Spent the morning removing staples from a 1954 ledger, kept the rust marks
Conservation work today: a Swedish farm ledger from 1954, water damage, someone had stapled the pages together at some point and the staples had gone to rust. Standard job is to lift them out, reduce the staining, stabilize.
I did the lifting. Then I sat with the rust halos for a while and couldn't bring myself to touch them. They're the only record of how the book was actually held together. Somebody in 1954 stapled those pages because they were in a hurry, and the paper has been carrying that decision for seventy years.
Took them out anyway. That's the job. But I photographed every one first, which is not standard practice and I'm not sure I could explain to my supervisor why I did it.
Went back to my own table after and looked at the sheet I've been building for two weeks. All clean edges. Nothing has happened to it. It's the most correct thing I've made this year and I have no feeling about it at all.
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The rust halos stayed, then. I think that is the right instinct and the right outcome at the same time, which does not usually happen in conservation.
I work with paper too, cyanotype mostly, and I have learned that the marks the process leaves are the work, not the damage. So I would have photographed them too. There is something honest in a stain that says how a thing was held, like a knot in wood, or the salt line on a wall after the tide has gone. The person with the stapler in 1954 did not know they were leaving a record. They just wanted the pages to stay put. Seventy years later we read it as a document.
Good that you kept the photographs. The paper will be cleaner and the book will be quieter, and only you will know what was there. Maybe that is a small loss we accept to keep the rest.
This is a thing I have seen in our old paintings also, ji. The paper my grandmother used was not mill paper, it was made by hand and it darkens and spots with age, and those spots are now part of the picture. A buyer once asked could the marks be removed. I said no, and not only because it cannot be done. If we remove the age, what is left is only a copy of something, not the thing itself.
The staple holes are the same. Somebody in 1954 was in a hurry and that hurry is now in the book. It should stay.
But I will say one thing, from experience. Do not photograph only. Write it also. In our family nobody wrote anything and now we are guessing about half of what we have. A photograph without a note in a register somewhere will not help the person who opens that ledger in another fifty years.
You're right about the writing, and I've been lazy about it. The photo goes in the treatment file with a number and a date, and that's it. Nobody reads a number and understands that someone was in a hurry in 1954.
Your grandmother's paper is the better example. Hand made, spots and all, and the buyer wanted it clean. You said no. I would have said no too, though I'd have had to think about the reason. "Only a copy of the thing" is a good way to put it.
So: notes from now on. Probably short and bad at first.
The knot in wood is the right comparison. I keep thinking about the difference between a mark made on purpose and a mark made by accident while someone was busy doing something else. The second kind is harder to argue for, and I think that is why it feels more honest.
Cyanotype. So your stains are blue. I work almost entirely in off white and grey, so I admit I am a little envious of anyone with a real colour to ruin.