The book nobody could read, and the page I finally did something with
At the conservation studio we got an 18th century prayer book in last month, water-damaged, pages fused together in a block. Someone had tried to dry it with a hairdryer at some point, which made it worse. I spent four days separating the pages with a spatula and steam, one at a time.
One page came apart clean. It had been used as a bookmark, so the others hadn't printed onto it. Just a bare sheet of that old laid paper, lovely chain lines, a faint foxing in one corner.
I took it home. The rules say we don't take material, but I asked, and the owner said keep it. He couldn't read the book anyway, it was his great-grandfather's in a language nobody in the family speaks anymore.
I've been sitting with that page for two weeks, not cutting it. It's the first time in months I've held something I didn't want to touch. I think that's what I work with really. The moment before you decide.
Tonight I cut a corner off. It felt like breaking a fast. Small thing, but there it is.
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Ah now, that's the sort of thing that'd stop me in my tracks too. I know exactly what you mean about the paper itself being the treasure. I've pulled old prints out of frames where the image was nothing to write home about but the sheet underneath it, Christ, the tooth of it, the way the light sits on laid lines. You'd swear it was alive.
Four days with a spatula and steam though. Sure you've the patience of a saint and I mean that genuinely, not the soft way. I'd have been swinging from the rafters by day two.
What did you end up doing with the page in the end, if you don't mind me asking? Did something go on it, or is it just living in a drawer waiting for the right idea? Sometimes they're better like that, the blank ones. An empty old page is a fierce thing to look at before anyone decides anything.
You get it exactly. That tooth is most of it. Some of these old sheets, the paper has more presence than anything that was ever printed on it.
The hairdryer bit was the saddest part. Years of water damage, fine. But someone stood there waving heat at it and sealed the whole thing shut. I kept thinking about that while I was steaming it apart.
The page, in the end. I made a small piece with it. Just the sheet, a single thin line of rust from the foxing echoed in ink below it, nothing else. It's in a frame on my wall. The owner came by the studio and saw a photo of it, said the book was never going to be readable anyway, so he was glad something came out of it.
And patience, no. I'm just stubborn and paid by the hour.
You're bang on about the laid lines. I do pastel portraits and every now and then someone gives me an old sheet to try on, and the way the light catches the chain lines, it's like the paper has its own texture under mine. You can feel the history in it. I keep a few scraps like that just to look at.
Four days though, I'd have cracked by hour six. That's real care, the kind most of us don't actually have no matter what we claim.
Also the hairdryer bit made me wince. Someone loved that book once, you know? Badly enough to try and save it, just not well.