A look back at Custom Clamshells

Back in my Book Conservator days (at Special Collections & University Archives, UCF Library), one of my favorite responsibilities was making custom clamshells. Many books in the collection needed a protective clamshell and I'll admit that some days it would get a little monotonous: rectangle after rectangle after rectangle. But then, every once in a while, there would be an Artist Book with an unusual shape or a 3D artifact that would need a truly creative housing. I stumbled across my old portfolio of extra custom clamshells and thought I would share!

The Wecheer Carving Tool Kit & the Dawn of Dillo Dangle

Join me on my journey into the future as I purchase an electric chisel! A while back I purchased one to aide in my plans for Participation 2014 at the Maitland Art Center. Okay, so this was a looooong time ago, but it's relevant now because I've made some recent progress on that print. Let's go back to the very beginning….

Designing my table for Participation 2014 finally gave me the impetus to create the triptych I had been planing for the three matching wooden shelves that were discarded from UCF Library's Special Collections & University Archives. I finally decided on a swinging armadillo for the subject matter.

These blocks were rather large, and my design would incorporate a lot of white space. This plus a deadline meant it was finally time to invest in some hardware. I should explain that the power chisel function of the "Wecheer Professional Rotary & Carving Tool Kit" is very different than a rotary tool. I mean, yes there is a rotary tool in there, but that's not why I bought it. I hate carving woodblocks with rotary tools (or "dremel tools" in the common tongue). I feel like I loose all control once the rotary bit hits the wood and inevitably goes skidding off across the surface. Alternatively, the power chisel works much more like a hand carving tool and slices through woodblocks like butter, while still leaving a hand worked texture. (Technically, the block is still handworked, just with more power!)

Photo by Douglas Nelson

After finishing the detail work (and carving out a safety buffer outline) with my hand tools, the power chisel made the rest a dream. No more hours, days even, of carving out white space by hand with my biggest gouge, ensuring the early onset of osteoarthritis!

The triptych is designed to connect to each neighboring panel in the round, meaning if each piece were connected at the edges to make a triangular prism, the ropes in the design would connect across each edge and spiral around the prints. So, that's exactly what I created for my table display, with the addition of luminance. Each panel was printed on thin mulberry paper and backed with a fly pattern cut from Arches Text Weave so the prism could function as a lantern with images displayed both in ink and in light. I was very pleased with how it turned out, and I'm hoping to eventually create a more permanent version of the lantern. However the next step was to combine the panels into one image….. stay tuned for the next installment!

Photo by Douglas Nelson

Photo by Douglas Nelson

Special thanks to Douglas Nelson for the fantastic photos.

Student Book Arts Competition

 The 8^th Annual UCF Student Book Arts Competition is drawing to a close. The entries have been received and judged, the winners announced, and the exhibit that will run for the month of February is up. This is the third year I’ve coordinated and judged the competition and I am pleased to say it is getting better and better. We’ve gone from four entries my first year to nine and in general the quality has risen as well. This year had so many quality entries that we opened up a second place position.

Matthew Gregor’s The Trap House Rules was awarded a well-deserved first place. Using woodcuts and screenprints, this book illustrates the experience of a drug addict visiting the trap house. The poem inside is well written and full of dark humor, and the grungy style throughout the book adds to the reader’s experience.

Second place was awarded to Second Skin by Alesha Hassard. This book’s fine craftsmanship, tasteful reproductions of the artist’s original delicate drawings and marbled paper, and insightful poems concerning mortality would not allow this work to go unrecognized. Alesha is now a two-time winner of the Student Book Arts Competition.

None of this would have been possible without the help of our fantastic judges. Joining me were Jean Gould, Dawn Rosendahl, and EllenKnudson. This was the first time I’ve worked with Ellen Knudson, and I sincerely hope she’s willing to continue her involvement with this competition. I found her judging to be extremely well thought out and her judge’s comments to be insightful and eloquently written. I was also excited to include Dawn Rosendahl as a judge since we were both Artists-in-Action at the Maitland Art Center.

