V AROUND THE INSTITUTE
coming soon
Fall conference will probe the form and function of the book in a changing media landscape
Why Books?
Why Not?
workshop participants took field trips to the weissman preservation center, which protects, conserves, and reproduces library and other cultural heritage materials.
COURTESY OF THE WEISSMAN PRESERVATION CENTER
CONSERVATOR Debora Mayer, assisted by Karen Walter, applies a Japanese paper lining to a deteriorating 1864 campaign broadside for Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.
DAWN WALUS, a book conservator, sews an 18th century letter book that once belonged to Peter Faneuil, a wealthy Boston merchant.
by Ivelisse Estrada Four flights above Harvard Square, in a window-lined openfloor lab, 19 conservators hunch over their work of bringing two-dimensional objects back to life. The Weissman Preservation Center, associated with the Harvard University Library, specializes in treating photographs, books, and works on paper. One conservator examines a parchmentbound art print book from the early 1600s, its binding buckled and its pages frayed. In the next few months, the book will be prepared for exhibition. A German book filled with elaborate astrological volvelles, or wheel charts, awaits treatment for its original 1580 binding. On February 12, as part of a workshop titled “Early Paper: Techniques and Transmissions,” the lab held an open house for 80-plus faculty members, students, and library professionals. The workshop was one in a series of three leading up to “Why Books?,” which will take place on October 28 and 29, 2010. “This hands-on element is one that we aim to replicate in the conference,” says Leah Price ’91, RI ’07, senior advisor to the humanities program at the Radcliffe
Institute and professor of English and Harvard College Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Price is organizing the fall conference with Ann Blair ’84, BI ’99, Harvard College Professor and Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, also in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “We designed these workshops as a way to bring together different constituencies within Harvard’s often balkanized institutional structure,” says Price. “We wanted to involve faculty, graduate students, curators, librarians, conservators, past and present Radcliffe fellows, and others who work with books.” And, indeed, the workshops have done just that. The first, “Paperwork: Agencies and Subjectivities,” brought 38 participants to the Radcliffe Institute campus to hear about work in progress by Ben Kafka, of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and Lisa Gitelman, of New York University. A lunchtime exchange preceded the workshop, during which 16 graduate students introduced themselves and briefly described their interest in paper, from menus and ’zines to topsecret documents and
subversive uses. “Early Paper,” the second workshop, convened an even larger group of students. The third and final workshop before the conference, titled “German Manuscript Illumination in the Age of Gutenberg,” was organized by Jeffrey F. Hamburger AM ’00, the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard. Art historians, curators, librarians, and philologists from England, Germany, and the United States examined issues around 15th-century illumination in front of an audience nearly a hundred strong. Their work will culminate in a 2014 exhibition of some of these rare specimens, to take place in Berlin and Munich. Rebecca Fink Wassarman ’87, the director of Academic Engagement Programs at the Institute, says, “The success of these workshops is a testament to the deep and abiding interest in textual materials.” ƒ ON-LINE U For more information on the upcoming conference, visit www. radcliffe.edu/events/ calendar_2010books.aspx.
Summer 2010 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
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