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ABSTRACT
Early in his career as a rare book conservator Christopher Clarkson worked at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, from February 1977 to August 1979. Hired by the Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books, Dr. Lilian M.C. Randall, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Clarkson conducted a condition survey of the western European manuscripts and wrote detailed descriptions of their structure and bindings for the first comprehensive catalogue to be published of the collection. Clarkson provided training for Walters staff in the handling and display of early books and, with Randall's support, drafted a lengthy monograph on the subject that included instructions on the fabrication of Plexiglas® book cradles. As Clarkson's time was limited, he was unable to undertake the specialized treatment of manuscripts with broken textblocks and bindings. Recognizing the complex problems of thickly applied media on flexible parchment supports, Clarkson made a significant contribution to the preservation of the Walters collection by recommending important changes to existing protocols, established in the late 1960s, for the consolidation of flaking paint in the manuscripts. The experience that Clarkson had at the Walters was significant, as it shaped his thinking about the role of the conservator in studying and caring for early books and in establishing model preservation programmes for special collections in research libraries as well as museums.
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
Von Februar 1977 bis August 1979 arbeitete Christopher Clarkson als Restaurator für Handschriften im Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Angestellt durch Dr. Lilian M.C. Randall und finanziert mit Stipendien des National Endowment for the Humanities, führte Clarkson eine Zustandserhebung der westeuropäischen Manuskripte durch und schrieb detaillierte Beschreibungen ihrer Einbände für den ersten umfassenden Katalog der Sammlung. Clarkson schulte Walters-Mitarbeiter im Umgang mit und im Ausstellen von historischen Büchern. Mit Unterstützung von Randall verfasste er eine ausführliche Monografie zu diesem Thema, die Anweisungen zur Herstellung von Plexiglas®-Buchwiegen enthielt. Da Clarkson nur eine begrenzte Zeit zur Verfügung hatte, war er nicht in der Lage, die Manuskripte mit schadhaften Bindungen und Einbänden fachgerecht zu bearbeiten. Clarkson erkannte jedoch die komplexen Probleme dick aufgetragener Farb- und Schreibmittel auf flexiblem Pergament und leistete einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Erhaltung der Walters-Sammlung, indem er wichtige Änderungen an bestehenden Abläufen, eingeführt in den späten 1960er Jahren, für die Festigung von abblätternder Farbe in Manuskripten empfahl. Die Erfahrung, die Clarkson an der Walters gemacht hat, war bedeutend, da sie seine Überlegungen über die Rolle des Konservators beim Studium und bei der Pflege früher Bücher sowie bei der Einrichtung von Programmen zur beispielhafter Konservierungsprogramme für Sondersammlungen in Forschungsbibliotheken und Museen beeinflusste.
Acknowledgements
I owe considerable thanks to Terry Drayman Weisser, Sian Jones, Melanie Gifford, John Klink, Linda Blaser and Judy Oliver, who assisted me in reconstructing the many contributions that Chris Clarkson made during his brief two years at the Walters and in recollecting their interactions with him. Special thanks go to Lilian Randall, who had the vision to hire Chris under the auspices of her first NEH cataloguing grant, and to lay the groundwork for an ambitious programme whose goal was the long-term preservation of one of the finest collection of manuscripts in the United States.
Notes
1 The manuscript collection now includes almost 1000 religious and secular texts from all parts of western Europe as well as Russia, Armenia, Ethiopia, Thailand and the Islamic world.
2 As the librarian Miner was responsible for building an art reference collection to support scholarly research; she also served as curator of the Islamic collection and edited all museum publications.
3 In 1973–74 the Walters Research Library, as well as the manuscripts and rare books, were relocated to the spacious new wing of the museum and a full-time librarian was hired in 1976. Randall's responsibility was to focus on supervising readers, planning rotating and major exhibitions, doing research, and after a few years plan and execute a Western manuscript catalogue.
4 Clarkson's formative training in writing, illuminating and lettering at the Camberwell School of Art served him well in his career as a book conservator working on medieval manuscripts.
5 In a letter to Lilian Randall from December of 1976 Clarkson stated ‘Since my days as an art student in London ‘The Walters’ to me has been one of the Great Institutions on this Earth.’
6 Much of Clarkson's philosophy about rare book conservation, found in his early correspondence with Randall and in their plans for the first grant application, was later formalized in an article in which he shared his views on the ethics of rare book conservation and discussed how the profession should be more closely aligned to objects and painting conservation (Clarkson, Citation1978a).
7 The Director of Conservation and Technical Research, Terry Drayman Weisser, and her staff were very pleased to welcome a specialist like Clarkson, who served as of February, 1977, as Conservator of Manuscripts and Rare Books under the joint auspices of the curatorial and conservation departments.
8 Clarkson used a number of his detailed photographs of Walters manuscripts to illustrate a later article about parchment in medieval manuscripts (Clarkson, Citation1992).
9 Clarkson provided a copy of his ‘Brief Guide to the Condition of Manuscripts’ to the paintings conservators and it proved to be very useful for prioritizing the treatment of flaking paint in the manuscripts, especially after his departure in 1979.
