Conservation
Posts related to the Conservation Department
October 21, 2024
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...
July 22, 2024
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...
May 6, 2024
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...
December 11, 2023
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...
July 17, 2023
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...
June 20, 2023
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...
December 19, 2022
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...
August 29, 2022
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...