woozy, felt the world spin. He reached out a hand to steady himself, looking for another person, or another stone, for stability. And he touched one of the blue stones, one of the much smaller uprights which had come from Wales. From Craig Rhosyfelin. It was warm to the touch. Warm, and welcoming.
As if that experience wasn’t enough for one day, we also went to Avebury, *another* World Heritage Site:
Yeah, they really are that big.
Yeah, really.
I’m not kidding.
Seriously.
And in addition to the old stones, they have a somewhat newer church there:
Though it’s still old by our standards:
And while that wasn’t yet the end of the day, it was the end of our trip outside of Wales.
Next: the third World Heritage Site in one day. Can you guess what it will be?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Book Conservation, Humor, University of Missouri | Tags: blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, humor, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Marsilii Ficini Florentini, MU, printing, University of Missouri
I’m currently working on a two-volume set of a 1641 book, and noticed something interesting which I thought I’d share.
It’s fairly common to find minor errors in page numeration in books from this time period, and normally I don’t pay them much attention. They’re usually just a transposed number or something simple like that, a simple error made by a type-setter in a hurry or suffering from a hangover. But when I have to take a book apart for resewing (and usually other minor repairs to allow that), I try to be careful to make sure that I am putting them back together in the proper order, and that means checking and double-checking the order of the signatures.
A printing convention from this time period was to note the sequence of each section with an alphabet code at the bottom of the printed pages. The first section would be “A”, the second “B” and so forth. Then they’d go from “Z” to “AA” (or sometimes “Aa”) for as many cycles through the alphabet as necessary. This made it easy to make sure that the sections were in order when a bookbinder got involved, since oftentimes several different printers would be involved in the creation of a book, each one responsible for producing a set number of different sections (say section A through section FF, with another printer doing GG through CCC, etc).
Anyway, take a look at these two images:
Sections ZZz and AAaa
And:
The back page of ZZz and the front page of AAaa.
Note the page numbers jump from 828 on the back of ZZz to 889 on the front page of AAaa.
Now, look at these two images from the second volume of the book:
Sections Zzz and AAaa.
And:
Back page of Zzz on top of the front of AAaa.
Note the page numbers jump from 816 on the back of Zzz to 807 on the front page of AAaa.
There are other minor errors in the printing (which I’ve noted, since the book is in Latin I can’t speak to the text), but it is very interesting to find this kind of numeration problem at exactly the same break in sections in both books. I certainly can’t prove it, but my guess is that two different printers had the responsibility for the sections leading up to ZZz/Zzz and those starting with AAaa, and someone screwed up in telling them what the proper numbering was supposed to be for the pages they were to do.
Kinda fun, eh?
Have a good Easter weekend.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, General Musings, Health, New Horizons, Science, Survival, tech | Tags: atherosclerosis, birthday, blogging, echocardiography, electrocardiography, health, heart attack, jim downey, luck, masculinity, miracles, myocardial infarction, science, Science Fiction, stent, technology, Wikipedia
A year ago yesterday, I met my cardiologist for the first time. After looking over the results of my stress echo-cardiogram and discussing what it possibly meant with me, he said that I needed to have a cardiac cath procedure sooner rather than later. Since he’s one of the premier heart surgeons in the mid-west, and always in demand, I expected that this meant I’d get put on a waiting list and have it done sometime in the next month or so when there was an opening in his schedule.
I nodded. “OK, when?”
He looked down at my chart, then back at me. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Good thing I don’t panic easily.
* * *
Well, as I recounted a few days later, the procedure went smoothly, though longer than usual, with the end result that I had a couple of stents placed to correct a congenital heart defect. It took a while for all the ramifications of what I had lived with, and what it meant to have it corrected, to really sink in. Part of that was coming to full understanding of just how close to death I had come, because even the slightest amount of atherosclerosis, even the tiniest little blood clot, would have triggered a massive heart attack.
But now it’s been a year. I saw the cardiologist several times over that year, most recently a few weeks ago. And, basically, I’m now past it all. I’m no longer taking any blood thinners, I don’t need to take any real precautions, I only need to check in with the cardiologist once a year or if I notice a problem. If I’m smart, I’ll continue to get regular exercise (I now walk three miles each morning, and get in plenty of additional exercise doing yard work and such) and be a little careful about my diet, but those are things which any man my age should probably do.
So, basically, today’s the first anniversary of my rebirth.
And it feels good.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Book Conservation, General Musings, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, humor, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, philosophy, writing
- a state of equilibrium
I recently started conservation work on a late 19th century Japanese book, and the 5-flap enclosure which protected it. The joints on the enclosure needed to be redone — a fairly simple but time consuming process — and the cloth covering of it had been badly faded. Take a look for yourself:
Yes, there are only four panels shown. The fifth is covered in paper inside and out, and so didn’t need redyeing except along the edges.
I like how the small rectangle on the top of the right panel isn’t faded; that’s where a label had been affixed.
The standard repair for this problem is to redye the panels back to the original color, then resize them (apply a coating of thinned-down adhesive for protection). Here are the same panels after redyeing:
Big difference, eh?
Now look at this next image, taken from a different position the next day:
Note how three of the four are noticeably bowed. That’s because the sizing I had applied yesterday had finally dried completely. The reason you resize cloth boards is because it serves as a sealant for the dye, and it also strengthens and protects the fibers in the cloth, making them less prone to abrasion or picking up dirt or oils from handling.
But this bowing can happen, particularly on old covers, due to the sizing causing a minor amount of shrinkage as it consolidates the fibers in the cloth. That puts more tension on the board, and causes this bowing. Scary, eh? Have I just ruined a rare book?!?!
