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Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 83, 2 January 1930, Page 14

which were crumbling, and gold tooling, which seemed to have gone black and vanished by various kinds of grease—castor oil, for instance, neafa foot oil, vaseline, tallow and lanolin. All of these helped to preserve bindings, but some will stain a light leather, and others, on account of their consistency, cause fine portions of the cover to be strained or rubbed during application. After considerable experiment, our advisers discovered a mixture which bad none of these disadvantages, and the recipe is one which I should recommend to anyone who has charge of books.

“We dissolve first of all half an ounce of beeswax in eleven ounces of hexane (which the amateur may find rather difficult, as the wax has to ba warm while the hexane is very volatile and inflammable) ; then we add an ounce of cedarwood and seven ounces of anhydrous lanolin. The lanolin is absorbed in the leather and preserves it from the acid, in the atmosphere, the wax polishes the surface and binds the cracks, the cedarwood not only acts as a. preservative, but binds the first two ingredients to the leather, and finally the hexane is a ‘thinner,’ which dissolves the wax and then evaporates. We have had this dressing regularly prepared for us by a commercial firm whose name may be obtained from the Museum, but any chemist could, of course, obtain the ingredients and compound them.” A Seven Years’ Task. “How do you apply this, and what results does it have?” “Well, first of all,” said Mr. Kelham, “we wash the books with good white soap and water, which brings up the natural colour both' of leather and of vellum, and brings to the surface the gold tooling which may have been lost a hundred years or more. Then we allow it to dry for a day and apply pur preservative. This remains sticky for a couple of days, but by then it lias soaked in, and the book can just be polished. Here,” he said, leading me into a gallery of the King’s Library, “is one of our workmen who cleans in this way forty books a day,” anil I was shown a dry, dusty leather cover of a seventeenth century work together with its companion volume, its original rich brown and pale gold burnished like new. A black vellum cover of a treatise on divinity of the sixteenth century stood by the clean whit® cover of its sequel of the same year. Mr. Kelham selected a breviary from’ a shelf. “This,” he said, “is perfectly; preserved without our touching it, because ' it was so often fingered by thei monks that the natural grease of ttte hand has preserved it more or less permanently. ■ What we do here is only to supply piecemeal and synthetically the natural preservation which a book used every day attains of itself. For many years before I came here my predecessors have been trying to restore! leather with less efficient preservatives, and it will be six or seven years before we ourselves have finished dealing with the special libraries, even before we start on the well-bound books in the iron library behind the Reading Room.’’ Mr. Bell’s Methods. Sir. Idris Bell, the Keeper of Manuscripts, takes a different method to preserve his beautiful bindings. Having fewer treasures to keep' intact he is able merely to dust them and put each away in a separate dirt-proof box. Like the Keeper of Printed Books, he deplored the lack of space as a rule to present his bindings to the public eye, though at present his two normal showcases are supplemented by a special show-case of bindings from the Egerton collection. “Next year,” he said, “I shall be able for a time to show how bindings developed from the eighth century portfolio of leather and papyrus in which an early Egyptian account book was bound to the gorgeous sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish patents of nobility whose tooled leather coverings formed a climax of specific manuscript binding before their study became a mere appendix to the changes in the bindings of printed books. Modern manuscripts are rarely bound, though if you wish to see a good simple Morocco cover you have but to look at the cases in which Mr. Galsworthy’s manuscript of the ‘Forsyte Saga,’ now on exhibition, was presented to ns. In medieval times good bindings were often themselves wrapped up in a ‘chemise’ of sheepskin, which overlapped its corners. One of these is to be seen in the Egerton collection. Others I shall show at the general exhibition in a few months.” ■