Conserving Ptolemy By Lesa Dowd and Matthew Clarke
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mong the treasures of the Newberry’s collection is Ayer MS 740, an extraordinary fifteenth-century handwritten copy of a seminal work of geography: Ptolemy’s treatise Cosmographia. The book is as beautiful as it is historic—yet few would know. For until recently, Ayer MS 740 was inaccessible to researchers due to its extreme fragility. Over the centuries, the degradation of the ink burned holes through the pages—a process known as “lacing” (right). To make matters worse, the book had been rebound too tightly by a previous binder, exacerbating the damage (below).
Because the costs of conservation were prohibitively high, Ayer MS 740 had been unavailable for decades. But in 2017, a group of donors at the Newberry’s annual Booked for the Evening event agreed to fund the repair and digitization of the manuscript. With their generous support, our conservation team (Lesa Dowd, Leith Calcote, Henry Harris, Kasie Janssen, and Virginia Meredith) was able to mend the book’s deteriorating pages and prepare the manuscript for digitization. In what follows, we take you step-by-step through the conservation process. * * * When it arrived in the Newberry’s conservation lab, Ayer MS 740 was encased in a beautiful nineteenth-century binding—but one so tight that it had restricted the opening and hastened the deterioration of the book.
The Newberry Magazine
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