During this blustery, cold day in PA, I found myself reviewing old treatments. I realized I never shared thoughts about the item which took me the longest to treat, a rare Victorian scrapbook. Background Victorian scrapbooks are fantastic items, in both meanings of the adjective, simultaneously attractive and fanciful/removed from reality. They are filled with illustrations, cutouts, and magazine clippings of beautiful, strange images. To our time, they may seem absolutely bizarre (at least they did to me!) as the images are removed from context and then mixed together. Printing advances: metallic pigments After having treated one, I now find them to be intimate items by the person who laboriously made them and lovely examples of a survey of printing progress. Within them one may find any number of advancements in printing, including the use of metallic ink. I wrote a blog post regarding investigation into these the metallic inks. At the time of writing the blog, I could not find information regarding the creation and use of this ink. Gratefully, a fellow conservator pointed me in a good direction with Henry Bessemer, a man who created metallic printing inks. Challenges Unfortunately, these scrapbooks are prone to a great deal of damage, due to the acidity of the paper, the adhesives used, and the proportions in the bindings (particularly in the compensation). This YouTube video shows a good example of the brittleness of a stack of scrapbook pages. I found a similar issue with the one I treated and ultimately ended up recreating the binding of the album with extensive paper repairs to the pages. I hope to produce an article regarding this treatment in the future, with emphasis on the decision making process to create a binding which reflected the intention of the original, but better suited to the current condition of the pages. Other useful links: Journal of Antiquities webpage
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