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Abigail Bainbridge, "Conservation of Books" (Routledge, 2023)
00:32:10
An interview with Abigail Bainbridge and Sonja Schwoll
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- [00:01]
Abigail Bainbridge
So good, so good, so good.
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Sonja Schwoll
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Abigail Bainbridge
There's always something new.
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- [01:28]
Jen Hoyer
Welcome to the New Books Network welcome to the Library Science Channel of New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Abigail Bainbridge and Sonja Schwolle. Abigail Bainbridge is editor of Conservation of books, published in 2023 by Rutledge and Sonja Schwoll is a contributing author. Conservation of Books is the highly anticipated reference work on global book structures and their conservation, offering the first modern, comprehensive overview on this subject. Its 26 chapters cover traditional book structures from around the world, the materials from which they're made, and how they degrade, and how to preserve and conserve them. It also examines the theoretical underpinnings of conservation, what and how to treat and and the ethical, cultural and economic implications of treatment and this book includes technical drawings and photographs to illustrate structures and treatments examined throughout. Abby Bainbridge is a book conservator and director of Bainbridge Conservation, and Sonja Schwoll is the head of Conservation and Treatment Development at the National Archives uk. Abby and Sonya, welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:48]
Abigail Bainbridge
Thanks for having us.
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Sonja Schwoll
Thank you.
- [02:51]
Jen Hoyer
I guess before we dive into talking about the book, I would love if you could each introduce yourselves. Perhaps you could share a little bit about where you grew up and what kind of education path you followed and then what brought you to the work you currently do. Abi, do you want to go first?
- [03:05]
Abigail Bainbridge
Yeah, sure. So I grew up just outside Baltimore, and then I studied printmaking, letterpress printing and a bit of book binding when I was at the Maryland Institute College of Art for my undergrad. And when I was doing that, I met a book conservator who was also a printer and kind of learned that book conservation existed. And then after I graduated, I got a job at Columbia University to sort of try out conservation before I committed to an ma and I liked it. And so I came to the UK to study at West Dean, which is where I met Sonia, because she was my teacher the first year, second year, both years.
- [03:48]
Sonja Schwoll
Both years. I'm actually from Germany. I grew up outside a smaller town next to Frankfurt in West Germany, and then studied art history and history in Berlin. And that was just the time when a lot of materiality came in in art history studies, and that's where I encountered conservation. I also had an interest in books and worked in antiquarian bookshops and as Libra assistant and then decided with the MA in Art History to go into conservation. And that's how I came to England and studied in Campbell College of Arts Book Conservation and trained with a private book conservator here in the country. And then for many years had my own book conservation studio and also worked in the States for two years. And, yeah, this. All this work led me then to the National Archives, where I've been head of Conservation Treatment Development at the National Archives for six years now.
- [04:45]
Jen Hoyer
Fantastic. Thank you. So then, let's talk about this book, Conservation Books. This is really, really an impressive resource, and it has 26 chapters written by 70 conservation experts who are based in 19 countries, not 90, can you imagine? But, Abby, I would love if you could start off by sharing a little bit about how the project came to be and what your hopes and goals were for it.
- [05:16]
Abigail Bainbridge
Well, I think we all wanted there to be a conservation of books book because Routledge had published others for other specialisms and nobody had done the book one. I'm not sure why, except that it was just a hugely daunting prospect. They asked me to review somebody else's book and at the end of the form it said, do you have any book ideas? And I mentioned that someone should do this one. And they said, why can't you do it? And so, yeah, it took me about a year to get a proposal in, just to kind of wrap my head around how to do it and how to structure it and what to cover and what tone to take and everything. But that's how it came about.
- [05:59]
Jen Hoyer
Amazing. Did you imagine it being as big as it is?
- [06:05]
Abigail Bainbridge
I think word count wise, yes. Although I had no idea how many words fit on a page or how many words end up in a book. I think this was around 300,000 for scale, but it was going to need to be this big, if not bigger. I didn't realize it would be this many people. Maybe, but it's definitely not something that even just a few people can cover because there's so many niche areas that we wanted to at least have a mention in there so that it could be comprehensive. So it was always going to be a big project, but it just kind of got bigger.
