Bringing a 545-year-old manuscript back to life
Delicate vellum pages in this book of hours were carefully restored by McMaster's own Audrie Schell. 'Skin takes on moisture; it becomes cockled, wavy,' she explained to The Globe and Mail. 'It swells and the spine cracks. It grows until it can’t fit in the binding any more … The book moves; pigment will crack and it will flake, so you get loss.'
McMaster preservation technician Audrie Schell recently spent eight months restoring a manuscript from the late-1400s.
Known as a book of hours, the hand-written manuscript is full of biblical excerpts, prayers and psalms in Latin, along with accompanying calendars and ornate images.
Her painstaking efforts were detailed in The Globe and Mail:
A large part of the project involved humidifying each page so it could be flattened. Unbound, each bifolium — or double-page spread — was unfolded and placed on a metal screen on the surface of a suction table in the library’s book preservation lab. A dome was lowered over the page and it was exposed to an ultrasonic mist of distilled water. The amount of misting had to be carefully calculated — too much moisture and the vellum would become irreversibly transparent.
