Anchoring Himself
Luke Russert ’08 traveled the world to think about his future. Now he’s come home to cable news.
Photography by Caitlin Cunningham and Matt Healey
The Conservator
Boston College’s twelve libraries and archives house more than three million books and hundreds of rare manuscripts and artifacts. Nora Dempsey’s job is to expertly repair the torn pages, broken covers, and shattered spines.
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Once a day, Nora Dempsey takes a stroll through the labyrinth of vaults, stacks, and reading rooms that make up the Burns Library, home to rare books and special collections dating back to the fifteenth century. To protect these pieces of history, the spaces are climate-controlled and carefully monitored, but especially on a steamy August day, Dempsey doesn’t like to take chances. Prolonged humidity is a recipe for mold.
As the conservation and preservation manager for BC Libraries, Dempsey oversees the health of every book in the University’s collections, from modern textbooks to centuries-old manuscripts. Even under ideal conditions, some damage is inevitable: Sixteenth-century leather bindings eventually crumble, and the spines of popular texts break from frequent photocopying. Dempsey is the person who puts them back together, utilizing techniques she first learned as an apprentice in Boston and has honed over two decades of working in library conservation labs at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. From her workbench in the basement of Burns, she repairs torn dust jackets, creased photographs, and cracked book covers, striving to restore their functionality while altering as little as possible. Several days a week, she heads over to her second lab in O’Neill Library, where she fixes modern books used by students for classes or research.
With historical items, Dempsey takes an especially light touch, adhering to the “six feet six inches” rule: from across the room, her changes should blend in, but up close, you might notice a binding just a shade lighter than its cover. As Dempsey says, “I’m not trying to fool anybody.” A committee within Burns determines which items to repair, weighing the pros and cons of various approaches while prioritizing items that are in demand by researchers or likely to be requested for exhibitions. Some treatments, like torn pages, are quick, while others require careful planning followed by dozens of hours of labor. “It varies wildly,” Dempsey said, “but we’re always trying to make the respectful choice—some of these books are really old, and my chapter in their lives is small, so I want to be mindful of that.” Dempsey documents her work with photos and notes, creating a record for future conservators. “It’s all part of caring for these materials in a way that supports them now but also in the future.” Here’s a closer look at Dempsey’s unusual role at Boston College.
Rebinding Broken Volumes
One of the most vulnerable parts of a book is the joint—the place where the cover connects to the spine—which is stressed every time the volume is opened or closed. Damaged books often arrive with the covers completely detached or the leather spines worn away, and Dempsey pieces them back together, incorporating a mix of old and new materials. A full rebind can take around fifteen hours, especially if she opts to paint the cloth cover using a hand-mixed shade of brown. For the parts of a repair that touch the original text, Dempsey uses a paste made of wheat starch and water as adhesive. “We try to make everything we do to an object reversible, especially in special collections, and wheat starch paste is a very gentle, thin material that I can take off just by moistening it, just like paper-mache.”
Restoring Pages
In places where pages are torn or missing altogether, Dempsey reaches for Japanese tissue, a lightweight but strong paper made of plant fibers. Using only wheat starch paste and water, she attaches the tissue to the damaged page or book jacket to create a durable repair that, under perfect conditions, seems to disappear when dry. “If you get it lined up just right and you’re using exactly the right tissue, sometimes it’s just legitimately invisible,” Dempsey said. “It’s quite satisfying.” Her tool kit contains a few unexpected items, like a kitchen blender for making pulp to repair homemade paper, a makeup sponge to remove dirt, and two kinds of cheese graters that she uses to grind up erasers for delicate cleaning projects. “You take the eraser crumbs and you rub them around on the paper really gently and then brush them off,” she explains. “When they turn gray you know it’s working.”
Fixing Everyday Books
For a rare volume used only occasionally by researchers, Dempsey preserves as much of the original material as possible, but a book in the University’s circulating collection has a very different journey ahead of it. Dempsey maintains a second workshop at O’Neill Library, where her focus is on repairing the texts that are checked out by members of the BC community every day. “That book has to go home in the backpack of an eighteen-year-old,” Dempsey explained. “It has to stand up to photocopying. Its function is different.” In those cases, she might choose to replace a book’s cover entirely, rather than repair a cracked piece, and she might reach for a stronger adhesive. Her shelves are always full of modern books awaiting her care, but if a professor or student requests a title, she moves it to the front of the queue. “They’re in a holding pattern, but not inaccessible.”
Before & After
Here’s a look at a few of Dempsey’s recent book-repair projects.
Nicholas M. Williams retreat diary, 1860
Every so often, Dempsey encounters what her colleague calls “a well-intentioned prior repair.” In the case of this diary from 1860, tape was previously used to reattach a deteriorating leather spine, which ended up causing even more damage. Dempsey replaced the spine with cloth she painted to match the original brown hue, and gently removed the adhesive residue from the cover. Faint outlines of the tape remain, a reminder of why modern conservators favor treatments that can be reversed.
Palm leaf manuscript, 1878
For help with unusual projects like this cracked palm leaf from an 1878 manuscript, Dempsey often consults message boards and online publications run by the wider conservation community. In this case, the dried leaf had splintered like wood, which made it easier to repair than a clean break. After some online research, Dempsey was able to knit the leaf back together using only wheat starch paste. “People are really open and passionate about sharing projects and treatments and odd things that come up,” she said.
Chants for the Mass for the Feast of Transfiguration, 1590
Some projects, like this sixteenth-century book of chants, just need a good cleaning. To remove dirt gently, Dempsey uses a paintbrush or makeup sponge and a HEPA-filter vacuum. When mold or chemicals are involved, she works beneath a fume hood like the ones found in science labs. After cleaning an item for mold, Dempsey adds a label alerting anyone handling it in the future. “That way they know the risks.” ◽
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