#rbsc

These images represent an extra large oversize book from our Rare Books and Special Collections department. An enclosure was made of corrugated cardboard, which is acid free and buffered, to protect it from environmental changes, dust, light exposure, and handling among other things. The book now lives in its own protective microclimate which reduces degradation of the cover and pages over time.

Following her attendance at an AIC workshop, in May 2022, led by Alessandro Scola—Senior Book  Conservator at Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University—our former Gladys Brooks Conservation Fellow, Maren Rozumalski, conducted a cradle-making training session here at our lab, based on what she had learned about Mr. Scola’s system of fashioning modular and reusable cradles. She left us with an excellent set of instructions, templates, and tools afterward.

In the Fall of 2022, we built up a ‘fleet’ of bases of different sizes and display angles. For the recently mounted Hesburgh Libraries, Rare Books & Special Collections Spring 2023 exhibit on Irish Book Arts, we began using the new cradles for the first time. The cradles are made using lightweight and pliable PETG plastic. We have been pleasantly surprised by their overall sturdiness and the variety of book sizes and formats that they can support.

Not only will the reusable bases save us production time in preparing for future exhibits, having at least half of the structure already made each time we begin to construct a cradle will mean using less plastic for the one-time use custom pieces that will be necessary, which will have a positive impact on our budget and also the environment since there will be less plastic discarded per exhibit.

On October 13, our department visited Hook Pottery Paper and Turkeyfoot Farm in Laporte, Indiana. The paper and pottery and studios are run by Andrea Peterson and her husband Jon Hook, and their son Ry Hook oversees Turkeyfoot Farm. Andrea Peterson is a renown papermaker who specializes in producing handmade papers from locally sourced fibers and dyes. Recently, Andrea published In the Field, which is a handbook for harvesting, processing, and making papers from natural fibers, such as daylily, hay, wheatstraw, and denim from local farmers. In addition to these papers, Andrea makes a highly textured style of binder’s board reminiscent of lumpy, irregular pasteboards commonly used by binders prior to the 19th century. Likewise, Andrea has a line of durable (and colorful) heavier weight papers that we are interested in for limp paper-case bindings. It was fascinating to see how Andrea’s innovative use of natural fibers is contributing to the field of papermaking (pun intended).  

In addition to touring Andrea’s papermaking studio, her son Ry Hook showed us around Turkeyfoot Farm, where he cultivates a variety of greens, livestock, and eggs for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and local restaurants. Ry discussed how he has been able to use regenerative farming techniques to improve the productivity of the farm while keeping its footprint small, both physically and environmentally. 

Jon Hook’s beautiful pottery is wood-fired using glazes formed from plants on Turkeyfoot Farm, such as thistle. The wood used to fire the pottery kiln comes from fallen trees on the farm and off-cuts from their on-site wood mill. Jon supplements the wood during firing with an ingenious oil-drip system that recycles used fry oil from local restaurants.  Visit the farm yourself next weekend! Hook Pottery Paper and Turkeyfoot Farm are having their annual Fall Open House November 11 - 13, 2022, with demonstrations of papermaking, fiber processing, farm tours, and ash glaze-making. Jon’s pottery, Andrea’s paper, and delectable produce from Ry’s farm will all be for sale in addition to soaps, jams, and art!

Andrea's papermaking studio, showing her hydraulic press, wove paper molds, and felts.

A selection of Andrea's papers made from natural fibers.

Jon Hook (left) and Andrea Peterson (right) discuss a pulp-painting, which is made from pigmented paper fibers added to the sheet during its formation.

Some of Jon's beautifully glazed wares.

Jon's studio with unfired vessels on the shelf.

Ry Hook inside one of his greenhouses.

There are few literary works with a presence as prolific as Dante’s Divine Comedy. This three part narrative poem took twelve years to compose and was completed a year before Dante’s death in 1320. This coming fall Notre Dame celebrates Dante’s work with the exhibit Bound up with Love… The extraordinary legacy of Father John Zahm’s Dante Collection. As part of our work to stabilize and mount approximately 30 rare volumes for this exhibit, curator Tracy Bergstrom approached us with a desire to identify the composition of the media comprising the remarkable hand colored images in our 1868 edition of Dante's Commedia in order to better understand the history and production of this volume.

The Divine Comedy narrates the path of the soul after death and follows Dante through the Inferno or Hell, Purgatorio, and Paradisio. The masterful language conjures a robust field of imagery, captivating the reader with scenes so intricate that they can only be described as real or they, at the very least, feel as though they are.

Given its literary imagery, it’s no surprise that The Divine Comedy has been an inspiration to artists since its creation. The Hesburgh Libraries holds thousands of editions of the poem, many of which are illustrated. The 1868 edition of Commedia is one of several copies held by the Hesburgh Libraries of the first printed edition of illustrations by the French artist, Gustave Doré. Doré’s prints for the Comedy are nearly as ubiquitous as the work itself, but our edition is unique in the way it was treated after printing. The prints in this copy are hand colored, but instead of watercolor or similar wet media more commonly used for this purpose, these prints have been colored using dry media including pastel, graphite, and colored pencil. It is more difficult to achieve detailed application of color with dry media than paints. Friction is required to deposit color from a pencil or crayon, whereas only a light stroke or tap of a very fine paint brush is needed to apply watercolor to a surface. Given the extreme detail of Doré’s engraved lines, coloring with this media was an unexpected find, and to date no other copies of this edition are known to have been colored in this manner.

Colored pencil has a waxy surface sheen distinct from other wax based media, which makes it easy to identify. It was first invented in the late 19th century, but was not accepted as an artist's medium until the early 20th, when Faber-Castell (manufacturer) produced an expanded range of colors marketed to artists.1 This Doré Dante was published in 1868-69, but this would suggest the coloring did not occur until much later.

The application of color is interesting as well. Pencil is designed to produce sharp detailed lines, but is less effective for shading large areas with uniform color. We see in this detail of the grass, in the lower portion of the image, how the tone has been built up with a layered application of multiple colors including yellow, green, blue, and orange glazed across the black and white print. The strokes appear loose and vigorous as they intertwine with the lines of the print.

We don’t have any information on who may have hand-colored this work, whether it was a commissioned artist, or possibly an earlier owner with artistic skill, but clearly it was someone with determination who vividly rendered the majority of the illustrations in this work. Visit RBSC to view this Commedia and other works by Dante and his contemporaries during the upcoming fall exhibit.

1 Crist, A. http://29aqcgc1xnh17fykn459grmc-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/anagpic-student-papers/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2020/04/2006ANAGPIC_Crist.pdf

Lots of time indoors over the long COVID winter in your respective 'pods' may have caused you to rediscover how much fun board games can be (in their analog or virtual forms). Meanwhile, our Notre Dame Preservation work pod treated and found ways to more securely house a collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century board games from our Rare Books & Special Collections Department.