The Power and Fragility of Family History

What makes the written documents of our family history so special? The intimacy of the stories they tell? The fingerprints of the people who wrote them, the penmanship that reveals traces of their personality? The diaries and stationery that show us their taste and style? The immediacy of all this evidence brings people back to life, introduces us to relatives we’d never otherwise have met, even if we’ve seen their faces in photograph albums. So when such a precious family document is handed down to us, we do what we can to preserve it. Sometimes that means piecing it back together.

A client brought a composition notebook to us at Faenwyl asking whether it was possible to salvage the badly damaged book, which contained the handwritten memoir of her father’s life after his arrival in the United States. The front board was detached from the book. Along with the lower half of the first several leaves, and the cloth spine was in pieces. The notebook’s pages were quite brittle; the spine folds were splitting and many leaves had torn straight across. Several pages had been taped back together, and a few had been marked with paperclips that had rusted through the leaves they were attached to. The covers themselves had broken and large pieces were lost. 

Our client wanted the notebook to be used for historical research purposes, and she also wanted her own grandchildren to be able to read their great-grandfather’s story in his own words. Together we decided on a course of action: repair the notebook’s pages and cover so it could be safely, if carefully, handled, and then digitize it in order to produce a set of facsimiles for each grandchild to own and read.

The first step was testing: Would the ink run when exposed to moisture in the paste we planned to use to repair the pages? Fortunately, the ink held fast. We also tested the tape that had been used to reattach some leaves, and determined that the risk of causing damage while removing it outweighed the problems caused by its presence. Also, the tape was evidence that someone in the notebook’s past cared enough to try to repair it. Both of these reasons convinced us to leave the tape in place and work around it.

Our next step was to repair the damaged pages with wheat starch paste and thin Japanese paper, and to reattach those leaves that had become detached. A light sheet helped us precisely realign torn edges. After removing the paperclips, we stabilized the rust-eaten paper in the same way and inserted strips of thin paper as bookmarks to show where the clips had been. 

To infill the missing areas of the cover, we teased apart the layers of the cover board and inserted a stiff card-weight core, then layered softer paper on either side until it matched the thickness of the original. We trimmed and rounded the corners, and covered the infills with heavy paper in a tone similar to that of the exposed board. Once all of these elements were repaired, we resewed the text block, reattached the boards, then rebacked the notebook in heavy black Japanese paper and put the original black spine cloth down on top of the paper.

Front cover of the composition notebook.

With the book now safe to handle, we moved on to photography. Our first step was to photograph each double-page spread with page numbers so we had a record of the correct order. We then photographed each individual page as well as the front and back covers, and worked with a designer to lay the images out for printing.

Our client asked for eight facsimiles, which we had printed in color on a heavy stock. We then hand-bound the eight copies in the same sewn structure as the original, with a black cloth spine. At our client’s request, we also tipped in photographs of her father as well as his obituary. Now each of his grandchildren can safely read the memoir he dedicated to them so many years ago.

The eight facsimiles being sewn on a sewing frame.

A facsimile notebook open to a reproduction of the repaired dedication page, with a photograph of the memoir’s author tipped to the front board.