Conservation Wiki

Hello all!

I'm delighted to announce the completion of the BPG Caoutchouc Bindings page on the BPG Wiki! For those curious, caoutchouc adhesive bindings were a common mid-nineteenth century British bookbinding technique, but they fell out of favor after 1870 because of the poor aging qualities of the natural rubber-based adhesive. Thank you to Sue Donovan and Katherine Kelly for all of their hard work on this content!

~Mitchel

Amazing! Great job Sue and Katherine. 

We just came across a bunch of these at SFPL from our Magazines and Newspapers Center. The publication is called The Portfolio (photo attached). I didn't realize how specific this technique was to British bindings! The Portfolio is from London and ran from 1870-1893, so their binders must not have gotten the memo that the technique wasn't working out...

That's a beautiful treatment shown on the wiki page, but since we've got two dozen of them and they aren't special collections, we will be sending ours to our commercial bindery. We may do the leaf reattachment here in house before we send them, but it will likely be DFAB if so. We'll take some photos so that we have another example to include on the page (with a more collections-care-type approach), if you'd like. 

I think ours might actually be comprised of bifolia rather than single sheets, but they are in another building so I can't look at them right now. I'll take a look soon. @Susanna Donovan and @Katherine Kelly, have you ever seen any examples with bifolia, or only with single sheets?

Thanks for making this great page!

Hello all!

I'm delighted to announce the completion of the BPG Caoutchouc Bindings page on the BPG Wiki! For those curious, caoutchouc adhesive bindings were a common mid-nineteenth century British bookbinding technique, but they fell out of favor after 1870 because of the poor aging qualities of the natural rubber-based adhesive. Thank you to Sue Donovan and Katherine Kelly for all of their hard work on this content!

~Mitchel

I've definitely seen single text-weight pages (as opposed to heavy chromolithograph pages) but I haven't seen bifolia used in this process since having paper that can be folded was pretty atypical for the binding method. Would love to see images of your treatment when it happens! And yeah, it's an involved process to do for that many volumes... you've got to weigh what makes sense for your team, the library, and the intended user/research purpose. 

Amazing! Great job Sue and Katherine. 

We just came across a bunch of these at SFPL from our Magazines and Newspapers Center. The publication is called The Portfolio (photo attached). I didn't realize how specific this technique was to British bindings! The Portfolio is from London and ran from 1870-1893, so their binders must not have gotten the memo that the technique wasn't working out...

That's a beautiful treatment shown on the wiki page, but since we've got two dozen of them and they aren't special collections, we will be sending ours to our commercial bindery. We may do the leaf reattachment here in house before we send them, but it will likely be DFAB if so. We'll take some photos so that we have another example to include on the page (with a more collections-care-type approach), if you'd like. 

I think ours might actually be comprised of bifolia rather than single sheets, but they are in another building so I can't look at them right now. I'll take a look soon. @Susanna Donovan and @Katherine Kelly, have you ever seen any examples with bifolia, or only with single sheets?

Thanks for making this great page!

Hello all!

I'm delighted to announce the completion of the BPG Caoutchouc Bindings page on the BPG Wiki! For those curious, caoutchouc adhesive bindings were a common mid-nineteenth century British bookbinding technique, but they fell out of favor after 1870 because of the poor aging qualities of the natural rubber-based adhesive. Thank you to Sue Donovan and Katherine Kelly for all of their hard work on this content!

~Mitchel