Thaw Conservation Center's blog

In late 2023, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired Codex Lippomano (PML 199044) from the Sotheby’s auction of the T. Kimball Brooker collection. This manuscript is the earliest known example of a plaquette binding from the Italian Renaissance, integrating Classical antiquity and Islamic decorative styles within an Italian structure.

The Morgan holds in its collection two letters handwritten by Helen Keller in 1890, one of which is currently on view in the East Room of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library. Keller’s lifetime of accomplishments, despite having lost her sight, hearing and speech at a very young age, are already familiar to most people. Yet this letter, written when she was only ten years old, provides extraordinary material evidence of her determination to overcome barriers to communication and engage with the outside world.

In Part I, I discussed how bookbinders in the fifteenth century did not have full confidence in the strength of paper for text blocks in books, and how parchment lingered in bookbinding practice to reinforce the paper gatherings.

In the history of European bookbinding, the transition from parchment to paper as the primary material for text leaves caused an associated shift in bookbinding practices, as bookbinders adapted to what they thought of as a weaker material. Parchment is made of animal skin, prepared by dehairing, stretching, scraping, and drying, whereas paper at the time was made of plant-based materials, such as cotton and flax.

The city street in eighteenth-century Europe was a bustling place with crowds, merchants and all sorts of entertainment, among which was the peepshow. A peepshow involved a box with at least one viewing hole, through which a series of images, spaced sequentially, could be seen. Such boxes were carried around by the showmen who were also the narrators, offering a more interesting experience. For people back then, these boxes were portals to distant landscapes, foreign continents, or battlefields.

This is a guest post by Lindsey Tyne, Conservation Librarian, NYU Libraries

Ashley Bryan (1923–2022) used colored and hand-painted papers cut into the shapes of people, ships, water, land, and sky to create the collages that fill the pages of Sail Away, 2015, as printed images. When these eighteen collages (2021.25:1–18) entered the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum in 2021 as a gift of the Ashley Bryan Center, I was drawn to the rich colors and textures of the collage papers and immediately recognized one paper, Canson Mi-Teintes®, by its distinctive honeycomb texture.

This post was created by Lindsey Tyne, Associate Paper Conservator

The gold, silver, red, and blue flakes that give Standing Together, 1986 (2018.105) by Luster Willis (1913–1990) its seductive sparkle are commonly known as glitter. Many of us instinctively know what glitter looks like and may even recall a childhood craft project or a greeting card we recently received, despite the fact that how glitter is made and what it is made of are trade secrets.

In anticipation of the upcoming exhibition Bound for Versailles: The Jayne Wrightsman Bookbindings Collection, on view June 25 through September 26, 2021, our conservators from the Thaw Conservation Center took a close look at techniques used in creating these elaborate works of art.

Several of the drawings included in Édouard Vuillard: Sketches and Studies come from sketchbooks spanning the artist’s entire career with dates as early as the 1890s to the 1930s. This exhibition provides the unique opportunity to learn about Vuillard’s preferred sketching materials. While preparing the drawings for installation, I looked for connections between them, with particular attention to similarities and differences in the physical evidence.

The Morgan’s collection includes a significant number of Coptic Christian manuscripts made in Egypt and dating from the fifth through the eleventh centuries. The Coptic collection is notable for its texts and illuminations as well as for a large group of early covers and binding fragments important in the history of bookbinding.