rebacking – Conservation & Collections Care blog

We haven’t finished talking about him… Henry VIII’s book is on the bench for some treatment

Henry VIII of England continues to attract attention. This time it is not about one of his many wives but about a book he wrote, the very book which granted him the title of Defender of the Faith, a title still assigned to British Sovereigns today. Henry VIII was a highly educated man and in the years before he turned against the Pope and the Church of Rome, he wrote a treatise called The Defence of the Seven Sacraments against Luther. The book is a theological treatise, dedicated to Pope Leo X, defending the Catholic Church against Martin Luther’s attack on Indulgences, and was printed in London in 1521.

The Fitzwilliam Museum’s copy

The Fitzwilliam Museum’s copy of the book is one of 27 copies that were sent to Rome by Henry to be distributed among the Cardinals of the Church after approbation by the Pope¹. As we are currently working towards an exhibition on Money, Image, and Power in Tudor and Stuart England (spring 2019), the book was brought up to the conservation studio, and this is when the exciting detective work started. In fact, the book has a number of interesting physical features which I tried to unravel, helped by my curatorial and conservation colleagues Suzanne Reynolds and Edward Cheese, in order to choose the most appropriate conservation treatment and extract as much information as possible about its history.

The authentic features

I was able to validate several authentic features of our copy, the large signature of Henry VIII at the beginning and end of the text being the most obvious evidence. The sixteenth-century full leather binding is blind-stamped with the Royal arms and the Tudor rose in a double panel. These stamps are attributed to the London binder John Reynes² and prove the authenticity of the binding. The title page is decorated with an elaborate woodcut border designed by Hans Holbein (1497-1543) which has been recorded by Gordon as part of the original features of the first edition of the treatise³.

Other features

Other features bear witness of the life of this copy and tell us about its owners, its condition and its uses.

Signs on the binding

The front board shows an inscription that has been scratched in the leather. We can read REX ANGLIAE IN LVTH meaning “The King of England against Luther”. The foredge has been inscribed with the title, along with an intriguing sign. This symbol is hard to identify and we came up with two suggestions of what it could be: a cross-bearing orb or a pomegranate. Please get in touch if you have seen this sign used on other books – there are possible links to Queen Catherine of Aragon.

Inside the book

The pages have been numbered by hand, and the running titles have also been added by hand by a reader comfortable with the Latin of the text, using an elegant humanistic script. This reader also annotated the text extensively.

The front pastedown

A nineteenth-century manuscript note on paper is adhered to the front pastedown. It is signed by Samuel Woodburn (1780/5-1853, art dealer and expert on Old Master Drawings) who explains that he bought the book from Signor Romanis at Rome in 1818. Napoleon’s invasion of Rome (1798) had a powerful impact on the Vatican Library as well as its manuscripts. Book dealers coming from England and other countries followed the army and acquired many books and illuminated cuttings. If Samuel Woodburn’s note is true, the book was purchased by Signor Romanis when several of the books belonging to the late Pope were sold by order of the French Army.

Remains of a former reback

One final feature. When removing the existing leather spine repair, blind-tooled brown leather remains were found underneath the original leather along the joints, suggesting a former reback. The patterns that are still visible indicate that the leather came from a fairly large late fifteenth – or early sixteenth-century binding with a central panel of triple-lined lozenges framed by foliate ornaments. The stamp used for these ornaments and the style of the layout is very similar to one recorded by Basil Oldham in English Blind-Stamped Bindings⁴, confirming the date of the re-used leather.

Features identified in Basil J. Oldham’s book

Conservation treatment

Let’s get on with some conservation treatment now!

The book was in fairly poor condition. It had been rebacked at least twice and the last reback was creating tensions to the book. Boards were distorted, corners were worn, the front endleaves were detaching, the large strip of glassine paper supposed to support the title page was falling off and the pages were dirty and torn around the edges. There was definitely room for improvement!

Here are the illustrated stages of the conservation treatment:

Removing the current reback, removing the thick layer of hard animal glue from the spine, and reinforcing the sewing with Japanese paper linings in the panels and linen braids over the sewing supports.

The glassine paper was removed mechanically.

Tears were repaired and losses filled with toned Western and Japanese papers.

Corners were reinforced and reconstructed. They were then covered with toned archival leather.

The waste parchment guard hooked around the front endpapers was cleaned so that the thirteenth-century manuscript writing could be revealed.

Margins were cleaned with a smoke-sponge. New back-bead endbands were sewn to reinforce the sewing. The detached leaves were guarded with Japanese paper strips and sewn back on to the textblock over the extended sewing supports using linen thread.

