Special Collections & Archives Blog

September 28, 2010 ZSR Archivists Visit Moravian Archives’s Newly Designed Spaces

A link to 12 ppt slides documenting our lucky visit to a fascinating and well designed archive.

My Preservation students perform much of the work my area. This work involves repairing damaged books and making protective enclosures. The students who work in Preservation spend many hours learning and perfecting each technique. There is a learning curve (and sometimes a measuring curve!) for each technique.

I thought I’d post a few photographs of my students at work.

Josh Wheeler toning Japanese paper with Dr. Martin’s Watercolors to match the color of the leather. We have toned Japanese paper, but the color is only close to the actual color of the leather. Using a chart I made, you can match most paper and Dr. Martin’s watercolor to any leather color.

Beili Li constructing a four-flap protective enclosure from archival bristol. This activity involves measuring theitem to be enclosed, then calculating, measuring and scoring a piece of bristol
board to wrap around it securely. The scoring is done by hand using a hand-held scoring tool.

Brittany Newberry making an archival box from archival board. This activity involves measuring the item to be enclosed, then calculating, measuring and scoring a piece of archival board
board to wrap around it securely. this board is thick and must be scored using a scoring machine and cut on the large board shear.

Usually in Preservation, we put things back together by repairing and restoring something that has come apart through age and use. However, in some cases, we also “take things apart.” In the case of a binding where we might want to scan individual pages, we “disbind” or take apart the binding itself to reveal the individual pages. In this case, I am dis-binding a bound Biblical Recorder from 1867 which we will scan, and then re-bind.

One of the students in my LIB100 class brought in an old Bible and asked me to repair it. I figured this might be a nice gesture, so I did. The Bible came from Israel and has wooden covers. Each cover has a small circular place in which water and soil from Israel has been placed inside a glass container. The first step of the repair was a simple matter of stabilizing the text block to secure the loose pages. I then checked for loose pages as I turned through the book itself. When I found a few of these loose pages, I tipped them in. The final step was to glue a thin leather strip to the spine.

Alexandre Exquemelin’s first hand account of the life of a pirate in the Spanish Main is the source of much of today’s pirate lore. From Long John Silver to Jack Sparrow, fictional pirates have their roots in Exquemelin’s 17th century bestseller.

The History of the Bucaniers of America has been called the ur-text of pirate narratives. It is the earliest and most complete source of information about the so-called golden age of piracy. First published in Dutch in 1674, it was immediately translated into several languages. The English editions were wildly popular, and the book was reprinted many times well into the 18th century. The 1741 fourth edition held in Wake Forest’s Special Collections Department includes additional narratives by Basil Ringrose, Raveneau de Lussan, and the Sieur de Montauban describing voyages and encounters with pirates in the South Seas.

Exquemelin was apparently a Dutch or Flemish surgeon who purchased his freedom from indentured servitude in the West Indies and joined Henry Morgan and his crew of pirates. He also gives accounts of his encounters with other famous pirates, including L’Olonnais and Roc Braziliano. Exquemelin describes daily life on a pirate ship and gives vivid (if not always entirely believable) accounts of the peoples, flora, and fauna of the Caribbean islands that they visited.

Exquemelin does not shrink from recounting the extreme cruelty of the buccaneers, often describing in grisly detail the tortures inflicted on the victims of pirate raids. But he also admires the pirates’ daring exploits, their defiance of an oppressive social order, and their peculiar but strict code of honor. It was this view of pirates as swashbuckling rebels that took hold in the popular imagination in the 17th century and retains its tremendous appeal today.

Wake Forest’s copy of The History of the Bucaniers of America was purchased, probably between 1939 and 1950, with funds from the Tracy McGregor Plan for the Encouragement of Book Collecting by American College Libraries.