To see all the entries, please visit the facebook album.

Removing Tape from a Dust Jacket

Another sad story of a well meaning collector trying to protect their books... with scotch tape. For the love of all that is good in this world, never "fix" your books with tape!

There are many books in our collection of Archimedes Patti's research materials. Many of those books have dust jackets and most of those dust jackets have been taped onto their respective books. This book especially won (lost?) the tape lottery. Every fold or scuff or scrape has been taped over. Even the back of the jacket had extra paper taped to it.

It took my microspatula, alcohol, a tacking iron, and all the patience I could muster to lift all of this tape, but in the end the tape was beat and the dust jacket got a new archival form of protection.

A whole new layer of terror

The Frame-up System - Japanese Tissue Repair

 I dedicate this post to how awesome Japanese tissue paper is. The cover of this leftist pamphlet from our Van Sickle collection was in taters (luckily no one had tried to tape it back together yet). After removing the rusty staples I was left with a gnarled cover in two, almost three, separate pieces. I carefully unfolded everything that was bunched together then mended all the tears from the back with Japanese tissue paper and wheat paste. The before and after results are below.



Before



After

DO NOT tape Faust into your Library book!

I don't care how cool and appropriate that nice leather book would look in your play, just don't do it. I'm lookin' at you, Gretchen! You may have been saved in the end, but who was there to save this book? Not you. It took me an entire hour to meticulously lift the scotch tape with an alcohol dipped micro spatula. Luckily the pages on this 1957 volume are clay coated which made the tape removal much easier than it could have been. Still, there is nothing to be done about the staining that has already set in from the adhesive.

WOMEN - African American Legacy: The Carol Mundy Collection

Two Special Collections exhibits in one week! This post is slightly delayed, but I was actually working on this exhibit at the same time as the Nierman exhibit at the beginning of November. Just slightly delayed...

This exhibit features photographs of women from the 1850s to the 1950s selected from African American Legacy: The Carol Mundy Collection. It was curated by Sandra Varry and was designed and prepared by myself. All of the photos that are on display were scanned, reprinted (some enlarged to assist with viewing), and mounted in order to protect the originals from the UV damage of being on display for several months. The exhibit also has a selection of awesome period cameras that are on loan to us. I feel bad since the photos should be the focus, but the cameras might be my favorite thing.

This exhibit is on the 5th floor exhibit area and will be there until the end of January when it will move into the cases on the main floor during Black History Month. At the end of February it will return to the  5th floor.

Leonardo Nierman

November 1st, 2012 was Leonardo Nierman's 80th birthday and in celebration I've curated a retrospective of his work in the Special Collections department on the main exhibit wall of the UCF Library. Nierman was born in Mexico city in 1932 and has become a internationally recognized artist. We have a large collection of his art at Special Collections, and throughout the Library in general. The nine foot bronze statue Flame of Hope by the main entrance and the stained glass Genesis on the third floor were done by Neirman. Both of which were acquired by the Library in 1987. These monumental pieces can always be seen at the Library, but the retrospective will only be up until the end of December. I recommend coming out to see it- it is rare that we pull out almost all of Nierman's artwork, especially the 6 1/2 foot by 8 foot tapestry. Now that was a unique challenge to hang!

Please enjoy the poorly pieced together panorama of the show below:

Off to the Printers!

For the past month I've been working on designing the exhibition catalog for the Crealdé School of Art's next show, Keeping Haiti In Our Hearts: Interpreting Heritage in the Diaspora. I am relieved to say that after thirty-nine and a half hours of work, the PDF files were sent to the printers yesterday evening. I can now breath a huge sigh of relief and start focusing on my excitement about seeing the finished product.