- [06:43]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, that's impressive. And then, Sonia, you contributed a few sections to the book, including chapters on stationary bindings and on binding repair. I would love if you could share a little bit about how you got involved with the project and if you want to share a little bit more about the sections that you co authored, that would be terrific.
- [07:02]
Sonja Schwoll
Yeah, it was fantastic that I could contribute to two areas like the one chapter of the binding styles, the stationary bindings. And this comes from a long interest of mine in private practice, but also at the National Archives. Stationary bindings is particular binding styles for archival records. And at the National Archives we cover the whole history of this. So myself and two of my team members could use our collection and really represent the development, the historic development of this particular binding style to the full extent, which was amazing to get it represented in this volume. And then I also contributed to the last chapter, which is a lot about decision making. And that again, relates to my work in private practice, but also at the Archives, where while it's very important to understand all the materiality and all the techniques and develop the craft skills, there's a lot of decision making and a lot of methodologies, how you decide what to do to an item or to a volume when you're conserving it, or how much intervention there should happen or could happen. So this chapter is not a how to chapter. It's more like what do you need to consider? And gives you the whole spectrum of almost doing nothing or really doing interventive treatments which are required for particular reasons. And that just represents how these thought processes are then how they're working.
- [08:27]
Abigail Bainbridge
It was a bit of a mean.
- [08:28]
Sonja Schwoll
Chapter to stick to, but I was very lucky. I wrote it with another amazing German book. Conservator and head of a conservation program, Andrea Pataki. And together it was really nice to bring our thinking together.
- [08:41]
Abigail Bainbridge
I think it's a difficult one, the idea of. Because that chapter originally started out as the rebinding chapter, we'd covered all the kind of smaller aspects of treating individual parts of a book, either in the materials or the structures. And then we needed something about when you need to redo the whole thing. And it was really hard to figure out what to say in that one, wasn't it? Because you don't want to be prescriptive or restrictive. And there are just so many options, especially when you consider all the decision making from doing nothing to doing everything. So in the end, doing it through case studies made the most sense.
- [09:20]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, I found those really, really interesting to read the case studies. And I know, I mean, I know we cannot talk about every single part of this book because there's so much and we don't have all 70 contributors here, but I wanted to talk about kind of like big themes that I saw coming through. And as a reader, I felt like there were a couple different roles the book was playing. The first role, which I saw in the first two sections on book structure and book binding materials, is really like that of a reference text. And I'm sure that no text can be totally comprehensive. And there were portions even in these sections where authors said, you know, more work needs to be done here. But it felt like, you know, an attempt at being pretty encyclopedic. And so I would just love to hear from you how you feel this book contributes to the field of scholarship as a reference work for book conservators. And what really sets it apart from any kind of previous attempt at something like this. And what do you hope this will do as a reference work?
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Abigail Bainbridge
I think one of the primary goals was that it just at least survey, if not go into all the details of everything that we could get in one place that's known whether it's already published or not. So that when people look up a topic, they know that it's up to date to 2023, and they know from what the authors have signposted in the text and in the bibliographies, where to go for more information, what's understudied some of those topics. I know I've said it before. There are already entire books on what we squeezed into 3,000 words, some of those chapters. They're the most exhaustive text out there on that subject. And it's all in the same place. So it's not necessarily that everything got an equal word count, because you couldn't, because there might be different amounts to say on everything or that they're equally exhaustive, but that it at least gives the reader a start into what's known, what's not known, where to go for more information, all in one bit. And you have to have those structures covered in order to start talking about repair, because you have to understand what it is that you're repairing before you do anything and decide to do anything.
- [11:46]
Sonja Schwoll
I think this is the really important. For me, that was the important bit for this book. It's just never happened before that we put all this in one place. So I also used to teach at West Dean College and in Camberwell College and the assistant tutor there and there. We never could give one volume to students. Like, there was never a starting point that discussed all that concerns us when we conserve books at that level. So all these chapters get you to a point that you have the right tools and the right levels to then do your own research. So it's not like this is what you use, it's. This is where you start. And then people can go out and. Yeah. Undertake their work.
- [12:24]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, absolutely. And they'll definitely know, like, names to look up, depending on what area, because there's so many experts represented here.