Nah — like I said, this can happen, and I have seen it countless times. It’s absolutely nothing to worry about. All I have to do is just apply the same sizing to the other side of the boards, which are covered in paper. Because the fibers in the paper will behave in exactly the same way as the fibers in the cloth on this side. Chances are, just a single application will restore the balance of tension, and the boards will return to a perfectly flat state. There’s a small chance that I may need to do a second application of sizing to get the balance just right, but that isn’t usually required.
Like many things, just knowing what to expect, and understanding what it means, gives you the necessary perspective to not panic when something seemingly goes wrong on first glance. And as a friend noted when I shared this on Facebook, it’s also a good lesson in how you need to maintain balance in life.
Jim Downey
*Equipoise was also the title of the first novel I wrote, back in college. It’s stuck in a box up in the attic somewhere, I think. I probably should just find it and use it as fire-starting material, but you know how it is: gotta maintain balance, even with the past.
Filed under: Book Conservation, General Musings, Humor | Tags: blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, cannabis, humor, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Wikipedia
I find all kinds of things in family bibles and similar heirloom books & albums. Photographs. Locks of hair. Newspaper clippings. Flowers. It’s all stuff someone wanted to keep safe, so when I come across it, I set it aside and give it to the client, recommend that if they want to keep it, to do so somewhere other than stuck in the book (because it causes problems for both the binding and the paper).
I’ve seen all kinds of stuff over the years. But this was a new one today:
I checked with the client, who was quite surprised to hear that it was in there. They decided that they didn’t need to keep it as part of the family history.
Does make you wonder, though, what the story is behind it. Hmm.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Publishing, tech, University of Missouri | Tags: 1493, art, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Germany, jim downey, Kozo, leather, Legacy Bookbindery, Liber chronicarum, marbled paper, Nuremberg Chronicle, technology, University of Missouri, Wikipedia
I’ve had the pleasure to work on a number of very significant items from public and private collections. Here’s the most recent one:
That’s the Liber chronicarum, also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, one of the most significant books in the history of printing. There’s a good basic description of why the book is important in the Wikipedia article, but suffice it to say that it was one of the first really successful integrations of both illustrations and type, and so a big step in printing technology. Here’s a good idea of what the illustrations look like:
This copy of the Liber chronicarum belongs to the University of Missouri system, and needed a little help, as you can see in these images:
Basically, the current binding, as nice as it is, was breaking along the hinge of the front cover. The rear cover was also showing signs of similar aging. This is a very common problem, particularly in large & heavy books. And my estimate is that the binding was probably 100+ years old, so showing a bit of age is understandable.
Typically, there are two basic repair options for dealing with such a problem. The first is to reinforce the hinge inside and out with Kozo dyed to match the leather. This is minimally invasive to the original binding. It’s a good repair for smaller books, but it doesn’t have a great deal of strength, and if a book is very heavy or is going to get a lot of use, doesn’t hold up as well as you would like. And to do it properly on this binding, it would have covered over a significant amount of the nice gold tooling.
The second common repair strategy is to “reback” the book in new leather. This includes removing the original spine, completely rebuilding the liners & hinges, putting new leather on the spine and then remounting the original spine onto the new structure. It’s a strong repair and works well, but tends to be much more time consuming and apparent than the Kozo repair, changing the visual character of the book more.
After discussing the matter with the folks at MU Special Collections, we decided that I would attempt to do a Kozo repair, but one which had elements of the how the leather rebacking is normally done. This was something of an experiment, as is often the case in doing conservation work; you almost always have to blend techniques to meet the specific problems and needs of the item being treated.
I selected a very heavy Kozo paper and dyed it to match the leather. Then I carefully lifted up the leather along the spine, just enough to insert about a half inch of Kozo. Here’s how that looked:
Note that the pieces of Kozo are only between the heavy bands — those bands are part of the sewing structure, and I didn’t want to impinge on how it worked mechanically.
Then I lifted up the leather along the edge of the front cover, pasted out the length of the exposed interior, and brought the two together, inserting the Kozo tabs under the leather. Once that was all positioned, I wrapped it in wide elastic bands and added weight all along the joint:
Then I left it alone overnight to allow the adhesive to set properly. Leaving it alone is always the hardest part of this process, but you have to trust that you did it right, because if you try and look before the adhesive sets, it’s probable that you’ll cause the joint to be out of position.
Here’s what I found the next day:
That’s a nearly perfect joint. I was very pleased.
But I wasn’t finished yet. Now that the cover was properly aligned and partially attached, I needed to strengthen the joint from the inside of the cover.
I opened the book and removed the detached marbled endpaper:
Previously I had carefully used lifting knives to get under the cloth joint cover and lift up the marbled paste-down:
Now I peeled further back the marbled paste-down on the front cover, and applied a wide band of heavy undyed Kozo to function as an internal hinge:
Then I put fresh adhesive on the exposed paste-down marbled paper and put it back into position, thereby securing the joint:
Then I remounted the marbled endpaper with a narrow strip of Kozo on the back:
Lastly, I put down a narrow strip of dyed Kozo on the outside of the cover to mask the broken joint and protect it. This was largely cosmetic, but helped to give the book a finished appearance. After an application of leather preservative and a bit of buffing, the book was finished:
It’s a good repair. Eventually, the book will need to be rebacked in leather properly, but for now we’ve been able to stabilize the book and again make it available for classes and researchers at the University of Missouri.
What a fun project. I really do love doing what I do for a living, and I realize just how lucky I am to be able to say that.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 