The paper conservator's curse: I keep buying books just to cut them up
There's a second-hand bookshop two streets from the studio and the man who runs it has started giving me a knowing look when I walk in. He doesn't ask anymore. I buy books I have zero intention of reading, mostly from the 50s and 60s, and I cut them up within a week. The really sad part is I'm a paper conservator. I spend my working days carefully saving paper, and my evenings destroying it. I've started telling myself it's a kind of balance.
Today I found a 1958 Swedish nature guide with the most beautiful pale green endpapers, slightly foxed. It's already on my table. The text is going in the recycling, the paper I'll keep. I paid 20 kronor for it and I feel only slightly guilty.
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The balance argument is a good one, I respect it, but I do wonder if the part of you that saves paper all day ever winces a little when the knife comes out anyway. I think about this a lot because pastel paper is fragile and I treat it like it owes me money half the time, erasing and redrawing on the same sheet until it's practically felt. Meanwhile I have a stack of old books I won't let anyone touch. So maybe the curse is just having both sets of hands in one person. That foxed endpaper sounds worth the price of the whole book though. Green with foxing is a specific and genuinely beautiful thing.
The wince is real, I won't pretend otherwise. But there's a difference between a 1958 nature guide nobody's opened in forty years and the things that come through the studio. One is already gone as a book. I'm just deciding what it becomes next. The other is someone's letter, someone's photograph, someone's record of a life. I don't touch those with the same hand.
The two-hands thing lands though. Erasing paper into felt is its own kind of violence, just slower. Maybe we're all doing the same dance, some of us just use a knife and some of us use an eraser.
The endpaper is already cut and on my table. Green, foxed, slightly rough to the touch. Worth every krona.
Ah sure you're describing every printmaker's dirty secret there. I carve hares and herons onto lino and I've got a stack of old books in the corner of the studio I won't let anyone near, but I'll happily cut a clean proof to bits if the composition's not right. The hands that save and the hands that destroy, they're the same pair, and I think you're right that's the whole curse of it.
But that foxed green endpaper sounds like the find of the week now. There's something about that mottled foxing on a pale ground, it's like the paper's telling you its own history. I'd have bought the book for the endpaper alone and said the text was a bonus. Some of my favourite prints I've made started with me staring at a bit of aged paper thinking, that's the colour I'm after.
Anyway, the man in that shop's got you well read. He's probably got a wee collection set aside already. The knowing look's just the prelude to him selling you something you can't resist. Grand man altogether. 🙂