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Abigail Bainbridge
Yeah, names of authors, the names in the bibliographies. I mean, we purposefully made them bibliographies, not works cited. So that there's a list of literature that people should go to. And some of that is really brand new stuff. Some of it is the classic writings for that subject that everybody should know about, even if it's been superseded.
- [12:53]
Sonja Schwoll
It also represents a change in our profession. Like when I trained over 20 years ago, we had a single individuals who were the researchers of the day. And it was kind of expected that one person holds all the knowledge. And this book really shows how it has changed and that we carry it together across age countries. People are from everywhere and any corner. And this really brings it together, what we are as a book conservation profession today.
- [13:20]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I am less familiar with all of the literature on book conservation, but in literature on libraries, we've seen that shift too, I think, where books were written by the expert in the field. And more and more we're recognizing that, like, a lot of people are experts and have different information to share. And it's neat to, I guess, see this book model that I wanted a.
- [13:44]
Abigail Bainbridge
Book to do that too, in the authorship that obviously People who are known for a subject, who have a lot of scholarship in that area should write what they have to say, but that also newer voices get a chance to get out there and have just as much value to add.
- [14:02]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, that's exciting. I guess the second rule that I really saw the book taking was encouraging active debate. And section three of the book, Approaches to Conservation and asks a lot of important questions. I would love if you could talk a little bit about some of the discussions that the authors and contributors are wading into here and how you hope this will further conversations about these issues in the profession.
- [14:34]
Abigail Bainbridge
I think there's just, you know, it's a relatively new profession. Should we mention the Florence Floods? It's like the drinking buzzword. The Florence Floods is like the origin story of book conservation. When the Arno river flooded in Florence and a lot of books were damaged, you could see which structures held up well and which ones didn't. And a lot of conservation lessons were learned. And it was in the aftermath of that that I think we would see the profession solidifying. And there's been a lot of change since then. Conservation labs used to all have a wet room where you would disbind books, regularly, wash the whole thing, rebind, do what we would consider now really interventive treatments that you do, maybe when necessary, but not as a rule. And I think in teaching, I've always wanted to stress that there isn't one rule. There's an ethical framework, a decision making process, stakeholder input that we bring in to figure out for each book what the right thing is. There's a question of who you're saving it for, whether prioritizing some future reader is leaving out a reader in the present who would like to enjoy the book, but it's in such restricted conditions that you can't see it. So, yeah, I mean, all of those things are really thorny issues. And I think the book probably asks more questions than it answers, but the whole thing is having the questions in your mind to answer. And I think it's helpful as well for the librarians and the collectors and the people who aren't conservators who might be reading the book to see what we're grappling with and how we're coming to our treatment decisions, because I'm sure sometimes that's kind of opaque.
- [16:28]
Sonja Schwoll
Yeah. I just wanted to add that there's a huge shift happening in conservation general in the profession, very much influenced also by politics, world events and sustainability questions. And what I encounter counted as a private Conservators often that when you ask to conserve one or two or five books that it's rarely put in the whole context. And it really would help conservators even like no matter if you work on five books or on thousands, what we do in the National Archives, you need to have all these questions asked because otherwise you keep putting resources into something that has no impact, that kind of don't lead. Like if you conserve books, which never will be looked at, or you don't know who will look at them, you might as well not do it. So it really needs a decision making process to prioritize, to allocate value and decide what where you put your resources in.
- [17:27]
Abigail Bainbridge
There's also like increasing awareness of the whiteness of the field, of the way that we're making decisions that affect the interpretation of the collection, things like that that aren't going to be quick fixes. But I'm hoping raising those questions again leads to more discussion.
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- [18:43]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, I really appreciated and Sonia, I think maybe this is what you were referring to, although maybe I'm using the term out of context. There was discussion of the social book and understanding all of the factors of the book and I mean that was a great concept for me to think about in lots of contexts related to books and print materials, the social archive, the understanding the full context in the present and the future.
- [19:19]
Sonja Schwoll
Yeah. And we start more and more asking the questions for who do we conserve? Like the concept of conserving our items forever is kind of subsiding, being changed into thinking about maybe it is for people to use the items also the books and it might perish at some point and you need to make the decision and carry the risk. If there are 20 of the same style or hundreds of the same style, you might allow one to perish, but allow the interaction with the volume especially books are also used items. So that's different to other museums items. So we have slightly different ethics because we want our items often to be used. So there's, yeah, a lot of questions coming with that.
