Samhain Publishing

Do you ever think about what happens to your books after you’re gone? I mean long gone, as in two-hundred-years-after-your-grandkids gone? Recently, I had a chance to find out. As a volunteer guide at the Carlyle House in Alexandria, Virginia, I was invited to tour the workshop of Thomas Albro, the restorer working on John Carlyle’s family bible.

Carlyle was a wealthy 18th century merchant and patriot, friend of George Washington and the builder of a Georgian Palladian style manor home boasting the only front lawn in historic Old Town Alexandria. Seriously—city trustees passed a law requiring all houses in town to front the street as soon as the Carlyle House was finished.

An unrestored page from John Carlyle's family bible. (Photo courtesy Carlyle House)

Like many of his contemporaries, Carlyle used blank pages in his family bible, a massive sixteen-by-ten inch tome published in London in 1759, to record the births and deaths of his two wives and nine of his eleven children. In the two hundred sixty years since, the book was rode hard and (all too literally) put away wet. The bible had it easier following the conversion of the house to a living museum in 1976. It rested in a specially constructed display case, its pages carefully turned by cotton-gloved curators on a schedule designed with preservation in mind. Despite the staff’s best efforts, however, by 2010 the pages had browned to the point where it was hard to read the text, much less the family notes scattered throughout. The binding—the bible’s second—was crumbling, to say nothing of the debris trapped between the pages.

What kind of debris? According to Mr. Albro, they ran the usual gamut of the good (a wisp of green lace used as a bookmark, minute copper sequins and thread from the sleeve of an 18th century gown, the book’s original label stamped with the words “Holy Bible With Cuts”), the bad (grease, possibly from candle drippings) and the ugly (mold, mildew and rat droppings). On the plus side, there wasn’t any bacon.

Yes, bacon might've been an issue. Eighteenth century worthies apparently brought their bibles to the breakfast table. In addition to breadcrumbs and coffee and tea stains, books from the 1700s typically preserve bits of bacon. “Sometimes you find a whole strip of bacon,” Mr. Albro said, “almost as if they used it as a bookmark.”

Carlyle’s bible was spared that indignity. But it was in desperate need of cleaning, conserving and restoring. Each conservation and bookbinding job is different, but Mr. Albro’s twenty-five years’ experience restoring books at the Library of Congress and his extensive work as an independent consultant equipped him for everything the Carlyle bible had to offer.

Unbound pages from John Carlyle's bible release decades of dirt in a bath of filtered water. (Photo courtesy Carlyle House)

First he removed the binding and prepped the individual pages for washing. Dunking old paper in water may seem like the last thing you want to do with it, but according to Mr. Albro, “Paper comes from water. It’s an important component of the whole.”

Paper made from rags, like that used in the Carlyle bible, is also sturdier than the wood pulp paper used today. It takes to water very well, as long as you take the correct precautions, such as placing each page on a larger sheet of nonwoven polyester (much like the polyester interfacing used by home sewers) for support. Several sheets can be washed at once. The number depends on the size of the wash tub and the number of drying racks available. (Mr. Albro’s workshop boasts a rolling “baker’s rack” of roughly twenty stacked screens.)

Several pages from the Carlyle bible were soaking in a basin of filtered water when my tour arrived. It reminded me of brewing tea. After an hour in the tub, the water was about the same color, too. Mr. Albro gently pressed the pages to circulate the grime and then lifted the stack of paper and polyester sheets out of the water onto an angled slab of glass or acrylic to drain. While they were draining he prepped a sizing solution, which acts as a preservative.

“You can’t write or print on paper without sizing,” he said. “The surface isn’t smooth enough to take the ink.”

The mixture he favored for this project features methyl cellulose, which despite its chemical-sounding name is a benign compound used in everything from toothpaste to liquid tears. It also helps inhibit the growth of bacteria, an important consideration when you’re conserving a book for the ages.

Following sizing and drying, many of the pages with engraved illustrations (the so-called “cuts”—an abbreviation for wood-cuts—mentioned on the bible’s label) were allowed to bleach in the sun. The effect of a few hours of sun exposure was amazing. The washed pages were the color of old ivory. The bleached ones looked like fresh cream.

The ivory tones of the washed page to the left offer a sharp contrast to the creamy whiteness of the page bleached in the sun. (Photo courtesy Carlyle House)

Not all the illustrated pages received this treatment, however. Although printers ink is impervious to sunlight, the ink used by Mr. Carlyle and his daughter Sarah Carlyle Herbert to make their notations is not. It would fade as quickly as a watercolor—not an option when those notes are among the reasons for preserving this particular book.

But dirt and grime weren’t the bible’s only problems. Many of the pages were crumpled and torn. The washing and sizing process take care of unwanted folds. Handmade Japanese paper dyed to match is used to mend damaged pages and replace ripped corners. After patching, the paper is cut to the original dimensions of the page to aid in binding.

The final step, rebinding the bible, may prove to be the most challenging. In addition to collating and hand stitching all the pages of the Old and New Testament (not all of which were numbered) Mr. Albro plans to create a cover similar to the original, possibly out of goatskin. “It’ll probably be brownish black with reddish stamps to reflect what we have of the original.”

It might even have gold embossing. Mr. Albro found an embossed stamp—a one inch square of reddish leather used to decorate the spine of the original 18th century binding—when he disassembled the bible for washing. He’s pretty sure he can find a matching punch among his collection of antique embossing tools. The result might not be identical to the book Carlyle brought from London two and a half centuries ago, but it’s sure to be a thing of beauty and a joy if not forever, for a very long time to come.

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John Carlyle’s family bible is scheduled to return to his Alexandria house for display sometime this summer. The Carlyle House Museum and its 18th century-style garden, among the jewels of the Northern Virginia Park Authority, are open six days a week. Guided tours take visitors inside the rooms where one of the most important events in Colonial America took place: the meeting of the five Governors General of the English colonies convened by General Edward Braddock to plan strategy and raise money for the conflict that became the French and Indian War. Writing from the Carlyle House after the meeting, General Braddock recommended the colonies should pay for their own defense—a notion that ultimately became the Stamp Act, one of the major causes of the War for Independence. More information can be found on the NVPA’s web site.