The exhibit features both contemporary and traditional haitian art, and from what I can tell from the images I worked with for the catalog it is full of painting, photography, sculpture, and tapestry. Eight of the traditional paintings are from the Bryant West Indies Collection held at the UCF Libraries Special Collections Department. In fact, that's how I became the catalog designer. The two curators, Henry Sinn and Natália Marques da Silva, have been in contact with Special Collections for over a year while they've put this show together. Natália came by in July to take some photographs of the paintings and mentioned to the head of our department that they were trying to find a new designer for the catalog and voilà! I had a job.

The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 14th at 7:00pm in the Alice & William Jenkins Gallery on the Crealdé campus located at 600 St. Andrews Blvd., Winter Park. From 8:30pm - 10:00pm the festivities move to the Hannibal Square Heritage Center 642 West New England Ave., Winter Park and will feature a live Haitian musical performance. Lots of people have put a ton of work into this event, and I know they would all be grateful to everyone who can come to the opening reception. 

A Photo History of the UCF Library

Exhibit mock-up on graph paper - one square to every six inches.

I've recently co-curated the Special Collections and University Archives exhibit A Photo History of the UCF Library which I installed this past Friday. As with all the exhibits I've done with SC&UA, it was immensely interesting and consuming. The library is the first academic building on campus and one of the only buildings ready for classes in 1968, which meant the library housed many random university needs including weightlifting as well as books. This exhibit is in preparation of UCF's 50th anniversary and is installed on the 72 ft. art wall at the main entrance. It's a step up, in size and exposure, from the exhibit area we have right outside of the department. I don't usually make such an extensive plan for an exhibit (pictured above) but since we only had one day to set it up I wanted to make sure we had all our ducks in a row beforehand. I've grown quite fond of my graph paper mock-up. The only significant difference from the plan and the actual is the absence of the groundbreaking shovel and Nierman's maquette of the Flame of Hope. The exhibit would have been approximately 10% cooler with their inclusion, but we also didn't want anyone walking out with them since it is so close to the entrance.

I haven't been lurking around the wall since I've put it up, honestly I haven't, but already I've seen a group men looking at photos from the 1981-1984 expansion and pointing out all their old buddies. I hope this exhibit is causing that kind of reminiscing even when I'm not creeping around the corner.

Exhibit will be up June 1 - July 31

Groom/Stick

Today at work in Special Collections I encountered Marbling: a history and a bibliography by Phoebe Jane Easton which had been a victim of a particularly vicious act of book on book violence. It had the extreme misfortune of being shelved next to a deteriorating leather book. As you can see, neither were wrapped in mylar and Marbling sustained extensive red rot staining on its cover.

Fortunately for Easton's book, the Acquisitions Department had just cleaned out a storage area and brought me a cart full of supplies to go through and keep if I wanted. In those supplies were two packages of Groom/Stick.

My first impression of Groom/Stick was that it must be some form of book torture that in one long gone day was thought to work. I did some research and found that instead it was supposed to be a revolutionary new cleaning material:

GROOM/STICK is a novel form of natural rubber with specific properties combining to create a surface dry-cleaner of high efficiency. The rubber's natural structure has been modified to make it permanently soft, kneadable and strongly tacky. Moisture, solvents and chemical additives have been excluded.

As a non-abrasive, non-staining cleaner of paper and other library materials, Groom/stick gently but positively picks up a wide range of foreign matter. Graphite, carbon, charcoal, chalk, crayon, dry powder colours, mould spores, dust, dirt and grease are cleanly lifted off the surface and held in a 'molecular trap' from which there is no escape!

The process is fast and smear-free. It is demonstrated by lightly rolling a Groom/stick 'cigar' across a freshly-printed newspaper. Excess print ink is removed instantly - without blurring the print or soiling adjacent clean areas. Ordinary solid or granular rubber/resin erasers abrade, smudge, crumble or produce clinging debris. Groom/stick sacrifices nothing of itself, leaves no dirty fragments to brush away (or mould spores to regenerate in concealed areas) and is always ready and clean to use.