Boards were re-attached using the extended sewing supports. Finally, the book was rebacked with toned archival leather and housed in a bespoke drop-spine box.

Thanks to this collaborative detective work and the conservation treatment that followed, the book is now stable and well documented, available to researchers and ready to go on display!

Special thanks to Assistant Keeper Suzanne Reynolds for all her help in untangling the many mysteries of the book and bringing academic support to the project.

The challenges of use and display

Books in a museum context have the particular challenge of being objects of study as well as objects of display. The beautifully decorated leather bindings which make the Founder’s Library such a grand historic interior also hold contents of great interest and therefore serve several purposes, both decorative and functional.

To commemorate the 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare, a small exhibition was put together last year at the Fitzwilliam Museum: ‘All the world’s a stage’: Shakespeare in Publication and Performance. Two of the books chosen¹ to be displayed had loose or detached boards as well as worn corners and endcaps which would have affected their display. After consultation between the curator and the conservators, we decided to undertake conservation treatment firstly for the books to be displayed safely and look cared for but also, in a much bigger scale, to restore their flexibility and allow them to be consultated safely by readers.

Both books are second impressions of William Shakespeare’s work, printed in 1632. They are now in an early 19th century binding. The beautifully decorated bindings were covering a poorly made structure as some 19th century practices are known to put more importance into the aesthetic of the book rather than its mechanical function. The ’Russia calf’ leather used for the covering of the binding had become brittle over time due to its acidic nature. Joints are usually the first area to break down as they are subject to a lot of stress.

We had two weeks prior to the exhibition to restore and even improve the accessibility of the content of the books by re-attaching the loose boards in a flexible and durable way. Re-attaching boards can be done in many ways and these books provide a good example of two different techniques we use.

The possibility to lift the gilded spine or not usually determines which technique we will use. If the spine is fairly easy to lift without falling into pieces, we will go for a re-back², otherwise, we will reduce the lifting to a minimum and insert small strips of cloth underneath patches of leather. For the first book, the spine could be lifted so we decided to do a re-back.

18-1-g-14-t-4-2 — Cleaning the spine after lifting the original leather

After lifting the leather spine from the book and cleaning the spine from residues of old brittle glue, a wide strip of aerolinen³ was adhered to the spine. The aerolinen was then stuck with paste and EVA⁴ in the previously split boards in order to re-attach them to the text-block.

18-1-g-14-t-12-2 — Lifting the leather along the joints with a knife

18-1-g-14-t-17-2 — Adhere a hollow on the spine

The leather on the boards was lifted away along the spine edge and trimmed along the gold- tooled line. A hollow back⁵ made of Heritage Archival pHotokraft paper was adhered onto the spine and the book was re-backed with new toned leather.

18-1-g-14-t-24-2 — Re-back with new piece of toned leather

The original spine was then re-adhered onto the book and the missing areas on the spine leather were filled with Japanese paper and toned with acrylic paint to match the leather on the spine.

18-1-g-14-t-29-2 — After re-adhering the original leather on the spine

This treatment should be very long-lasting as the joints are now supported with aerolinen and new leather. Endcaps have also been restored in the process of re-backing and the original spine is now well supported.

The second book was quite another story. The leather was too brittle for the whole spine to be lifted away without losing the decoration and the sewing was in good condition which means that the spine didn’t need to be treated. Therefore, the leather was only lifted along the edges of the panels to allow tabs of aerolinen to be adhered to the spine and onto the boards to form a strong but flexible attachment.

img_6717-2 — Aerolinen tabs extending from the joint

When these repairs were dry the original leather was readhered with a mixture of EVA and wheat-starch paste. The joints were then covered by a thin strip of Japanese paper⁶ to prevent slight cracks from developing. Paper repair patches were toned in situ using Golden’s acrylic paints and the whole binding was furbished with two light coats of Renaissance microcrystalline wax

img_6727-2 — Adhering a strip of Japanese paper along the joint

This treatment is very efficient as it is much less time-consuming than a re-back but strong enough to hold the boards to the book when the rest of the binding is in good condition.

Both books have kept their aesthetical value which is extremely important in the context of historic libraries. They will still be able to fulfil their decorative role as well as being accessible and available for researchers and readers.