- [20:02]
Abigail Bainbridge
Yeah, it's this thing of the, you know, like it's a carrier of information in the text itself. It's a carrier of the social history and economic history and all those other things around the making of the book. It's an aesthetic thing and even determining which of those is the most important to prioritize through our interventions isn't always obvious and it definitely affects the decision of what you're going to do with it.
- [20:29]
Jen Hoyer
Right. And I think because you were so clear in a lot of the conversations about decision making, I think there's also a recognition there that we need to make decisions and then just be transparent about them because everyone would make a different decision.
- [20:49]
Abigail Bainbridge
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [20:52]
Sonja Schwoll
Yeah, yeah, that's a hint. Gets to another point, all this knowledge sharing. So that's one of my topics in the National Archives. I'm working on a knowledge system and it is really what conservation has been lacking. We all know we work on the same things, we all know we face the same problems. We still not exchanging to the extent that would be really helpful, their conferences, the academic papers and other events. But the digital realm now offers other opportunities which hopefully will get us to a level where we can exchange this knowledge even more.
- [21:26]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, absolutely. And then the, the other use that I saw this book playing came through more in sections four and five, which are about preventative conservation and techniques of conservation. And you, you were very clear in the introduction to those sections that they're not exhaustive, but to me they felt a little bit more like a how to manual or the beginnings of more how to manuals. And they're a little bit more hand on than the previous sections. I would love if you could share a little bit about what's in those sections, what the topics are covered and how you hope they can support some growth and professional development.
- [22:10]
Abigail Bainbridge
It was tricky to decide how much of the how to stuff to include. I had colleagues when I was organizing the book proposal who said, oh, you're not going to do a how to, are you? Because they were terrified that, you know, lay people would get their hands on the book and just follow step 1, 2, 3, 4, fix your own book and then trash everything. And then there were people, maybe more early career conservators who were saying it's going to be a how to, right? Because I've never done XYZ and I really want something that sets out all the steps so I make sure I don't do it wrong even though I have training and I am responsible. So in the end we did something kind of in the middle. I'm not super worried that people will pick up the book and try their hand at it because I think it's so complicated. Even if it was a how to, I don't think it would be straightforward. But I wanted there to be something that goes through all these processes like paper repair, repairing sewing supports, putting new spines on like all the hands on treatments that we do. When we do decide to be interventive and talks through what the options are, what considerations you need to have in your head from a practical point of view, not the decision making stuff. We largely left to those separate chapters that look at that specifically. And this is more like these are your five options when you have this kind of a damage if you've decided to repair it. Until we got to the rebinding chapter and that was just too difficult to pigeonhole into something like that format.
- [23:54]
Sonja Schwoll
And I think I really want or like I'm glad it ends in. There is not one solution like after you have had all these descriptions of what can be done to make it very clear that there is by no means a recipe like we have this term conservation binding. But in the same breath we really try to make clear there is not one conservation binding. Conservation binding is the whole thought process around it that then might lead, will lead to this one particular solution for this specific item.
- [24:26]
Abigail Bainbridge
There's also regional differences like what's kind of standard unquestioned practice in one area might be quite heavily eyebrow raising somewhere else. And I didn't want the book to put off anybody or exclude anybody. So there was a bit of dancing around that with you know, some conservators might do this, other conservators might do this or this used to be common practice. It's less common now because there may still be an argument for doing something that is less common. That is not what people would do anymore or there might be and I think some countries are seen as more interventive by other countries that kind of distinction. And it's hard to make a book that's got a global perspective and is relevant to a global audience with all of that in mind. And it also I think the authorship skews heavily British and North American And a bit European, because that's who my network was. But ideally it would have been a much more, you know, suppose heterogeneous group of authors as well.
- [25:44]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, yeah. And I guess we are always tempted to like make value based judgments about these things and to, to lead people towards the realization that like, we don't do things anymore. This way we're not going to say it's wrong. Some people might still do it that way and they might have reasons for it.
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Abigail Bainbridge
But some people will say it's wrong.
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Jen Hoyer
Some people would say it's wrong.
