Tales from the conservation studio

One of the trickiest items to conserve as part of our Uncovering UCL’s Jewish Pamphlet Collections project has been an 18th century Hebrew wedding poem (De Sola Pamphlets 17, item 15). This poem, from Livorno, celebrates the marriage of Joshua and Esther Recanati. We needed to do a bit of detective work to conserve it correctly.

At some point in its history, the poem had been cut in two. The two halves had been taped together, but closer inspection revealed that the text did not line up and in fact some text was missing.

We decided to remove the old repairs and instead mount the two halves of the poem with a gap where the missing text would have been. We were able to locate another copy online in the Jewish Theological Seminary Library’s digital collections. By comparing the two copies, we could see how much text was missing and work out exactly how much space to leave between the two halves.

So our conservator carefully separated the two halves, and the poem was then humidified and pressed for two weeks to remove creases. It was repaired so that it was stable enough for mounting and then attached to a mount board with polyester corners and strips, so it can be removed easily for digitisation or to look at the other side.

The Jewish Theological Seminary’s copy also has missing text, but between the two copies we can now reconstruct the complete  poem, a great example of the value of digitisation!