RECOVERING AND RE-COVERING: Conservation of a fifteenth-century bookbinding

Books are something of an oddity in the context of a museum in that they are not only objects which we want to preserve for their historical significance but also machines which have a mechanical function to carry out every time a reader opens them. No one in his/her right mind would dream of cooking in a medieval pot or wearing a pair of eighteenth-century shoes – i.e. of using either object for its original function – but the medieval and eighteenth-century bindings in a library are expected to work to allow access to the texts they contain. Continued use, combined with the ageing of materials used in the construction of the bindings, eventually leads to boards becoming detached and sewing structures wearing to the point where they can break, so generations of bookbinders have repaired bindings as a large part of their work.
One of the incunabula (that is, books printed before 1500) in the Founder’s Library had been given a new spine in the late nineteenth century in order to reattach the front board. Unfortunately, the poor quality of the leather meant that the repair itself was deteriorating and the front board had become detached again. In addition, the previous repairer had used a large amount of hide glue on the spine of the book which prevented it from flexing. The result of this repair campaign was to give an early printed book a spine which would look much more appropriate on a nineteenth-century book. A large part of the interest of this binding was in what lay hidden beneath the previous repairs. As conservation work progressed, the book started to reveal elements of its making hidden for over a century.

The book as received, showing the original blind-tooled calfskin on the boards.

The book as received, showing the nineteeth-century leather on the spine.

The large amount of hide glue applied to the spine during the previous repair work prevented the book from opening properly. The image shows the maximum opening possible without breaking the spine!

The nineteenth-century paper paste-down on the inside of the front board appeared to be covering a much earlier sheet of parchment, which is just visible at the tail edge.

On close examination at the bench, it soon became apparent that the sewing structure might well be original and that endbands of braided alum-tawed skin, typical of Germanic bindings of this period, may well have survived under the newer leather on the spine. In addition, a narrow line of parchment was just visible, extending beyond the edge of the nineteenth-century paper paste-downs (the sheets of paper pasted to the inner surface of both boards). Depressions in the pastedowns also suggested that the original pattern of the cutting for the foredge corners of the boards (the free corners on the opening edge of the boards) was of the ‘tongue corner’ type rather than the mitred type suggested by the nineteenth-century repair patches. The ‘tidying up’ by the last repairer seemed to be obscuring a great deal of fascinating information.
After discussions with the curators of the collection, we decided that the need for repair provided a good opportunity to examine the structure of the book further and that the nineteenth-century material could be removed, saving annotations on the newer paper endleaves and the labels for future reference. Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century leather on the spine and at the corners of the boards was far too degraded to save and crumbled into powdery flakes during attempts to lift it. However, when the leather and hide glue on the spine had been removed, it was exciting to find that the original sewing structure and the original braided endbands had survived in a surprisingly good state of preservation, so much so that the whole structure could flex in an excellent opening arch as the original binder intended.

The spine cleaned of nineteenth-century leather and hide glue to reveal the intact sewing structure and braided endbands of a well-constructed early printed book.

Further investigation on the insides of both boards revealed that the original parchment board sheets were still in place and, further, that they were made from a recycled manuscript document which appears to have had at least six seals attached to it on parchment tabs in its original form – the slits for the tabs to pass through are clearly visible in the sheet on the back board (see the lower edge of the sheet in the image below).

Slits in the reused parchment on the inside of the back board suggest that the document originally had at least six seals attached with parchment tabs.

With the leaves of the book flexing from the spine-folds once again, it was also easy to see that the centre of each section had been reinforced by the binder with a folded strip of parchment to help prevent the paper leaves from tearing around the sewing holes. The parchment strips are made from manuscript waste too, although it is not yet clear whether they are from the same document as the board sheets.
The approach to repairing the book was to follow binding techniques of the fifteenth century rather than to re-apply inappropriate nineteenth-century methods. The front board was reattached and the attachment of the back board reinforced with linen braids, secured to the original raised bands with helical stitches of linen thread. The ends of the braids were left long so that they could be frayed out and threaded though the boards next to the original sewing supports to form a sturdy attachment. A slotted loose linen spine-liner was also added to prevent the new leather spine from being adhered directly to the backs of the sections and to form new inner joints in the repaired binding. The lining was carefully cut to fit around the endbands, which remain exposed as the original binder intended.

Linen braids and a loose linen spine-liner in place, ready for the reattachment of the front board.

New archival tanned calfskin was toned and pared to blend in with the original leather before being adhered with wheat-starch paste, again leaving the endbands exposed. The book was then put into a finishing press and strong cord was used to hold the leather tight to the spine and raised bands in the traditional manner during drying.

The re-backed book tied up with cord to dry.

The corners of the boards were re-covered with patches of the same leather inserted under the original covering material so that the tongue corners are visible once more. When the new leather was dry, the flanges of the linen spine-liner were adhered to the insides of the boards under the lifted edges of the manuscript waste board sheets, which were in turn pasted back into position.

Following conservation and repair work, this book is in safe condition to be consulted by researchers in the Founder’s Library. The opening is greatly improved and many original features of the binding have been revealed for the first time in over a century, allowing the book to give us many more clues as to its making and provenance.

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