#insect damage

I don't know which creatures nibbled this datura leaf, but I know the assassin bug was not one of them. It is a small but mighty hunter.

Frass: debris or excrement produced by insects.

This manuscript is part of the José Agusto Escoto collection of Cuban history and literature. The 1574 manuscript in a later binding had extensive beetle damage ​from its previous life in the Caribbean when it arrived at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. There were such copious frass deposits that large sections of the 119 pages were stuck together, so much so that the text could not be read. Karen Walter, senior paper conservation technician, had a lot of work ahead of her.

The manuscript needed to be stabilized for digitization by disbinding, separating the fragile pages, re-attaching the fragments with media, and rehousing in Mylar sleeves.

It was the “separating” part of this task that worried Karen until, during disbinding, she realized that the frass was very brittle. She did a test using a Teflon tool to apply pressure through the paper on top of a small area of frass and was surprised when it crumbled away allowing her to slide a microspatula further between the two pages until it hit the next deposit. In the worst cases, this step was repeated dozens of times.