Whitney Curtis
You can save money at the bank, save dogs at the pound, save your soul in church. But how do you save the past?
Visit Richard C. Baker.
A nationally known conservator, Mr. Baker has tenderly restored everything from faded ancestral photographs to Shakespeare's second folio, a first edition of Newton's Principia Mathematica, 26 volumes of Piranesi engravings and the famous elkskin journal that Lewis and Clark had bound en route. He wielded his rare expertise at the Smithsonian Institution and then the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass.; since 1989, he's run his own business in the back half of a nondescript office building on Big Bend.
Today, he's stamping 24-karat gold tooling — an ornate Torah scroll design — onto a facsimile cover for a Hebrew prayer book, Day of Atonement. The original succumbed to red rot, its edges a powdery red-orange where acid from the tanning had nibbled away the leather. "We scanned the tooling, cleaned up the image with Photoshop and Illustrator and had a die made," he explains.
He does a test first, on a scrap of leather. "Too hot," he announces, rubbing lightly at the gold and dialing down the finishing stove. To an untrained eye, the imprint looks perfect, pure gold deep in the leather. Mr. Baker says it's blurred ever so slightly at the edges, where the ribbon of gold melted. "Too cold, and the gold won't stick; too warm, and it will melt," he explains.
He shows me another method: movable type set in a clamp and rocked across the strip of warmed gold, to foil-stamp a curved spine.
On the counter waits another project: Gart der Gesundheit, published in 1485 and the oldest botanical book in the Missouri Botanical Garden's collection. Mr. Baker carefully removes a piece of protective cardboard from the cover. "It's pre-Columbian," he says. "They plan to digitize it, but it was in such poor condition, they couldn't even page through it. It didn't have the original binding." How did he know? He snorts. "It had a leather spine and marbled paper sides, which is very 19th century."
Often his work is a high-wire balancing act — one false step, tremor or wiggle, and something irreplaceable will be lost forever. He uses a sharp knife to pare the underside ("flesh") from leather and a century-old guillotine to slice through paper stacked as fat as a Sears, Roebuck catalog.
As his assistant, Tori Walters, stirs cooked wheat-starch paste she's strained through a horsehair sieve, Mr. Baker shows me a big drying rack: "We can wash a whole book!" His water's thrice filtered, then sent through a tank of marble chips that restore the calcium. "Without that alkaline, purified water is a very aggressive solvent, because it's not in a natural state," Mr. Baker explains. "Water likes to dissolve things, and if there's nothing already dissolved in it, it's more aggressive."
He soaks fragile documents in water, support-ed on blotter paper, then lets them air-dry. If they cockle (wrinkle), he flattens them in a press — but not while they're wet, because he's trying to preserve the original type impressions. When he had to rinse a giant, 1876 map of Cahokia Mounds, the first ever hand-drawn from an actual survey, he improvised a sink from two-by-fours and a plastic sheet. To bleach away stains or foxing (tiny brown spots of slow-growing fungus), he sets a bin of tap water in the sun. Right now pages of an Art Nouveau children's book illustrating the Song of Solomon are soaking outside on the parking lot, and he shows me an early sketch of a steamboat on the Mississippi that the sun has cleaned up for him. "It's gentle, never a hard bright white; you're going slowly, using only oxygen and water and sun, and it lightens like your hair at the beach. Look: Now you can read the signature of the artist!"
Books often have rounded spines and shoulders, like the scholars who pore over them. Mr. Baker can mend the edges, where the flat of the cover meets the curve, and he can fill in missing corners on dog-eared pages. He pours clean water into an empty, refillable marking pen and uses it to weaken the paper, making it easy to tear a softly feathered edge that will be easy to patch, overlapping the feathered edges a millimeter or so.
He moves aside his treasured lithostone (from one of the famous quarries in Solnohofen, Germany) and turns to more covers. The ridges on the spines, once formed by sewn-on cords, are now fake, he informs me casually. Nobody binds with such patience anymore.
They restore with patience, though. Soon Mr. Baker will be working on William Blake's Night Thoughts and the Nuremberg Chronicle. Half of his work is for museums and libraries, the other half for individuals.
He moves to an old framed engraving of John Trumbull's Signing of the Declaration of Independence and pries wood from the back, removing handmade nails as gently as if he were pulling splinters from his beloved's hand. He'll spot-test the inks, wash and bleach the print, and line it with long-fiber Japanese tissue (known as rice paper, although there's no rice in it).
"There's a tear about 10 inches long that looks like it was mended," he notes in a golf-announcer whisper. "The old mend will come off, and the lining process will mend the tear. The owner will want the wood put back — it was often used in the 19th century — so I'll put a barrier between the wood and the print: an acid-free, lignin-free corrugated board impregnated with activated charcoal to absorb corrosive gases."
He gingerly lifts the edge of the print with a spatula and sighs in relief. "Sometimes things get stuck to the glass." The print's edge is jagged, hand-cut with scissors. "Looks like it was in this frame when it got wet," Mr. Baker says, "because the water stain continues onto the frame." He pauses. "Every object has a life. A past."
The trick is not letting that past dissolve.
