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From Heritage New Zealand, Winter 2008

Tome is Where The Art Is

by Paul Little

Hidden away around the country are a great number of old books of quality, many the worse for wear. Restorer Paul Taylor is here to help

Paul Taylor at work Photo: Steve King

The need to conserve and transmit our hard-won human wisdom is as old as rock art. About the time the first book, in the sense we use the word today, was made, the first book
owner dog-eared a page, made a note in the margin, left it open, upside down in direct sunlight with its spine splayed, and spilt coffee on it. The craft of the book restorer, therefore, has been in demand for almost as long as we have had books themselves.

And it’s not only human carelessness that does harm to volumes over the long term but also factors outside human control, such as climate, and knowledge of the materials used in making the book and how they will endure. It is Paul Taylor’s mission in life to extend the life of books.

“I call myself a book and archive conservator,” says Taylor. “I conserve bound items, manuscripts, paper items, documents, things like that.”

His Spiral Path Books Studio is housed in the Lake House Arts Centre in Auckland’s Takapuna. Among his clients, Taylor can count the NZHPT. At the request of property manager Cheryl Laurie he has done an audit of the volumes in Highwic and repaired two bibles from the house.

“Both had damaged bindings. The spine and front board of one volume were detached so I re-attached the board and added a new leather spine and then re-mounted the original leather (a technique called re-backing). One had a loose board and needed a new leather strip down the front joint, and the inside joints were repaired with Japanese tissue. We are also going to make some archival boxes for them.”

Techniques and tools of book binding craft range from those that have been around for centuries to present day innovations Photos: Steve King

Assessing collections is part of Taylor’s job. He made some recommendations about other volumes at Highwic and has recently “been at the [Auckland War Memorial] museum looking at the John Logan Campbell collection. That’s a really important collection and some of that needs quite a lot of work”.

Taylor, who moved here from the UK in January 2004, knows his stuff. He has been working in book restoration for 24 years, has a diploma in book and archive conservation from the Colchester Institute, is accredited by the Institute of Conservation in the UK and is also a full member of the New Zealand Conservators of Cultural Materials organisation.

In the UK, he has worked at the National Archives at Kew, John Rylands Library and Canterbury Cathedral Archives. He began work here as preservation manager for Auckland City Libraries. A delight of the Auckland job was the many treasures in the George Grey Collection – “It is fantastic to have a first folio Shakespeare, when there are only a couple of hundred in the world and there is a huge manuscript collection.”

Taylor, with wife and partner Terry Bowden, who looks after the financial and organisational side of things, says the pair had “got to the point where we fancied a change”. They had not been to New Zealand before but “thought we would see what happened”. To the suggestion that being able to forge a path in book restoration in New Zealand was a bit of a long shot, Taylor retorts that “It works the other way too - there are only about four book conservators in New Zealand.”

He stayed with Auckland City Libraries for three years, before going out on his own in 2007.

“It was a good move,” he says. “Not that I didn’t enjoy working at the library. It was fantastic. But actually being able to have our own business works well for me. We get a whole range of things from individuals, booksellers and some institutions as well.

“I do quite a lot of work for some of the big institutions, like the museum, the city library, the archives. And some of those items are very old and very important. It is key that they are preserved - not only the information inside them, but the actual objects themselves. The Auckland City Library, for instance, has a lot of mediaeval items, and those structures are unique.So, it is important that those structures are preserved.”

Photo: Steve King

Bibles are part of the product mix, with people bringing in their family heirlooms for repair. On his work table, Taylor displays a large, heavy and extremely tattered volume from Highwic as typical of the state family Bibles end up in. He has a pair of boards from an identical Bible that were brought in, coincidentally, by someone who wondered if they could be used on something else.

“A lot of individuals bring those items in because they contain information about their history, their past, and they belonged to previous generations, so that’s a continuation of the object and the information. We get quite a lot of Bibles, and a lot have a great deal of information in them. Often we digitise those pages so they can send that information to other members of the family. Then we do repair work on the book.”

Taylor says among the most interesting books he has had walk in off the street, as it were, were not publications but “a couple of exercise books that were the diary of someone who was a Polish lady in a Nazi war camp. I’ve also had quite a number of old books, a couple from the 16th century –a copy of the ‘Breeches Bible’.” The original dates from about 1590 and this was from 1610.

The “Breeches Bible” is an edition of the good book in which Adam and Eve are described as making “breeches” to cover their nakedness on their way out of the Garden of Eden. Previous editions had referred to them making and wearing “aprons”.

“We get a whole range of things,” says Taylor, not just books, but “maps, and plans and artworks sometimes, too.”