10 In 1977 Clarkson gave a lecture on the history of bookbinding for the ‘Pen to Press’ symposium and a public lecture on ‘Limp vellum bindings: the survival of the fittest in the Florence flood.’ The following year Clarkson shared his extensive knowledge of medieval manuscripts with the museum docents. In keeping with his enthusiasm for the topic, he presented a four-hour lecture and showed riveting photographs he had taken for his manuscript survey.
11 Petherbridge intended to return to the Walters the following year, to write descriptions of the bindings on the Armenian manuscripts, yet this visit never transpired.
12 Linda Blaser, one of the original trainees at the Library of Congress who worked closely with Clarkson in preparing, installing and monitoring rare book exhibitions, recently confirmed that it was he who coined the terms ‘mountain’ and ‘valley,’ to describe the direction of the folds made during the construction of book cradles. Blaser's published instructions for the fabrication of book cradles using archival board derive from this early experience working with Clarkson (Blaser, Citation1992).
13 Prior to Clarkson's arrival, Randall enthusiastically supported the work of the Conservation Department on her collection. In 1976 she collaborated with part-time conservator Susan Dupont in mounting a small exhibit on the ‘Wear, Tear and Care of Medieval Manuscripts,’ which presented a survey of preservation problems found in illuminated manuscripts and described approaches to their treatment.
14 Coremans and Packard were both involved in the formation of the International Institute of Conservation and shared an interest in the materials and techniques and conservation of early Italian panel paintings. Coremans died in 1965, so any discussion that he may have had with Packard about soluble nylon would have occurred prior to that date.
15 N-methoxymethyl nylon was made by treating nylon 66 with formaldehyde. It came in two grades, Calaton CA and Calaton CB, with the latter being preferred for use in conservation.
16 The consolidant was applied with great care, allowing it to flow into cracks and around the edges of losses. To allow for sufficient drying of the adhesive a treated folio could not be turned for thirty minutes, making the work extremely time consuming.
17 Powell used soluble nylon in the 1960s to reinforce mold-damaged parchment and consolidate flaking paint in an early Icelandic manuscript (see Steingrímsson and Brynjólfsson, Citation2005: 42).
18 In his preference for parchment size over modern synthetic adhesives Clarkson was influenced by the work of his colleague Ronald Reed (1919–90), a leather analyst and professor at the University of Leeds. Reed was a pioneer in the study of parchment and published two books that were aimed at non-scientists with an interest in leather, parchment and skin and the early history of skin processing. See Reed (Citation1972: 220–226).
19 After gaining experience in the use of parchment size the Walters painting conservators decided to omit the acetic acid in Clarkson's recipe and instead applied ethanol in a preliminary step before the size, to help the adhesive wick under the flaking paint.
20 During his two years at the Walters Clarkson developed a special relationship with Sian Jones, appointed senior painting conservator after Elisabeth Packard retired in 1977, and E. Melanie Gifford, an intern in painting conservation from 1977–78. They assisted Clarkson in his use of the microscope and the x-ray machine and spent time discussing the handling and exhibition of rare volumes, the design of book boxes and cradles, and the consolidation of flaking paint in illuminated manuscripts.
21 On this priority list Clarkson noted that ‘Except for one mss, none of the bookboxes meet book conservation specification, none have the correctly tailored pressure points so essential to parchment codice (sic) preservation & recognized as such for the past 50 years.’
22 In 1997 Blaser published an article on the construction of acrylic cradles for rare books, with much of the information derived from her experience working with Clarkson (Blaser, Citation1997).
23 Randall's vision from the outset was to produce a four-volume catalogue of the Walters’ permanent collection of western European manuscripts. By the time of her retirement in 1997, three richly detailed and illustrated volumes of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from France and Belgium had been published, with generous funding provided by the NEH and the Getty Grant Program. Her successor, William Noel, arrived in July 1997 with ambitious ideas for making the collection more widely accessible. Building upon the research that had been initiated by Randall and her team on the manuscripts to be included in the fourth volume, and with funding provided again by the NEH, Noel launched a comprehensive program of digitization, cataloguing and online publishing of the Walters manuscript and rare book collection (Walters Art Museum, Citation2019b; see Quandt, Citation2020).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Abigail B. Quandt
Abigail Quandt received one of her first bookbinding lessons from Chris Clarkson in 1976. She later went on to earn an M.Sc. and Diploma in Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Art Conservation Program in 1982, with a specialization in rare book conservation. From 1982–84 she was an advanced intern under Anthony Cains at Trinity College Library, Dublin and spent one month studying with the English bookbinder and conservator Roger Powell. In 1984 she began working at the Walters Art Museum as a visiting manuscripts conservator and joined the staff in 1989. A specialist in the conservation of illuminated manuscripts on parchment Ms. Quandt has been Head of Book and Paper Conservation at the Walters since 2001. She has taught a five-day course on parchment conservation for book and paper conservators and leads workshops for students in the American graduate programs. She was the co-compiler of a chapter on parchment for the AIC Paper Conservation Catalog which was published in 1994 and reformatted as a wiki in 2017. Ms. Quandt was the principal conservator for the Archimedes Palimpsest Project (1999–2012) and also supervised the treatment and rebinding of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest for a similar multi-spectral imaging and transcription project based at the Walters.