10 Years, 10 Treatments: An exhibit of conservation treatments from the Duke University Libraries Conservation Laboratory

Chronica - Leather Re-binding

CHRONICA, by Johan Carion, Wittenburg 1532, bound with a German manuscript from 1477.  Harold Jantz collection of early manuscripts; MS #58

This book is a printed German historical text with an earlier, handwritten manuscript bound in at the end. The title page of the printed work has an ornamental woodcut border variously ascribed to George Lamberger and Lucas Cranach the elder.

Treatment

The book had been previously bound in an elaborately blind-tooled calf binding with silk ties, but the boards were missing and only fragments of the leather cover remained. To protect the text and allow it to function once again as a book, the conservator rebound the text in calfskin and created tooled lines on the covers that reference the original binding style. Fragments of the original binding remain with the new binding and text, in a custom-fit enclosure created by the conservator.

Before Treatment

After Treatment

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