Conservation

Posts related to the Conservation Department

Renée Wolcott
In 1956, the American Philosophical Society acquired a 1773 almanac that had been used as an account book and diary by James Wilson (1742-1798, APS...
Anne Downey
You may remember Renee Wolcott’s excellent blog post that addressed why we conservators (and all of us library, archive, and cultural heritage professionals) abhor any...
Renée Wolcott
In the APS Conservation Department, winter is museum time. We check the items from the APS Library that were exhibited in the previous year, and...
Renée Wolcott
Header Image: 2023 Willman Spawn Conservation Intern Charlotte “Charly” Starnes puts the finishing touches on her treatment of a 1549 French copy of Aphorismi Hippocratis...
Renée Wolcott
In 2021, the APS Library & Museum’s Dr. Franklin: Citizen Scientist exhibition featured a copy of the 1737 Poor Richard’s Almanac open to page 4...
Anne Downey
It’s not very often that we think about making repairs designed to fail. But that’s exactly what I’m striving toward while working on multiple materials...
Renée Wolcott
Two previous blog posts by Anisha Gupta and myself shared the problems with iron gall ink, which was used for almost all the manuscripts in...
Renée Wolcott
In my first post about Petrus Ramus’s 1636 Via Regia ad Geometriam—a geometry textbook with warped, broken wooden boards and mold-eaten leaves—I described the innovative...