 I decided to give it a shot and the results were earily exactly what the promotional material said they would be. While I didn't find rolling the material into a cigar a very easy endeavor (my lump looks more like a creepy alien-esque cacoon), I did find that the surface dirt it grabbed would never escape from it's plasticky grave. Here it is covered in red rot powder and none of it is transfering to my hands or any other part of the book. In fact, it was cleaning me. I could see it, while still covered in powder, taking all the oil that I didn't know I had off my fingertips.

Groom/Stick is my miracle item of the week. Enjoy these before and after photos:

Removing... *sigh* Chocolate

 What's that on this book? Is it a crayon? Is it poop?! No! It's CHOCOLATE! Because who doesn't love a sweet treat when perusing some Dolce and Gabbana fashion. This is a rare instance where I fixed up a book from our general, circulating collection - hence the chocolate. Just a bit of careful scraping with the micro-spatula and a final pass with a soft eraser.

Carry Me

"Carry me out of the host, for I am wounded."

This is the Adorable Wood Engraving of the Day! While removing the library stickers from some of our new arrivals at Special Collections I found this little guy. He's from the book Infelicia by Adah Isaacs Menken published in 1868. What makes this especially adorable is the caption underneath him reading "Carry me out of the host, for I am wounded." Now I can't see the frog's out stretched arm without imagining him crying "Enh! Carry me!" I think I may submit this to Cute Overload.

Trini-bagian-ese

You may or may not be aware of my day job as the Book Conservator for the Special Collections and University Archives for the University of Central Florida Libraries. I also do private book repair and after all the horrible do-it-yourself fixes I've seen I feel the need to present this post as a public service announcement about not using staples or tape on your books.

We have a large amount of pamphlets held together by rusty staples that need removing, but I thought these (this?) little pamphlets were in need of documentation because of the... unique way they have been joined together. It is (they are?) three stapled pamphlets that have been stapled to each other and then taped together with some specialty bookbinding tape which is more like electrical tape than anything that should come in contact with a book.

The first order of business is to remove the the horrid red tape that is acting as a spine in this Frankenstien creation....

Heat is applied to the tape with a tacking iron. Heat will usually reactivate the adhesive of the tape, or if you would like to use proper terminology it reactivates the gooiness. However there are cases where heat will just cause the tape to dig its nasty little claws in deeper, so one should always test the waters carefully before removing tape with a tacking iron.

Using a metal micro spatula dipped in rubbing alcohol the tape is slowly lifted

Look at that progress!

Now that the tape is removed you can see where the three pamphlets have been stapled together. The two staples near the spine only go through a pamphlet and a half. There is another set of staples on the back side leaving these helpless pamphlets in a carnivorous jaw of four ruthless staples.

The tape may be gone but some of the tackiness has remained. To remove the sticky I use a soft white eraser, specifically MagicRub, and gently rub the surface. This rolls up all the tape goo in with the eraser poop (ask your mom if you don't understand) and the leavings can be easily brushed away. Once the sticky spine was returned to a satin finish I removed the four staples that held the pamphlets together. This proved to be a Chinese finger trap of sorts since I could not get at the end of the front staples until the back ones were removed and vice versa. After some contorting however, the pamphlets were free for the first time since... probably the 70s.

Now on to the two staples for each individual pamphlet.

The two photos below illustrate how harmful staples can be. The left shows the rusty staple and the effect it has had on the paper. To the right is the page next to the staple showing how deep the rust has permeated the paper. 



The micro spatula returns, this time sans alcohol, to lift the staple prongs on the inside and then carefully wiggle the staple out the back.

Once the staples are removed new "cloth staples" need to be sewn in to hold the pamphlet together. Here I am using some safe linen thread. The pictures below show the substitution- the pamphlets will never know the difference!



Here they are- separated and free of their rusty shackles. After some paper work they were let loose in the stacks where they now graze freely with their fellow pamphlets; a new and happy life.