Most people think of a book as a book as a book, but, of course, there are the boards, different kinds of paper, inks and other elements that go into the construction of a volume. Likewise, book restoration has many parts and Taylor can build up quite a head of steam listing the different aspects to his work.
“It’s a real blend of craft skills, science and aesthetics,” he says. “We’re looking at multi-materials in these items. Take the different types of paper, for instance. The early books are all on handmade paper, which is cotton. Then, from around 1850, you get wood pulp being introduced, and you get poor quality papers containing a lot of acidity. They are quite different to deal with than the handmade papers.

“The actual styles of binding vary considerably – there are stationary bindings, vellum bindings, flexible bindings. And the way they are put together - the sewing styles are completely different. Then you have the materials – different types of leather from early pigskins, deer skin in mediaeval times, goat skins, calf skins, different types of cloths and vellum.

“And the treatments we use vary, as well. We can wash paper, deacidify it, resize it, remove stains. You have to know quite a lot about chemistry too. A trained conservator uses all those skills to make decisions about what treatments to carry out on an item.”

There’s a customer-relations component too. In particular, the conservator might need to help the customer understand what can and cannot be done with their treasure.

“We focus on the object rather than what someone might want us to do with it,” says Taylor. “If you don’t know what the options are [for conserving a book] you can’t make a decision. People come to us often and ask for advice about what they should do. If someone comes to me with a mediaeval book and wants [an inappropriate restoration] we say, no, we won’t do that, because it will have serious implications for the integrity of that item as an historic object. A lot of the job is making decisions about what not to do and giving people information
about what can be done. There’s an educational component to the job as well.”

Then there are those volumes brought to him in a sorry statebecause in years gone by – or perhaps not so long ago as that – the pretty pictures have caught someone’s eye and been cut out and pinned to a wall for their decorative qualities, leaving a sadly eviscerated tome to be salvaged as best it can be.
“Once something has gone, you can’t replace it. But we can repair it – we can put in a new piece of paper. And all the treatments we carry out as conservators have to be reversible and use archival quality materials.”

It is important that any procedures undertaken can be reversed later because “we need to know that what we’re doing to that item isn’t going to affect the original materials. The adhesives and materials we use have to be of archival quality because in the future someone may decide there is a better way to do that repair, and it has to be able to be taken apart. Most of the repair work I do on paper is done using starch paste – that can be damped down and tissues can be removed very easily. There’s a whole code of international ethics that governs conservators that we have to adhere to.”

Although Taylor has been pleasantly surprised at the number and quality of challenging and significant volumes he has been able to get his hands on here in New Zealand, other parts of the job have not been so straightforward. Sourcing those archival quality materials, for instance, can be a problem.

“There’s very little material produced in New Zealand for this work. All the leathers I use I import from the UK – goatskins, calf skins, vellum, sheep skins. The only leathers you can get hold of in New Zealand are upholstery or clothing leathers. A lot of the handmade papers also come from the UK or Ireland. That does affect the cost: starting off with materials that are imported, then you’ve got the work on the item which can take a long time. And it is very labourintensive.”

Which is not to say that the job is all concocting inks from bird innards and working by candlelight to spare the paper. Technology and human ingenuity are changing the book restorer’s job as new ways are found to perform old processes; which means more things can be saved than could be hoped for in the past.

“There is a whole area of research into conservation techniques, including inks, papers and repair techniques. One of the current issues is looking at iron gall inks, which were used from mediaeval times and are still used today. They are made from oak galls and cuprous oxide with a few coloured bits and pieces thrown in, depending on what recipe you use. It’s a very stable ink, but it’s very acidic. Over time, the acids in the ink can eat through the paper. It can change colour, too, to very dark black or different degrees of brown.

“It was discovered recently that any moisture content added to the paper disperses the acidity from the inks throughout the paper, so some treatments that would have been carried out in the past with water soluble pastes are not being done any more.
“People are looking at ways of treating inks to remove the acidity before we can do any other treatment. There’s a number of treatments that have been devised using various chemical processes to capture the acidity and remove it. That’s ongoing research, as a lot of documents were made with iron gall ink.”

Taylor enjoys passing his knowledge on. As well as the restoration work, he runs practical bookbinding training courses, from an introductory course to leather binding work. He also makes the most of new equipment that is also being
designed to help conservators do a better job, such as vacuum tables to hold items. But there is no shortage of old style tools in Taylor’s studio – many of them exactly what craftsmen would have been usingcenturies ago.

“All the book binding equipment I have is traditional binding equipment, like the finishing presses and laying presses. All the brass tools for gold finishing are traditional implements. All the main binding tools are based on traditional ones and haven’t changed in 500 years.”

In his down time, Taylor relaxes by making ... books. “This year the first international bookbinding competition is being held. So far, 350 people have entered it and a special book has been printed for it. The theme of the book is water and it contains poems and prints by various artists in lots of European language. I’m entering a book. That’s got to be in by November, and will be judged in January.”

Taylor is not sure what he’s going to do for his entry, but you can be sure it will exemplify the best of traditional bookbinding techniques as well as all the contemporary skill that can be brought to bear.