The conservation bench let me touch a 17th century book of hours
We got a 17th century book of hours in at the studio this week, brought in by a private collector. My job was mostly structural work on the binding, but at one point I had to open it flat to check the gutters, and I just stood there with the weight of it in my hands.
The paper was this extraordinary handmade laid stock, still holding its chain lines after four hundred years. Someone wrote marginal notes in pencil on two pages, tiny cramped handwriting, and you wonder what they were thinking while they did it. I worked on it for maybe three hours and I have never been so careful about the weight of my own hands.
It made me want to go home and tear up something worthless, honestly. Not in a bad way. Just to remember what paper is for.
Anyway, the collector was pleased, which is the part that pays. But the hour of holding it was the part I'll keep.
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Ah now, that's the kind of thing that'd make you forget to breathe. Four hundred years and the chain lines still holding. I know exactly the feeling you mean, the weight of something like that in your hands and you're suddenly aware of every person who held it before you.
The pencil marginal notes would do me in entirely. Tiny cramped writing from someone who sat with that book the way we sit with our own work, and now they're gone and there's just their wee marks left on the page. You'd give a lot to know what they were at, wouldn't you. Whether they were cross-referencing something or just noting a thought that wouldn't keep.
I work mostly on my own blank paper so there's no history in it, just what I'm making now. But there's a reason we keep coming back to the old stuff. That connection is the whole game, isn't it. Fair play to you for the careful work, sure you'd feel every mark of it if you slipped.
That's the thing, isn't it. Four hundred years is just a number until you're holding the actual weight of it. The paper alone changes you.
The marginal notes are what got me too. I kept wanting to stop and read them properly but I had work to do. There's one in the margin where the pencil's gone thin and faint, and you can tell they pressed harder at the start of each line. Small detail, but you know they were writing something they cared about.
I think about what we leave behind sometimes. A few pencil marks in a book someone else will find in a hundred years. That's not nothing.
That's the part that stays with me too. The marginal notes. I do a lot of work with books that have been read hard, and there's something about those small pencil marks, someone who didn't know they were leaving anything behind. They were just living with the book.
And you're right, you'd give a lot to know. Whether they were studying it, or arguing with it, or just noting something that caught them. Four hundred years later and all that's left is the pressure of their hand on the page. It's a kind of tenderness, isn't it, that we're the ones still reading them.