Paper Conservation: Decisions & Compromises

Fig. 4
Museum in London and the prestigious exhibition
of fine medieval art in Brussels in 1880 10 .
This major exhibition included a large number
of medieval manuscripts and incunabula from
all over Europe and proved to have considerable
public appeal. Already in 1860 there was a growing
interest, especially in England, in travelling
to the Continent to see actual medieval relics, a
trend that the development of the railways had
made possible.
On the other hand, the growing interest and
public display of century old books encouraged
the unbinding from their original bindings. For
the 1880 Brussels exhibition a splendid illuminated
book of Hours (the Hennessy Hours) was
unbound and the folio’s presented in movable
wooden frames 11 . The same approach could be
seen in the Bargello Museum in Florence where
the collection of manuscript leaves of the French
antiquarian Francetti Carrand (1821-1899) were put
in 1894 on permanent display in vertical wooden
showcases 12 .
The press took the communication for the exhibitions
in their hands and Travel Guide Books
like the little red Baededeker, Handbook for Travellers
are revealing with great precision which
precious books or documents the new traveller
could see “on show” in the main European libraries,
museums or archives. These institutions
were open to the public, although limited hours
a day or week. A closer look to the continuing
new editions of the Baedeker show how long the
same manuscripts and early printed books stayed
on display, this could be without doubt between
twenty and thirty years, with the opening on
the same page. The example of the Antwerp Museum
Plantin-Moretus is clear, the 1891 edition
of Baedeker is mentioning: Room III. in the center,
miniatures from the tenth to the sixteenth century 13 .
On the first floor of the Museum there were autographs,
incunabula and documents on view in
glass showcases, close to the windows. The showcases
were covered with leather covers to protect
against light (Figure 4). Not all repositories took
these preventives measurements.
For public collections, there was another challenge.
After the Sankt-Gallen (1898) and the Liège
conference (1905) attended by a large group of
European librarians, one of the solutions proposed
to protect original book material was the
making of reproductions 14 . The starting point
was the idea that the original would be handled
less and thus would be better conserved. Photographic
reproduction, it was argued, allowed the
user to view and study a manuscript as much
and for as long as he pleased, without any risk
to the original. In this scope, only facsimiles of
European manuscripts were sent to the St. Louis
World’s Fair in 1904. The travel risks and the
long display period were esteemed to riskfull.
Conclusion
The context and evolution of display of historical
documents in public and private places reveals
a fundamental interest of the custodians for the
protection and the prevention of the artefacts.
In the modern period, the value of libri antiqua
shifted to items with an historical, didactical financial
and artistic value. In this context, books
were from the 19 th century on -without scrutinydismantled,
mounted, restored and rebound
to function in the shifting exhibition contexts.
The ‘progress’ in display entailed occasionally
a dramatic paradox for the physical integrity of
the old document. The history of the display of
an artefact is an important mark in the material
pedigree of a book. In this regard, conservators
-with their trained eyes and minds- can frequently
reveal detailed material marks of those distant
and mostly undocumented displays. In this way
they are privileged observers and keepers of the
unwritten history of a book or document 15 .
ICOM-CC Graphic Documents Working Group Interim Meeting | Vienna 17 – 19 April 2013
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