Vol. 38, No. 18

1-17-2007
By: Julia Harris

The book doctor is in

Lots of people love books, but Harry Campbell is not your average bibliophile. He’s more of what could be called a “book whisperer,” someone able to discern and address the aches and pains of old books.

Officially, Campbell is the Book and Paper Conservator with the OSU Libraries. Unofficially, he’s the master craftsman charged with mending and maintaining the libraries’ five special collections.

“To put it simply, Harry is one of the nation’s foremost book and paper conservators,” says Wes Boomgaarden, preservation officer for the library. “For books and works of art on paper, he has an artist’s eye, a scholar’s understanding, a connoisseur’s appreciation and a master’s touch.”

High praise indeed, but Boomgaarden has the proof to back it up. He has worked with Campbell since 1985, when the two of them created the conservation program for the library’s general collections. After getting the program up and running, Campbell left OSU in 1994 to pursue a career in private practice. He accepted a post as chief conservator with Etherington Conservation Services in North Carolina, where he worked on a wide range of works from across the country.

“At Etherington, I got to work with museum-quality objects, especially in the art-on-paper area, and I learned a lot of new things,” Campbell recalls.

One object he remembers well was a large mural, painted on very thin paper and mounted on canvas that had been bolted to the wall of a train depot in the 1930s. The depot was slated for renovation, and the project directors wanted the mural restored. Over a period of six to eight months, Campbell painstakingly removed decades of soot and grime, repaired places where the mural had cracked, eliminated stains from old adhesives and touched up areas of the painting itself.

Even with such a diversity of projects to work on, it wasn’t long before Campbell was ready for a change. When Boomgaarden approached him in 2002 about coming back to Ohio State to work exclusively with the special collections, Campbell didn’t think twice.

“I missed working in a big research library, and I specifically missed the collections here at OSU,” Campbell says.

Since his return, he’s had the opportunity to work on many artifacts, such as an assortment of Thurber cartoons and drawings for which he did extensive adhesive removal, stain reduction and surface cleaning. He also performed major cleaning and repairs on the Cartoon Research Library’s recent acquisition, hand-colored drawings from Winsor McCay’s 1904 comic strip “A Tale of the Jungle Imps.”

One of his favorite projects, Campbell says, was working on paper materials that had been brought up from a ship submerged since the 1850s. “These things had been in leather and wooden trunks in the bottom of the ocean for 150 years,” Campbell explains. “Once the paper was dried out, it was good as new. You would think paper would dissolve after a while, but it takes a lot to tear it apart.”

If anyone knows about the resiliency of paper, it would be Campbell. His work area, located at the end of a long walk through the Ackerman Library’s second floor, houses both simple hand tools and complex 21st century machines for washing, mending, binding and chemically stabilizing paper of all kinds.

It’s a world where old school meets high tech — a collision that fascinates H. Lewis Ulman, associate professor of English and assistant dean for Instructional and Research Technology. As part of his work with students in his Digital Media and English Studies class, Ulman has been documenting with video and photographs Campbell’s restoration of a journal written in 1851 by Ohio congressman Samuel Sullivan Cox.

“This journal was in such delicate condition when we got it, I was afraid to handle it,” Ulman says. “That’s where an expert craftsman like Harry comes in, because you’ve got to disbind the book, take all the stitching out, mend the spine … A whole range of tasks.”

The goal of the restoration, Ulman says, is to make the book accessible and safe to handle, so that his students can then work with the text to create a digital version of it.
For Campbell, Ulman’s project is a prime example of why enjoys his job.

“In libraries, as opposed to museums, our artifacts are used by people doing research and teaching in the university,” he says. “They’re not only preserved because of their value as rare artifacts, but they are primary research materials, which means they have to be stable enough to be handled.”

New tricks for old books

For people who enjoy the look and feel of old books and worry about maintaining them in good condition, Harry Campbell has a few suggestions.

1.Control the environment. Keep your books in an air-conditioned or centrally heated room, on well-supported shelves. Paper is actually very strong, especially the kind made before 1800. If it remains in a stable environment, it could theoretically last forever.

2. Protect them from ultraviolet light.

3. Don’t store your books — or any of your paper objects, like watercolors or prints — in attics or basements where there’s too much heat, too much moisture or too much stagnant air.

4. Handle them with care. Older books are delicate and need to be treated as such. Be careful not to spill things on them.

5. If you do spill something on your books or find they have become moldy, the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works has a Web site with tips and a service for locating a conservator to help you. See http://aic.stanford.edu/public/index.html

onCampus Home