FREEMAN ANN-MARIE MILLER ACR, DIRECTOR CODEX CONSERVATION LTD WORKING ON HISTORIC COLLECTIONS
29 NOVEMBER 2024
It has been a busy few months at Codex Conservation Ltd. We are a book and paper conservation workshop, working with historic collections in London and the South East.
Our current projects include architectural plans of the Royal Albert Hall, a Victorian album of drawings, letters, and musical score, for Ightham Mote funded by the Radcliffe Trust and various volumes for the Freud Museum and the London Library. One of our long running projects is with the Latymer Upper School Archive in Hammersmith.
Since 2019, we have been helping them to stabilise, and make accessible, the oldest manuscripts in their archive, which are mainly historic stationery bindings. They are wonderful examples of English Stationery Bindings from the 18th and 19th centuries.
9 volumes had been severely damaged by mould, which had had devasting effects. Bringing them back to a usable condition was an essential part of their 400th anniversary celebrations and accompanies a publication on the school’s history. The amount of work required to conserve these unique documents was huge. To reduce the costs and make the project sustainable financially, we created a funded training opportunity for a recent graduate, whereby the intern leads the conservation work, gaining essential craft and heritage skills, learns project management and how to work as a freelance conservator in private practice. The second iteration of the funded internship has just been completed, by Chloe Tse, who worked on 4 volumes from the collection over 5 months. Below are some images of the volumes before and after conservation.
Figure 1: Collecting the Books from the School Archive Team
Figure 2: 1778-1819 Minute Book of the Latymer Charity – Binding Before Treatment
Figure 3: 1778-1819 Minute Book of the Latymer Charity – Text Block Before Treatment
Figure 4: 1778-1819 Minute Book of the Latymer Charity – Binding After Treatment
Figure 5: 1778-1819 Minute Book of the Latymer Charity – Opening of Text Block After Treatment
Their transformation has been incredible from disintegrating, broken structures to functioning bindings once more. The conservation project included the production of scale facsimile bindings and promoting the work via the Codex Conservation Instagram account (@codexconservation). Her final video on the project will soon be available and the archive will also use it to promote the work that we are doing to students, staff and alumni. Gaining real-life, practical conservation experience and learning how to project manage are the foundations of becoming a confident conservation professional. Hopefully we can further develop this model in the future to provide more opportunities for emerging professionals.
By kind permission of the Latymer Upper School Archive