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Abigail Bainbridge
I know some people tried to say it's wrong. Yeah, it's hard, but it is. I mean, for every author that tried to write something like we don't do this anymore or this is not recommended for this reason, there would be somebody else even within that pool of 70 authors who say, I don't agree with that at all. So it had to be tempered. And I think, you know, there are some things that people feel really strongly about, but that's, that's where you've come to in your own personal assessment of the ethics and the standards and everything. And there is no one right solution.
- [26:41]
Sonja Schwoll
Yeah.
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Jen Hoyer
And actually, as we're talking about some of the kind of how to and, and really explanatory stuff, I am thinking again of the illustrations that I mentioned at the beginning. Do you want to give a shout out to the illustrators or talk any talk at all about the folks who did that? Because I was really impressed by the illustrations.
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Sonja Schwoll
They're great.
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Abigail Bainbridge
Right. So that started because we were trying to figure out we had a really, really small image allowance and we knew it was only going to be black and white as well. And there's just, just only so much you can show in photographs. And then there's the question of trying to make things as visually consistent as possible. You know, you're going to have some that are really nice studio lit photos and some that somebody snapped in a reading room because that's what they had access to. So Giorgios Boudalis volunteered. I didn't even have to ask him. He volunteered to draw all of these really amazing line drawings, which allowed him to. He really focused on the book structures in the first section and combined different features that you would see in variations of regional binding styles in the same image so that we could pack loads of information into one figure. And then Katerina Williams and Roger Williams, no relation, also joined in because it was too much for Georgius to do all of the drawings and his chapters, plus I made him write an extra chapter partway through. And they were also writing. So, yeah, between the three of them, they pulled all these images together. And I'm just so grateful because it really made the text more cohesive visually and allowed us to show so much more than we would have been able to otherwise.
- [28:33]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, they're great. Well, before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to share about the book that I didn't think to ask about or. Or now that it's done, you know, are there new projects you want to talk about that now you can finally think about other things or anything fun and new going on?
- [28:55]
Abigail Bainbridge
Not any more lectures.
- [28:56]
Sonja Schwoll
Yeah, but we had.
- [28:57]
Abigail Bainbridge
Well, we had a lot of lectures this year.
- [28:59]
Sonja Schwoll
Like, this volume triggered a really lovely series throughout this year of events connected to each chapter. And at the Archives, Holly Smith and Katarina, again, Katarina Williams, organized a whole symposium workshop day around stationary bindings. So it already has created a new, I don't know what you say, like a foundation for more events around conservation, teaching and studies.
- [29:27]
Abigail Bainbridge
Yeah. And it gave me my idea for my next book because as I was editing, I was coming across so many plant names used in the production of all of these books. So the next book I'm working on is a collaboration with a botanist and it's about the plants used in book binding, which is obviously the paper making and the dyes and the inks and things, but it's also adhesives, it's tannins for leather, it's the board. So I'm excited about that.
- [30:01]
Jen Hoyer
That sounds really great. Yeah. Sonia, I don't know if there were any new projects that you want to highlight or.
- [30:11]
Abigail Bainbridge
No, I think I'm quite proud of this.
- [30:12]
Sonja Schwoll
Last.
- [30:15]
Abigail Bainbridge
For a while.
- [30:16]
Sonja Schwoll
No, maybe it feeds in, like the stationary binding, because it is this huge top. At the National Archives, we had the symposium in October and we are working with this new knowledge database research space, and in that, we're creating forms to record bindings, which is really complex because if you think of any database, how do you make space for all the different aspects you want to record around a book and relate them to each other in their physicality, and record the research data we have around this and we have started, and we will continue to create these forms to describe bindings, and then this is something that will be shared beyond the National Archive. So that's my project for next year, to get it out of the archive, share it with other archives across the uk. And I've already also have partners in the States and in other countries to really create this platform. I was talking about that we can have the knowledge exchange beyond these books and bring it out there, that everybody can contribute and benefit from this information.
- [31:17]
Jen Hoyer
Fantastic. Well, thank you both so much for chatting once again. I've been speaking today with Abby Bainbridge and Sonia Schwoll about Conservation of Books published by Rutledge in 2023. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you've been listening to new books.
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