Flood in Florence, 1966: A Fifty-Year Retrospective

A Fifty-Year Retrospective

The organizers of the symposium have asked me to reflect on my impressions of the conservation field over the fifty-year period since the flood. Most likely, I am one of the few still living who can give a few reasonable comments. First of all, I can claim that the restoration effort in Florence was the catalyst for many of us to change the direction of our careers. When I worked for Roger Powell and Peter Waters before and after the flood, they opened my eyes and helped me see structure and materials in a whole new light, as opposed to how, in my early training, I concentrated mainly on good technique and finish. Without realizing it at the time, through Florence and beyond, I went from being a bookbinder to a conservator.

The Florence Flood of 1966 was a milestone in the field of book conservation throughout the world. The aftermath of the Florence Flood was the point at which the word conservator entered the lexicon of our work. Until Florence, we were all restorers. I don’t know if, in the other disciplines—painting, sculpture—the word conservator was used, but certainly for book restorers, the word conservator was not used before Florence. Also, for the first time, restorers from Germany, Denmark, Russia, and many other countries started to talk with each other about their work. Before, people who had some certain technique would hide it; nobody wanted to share. In Florence, talking about our individual techniques was like lifting a curtain. It was wonderful. For me it was one of the greatest events in my life to just sit over vino or coffee and discuss these things that had always been kept secret.

How I Got Involved

The scale of the disaster at Florence was enormous. There were about three hundred thousand volumes that suffered in the flood at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF), many not only sodden but covered in oil from broken heating systems.

After the flood, the Italian authorities reached out to the British Museum first. A British team was quickly assembled that included staff from the museum and a number of skilled workers from other parts of the country. These included Peter Waters, Roger Powell, Sandy Cockerell, and Tony Cains. Peter Waters headed up the team from the UK.

I came fairly early to the scene, in December of 1966—about a month after the flood. I was part of the British team. I had known Peter for a number of years. In fact, I worked for him and Roger Powell in the early 1960s. I was a twentysomething when I interviewed with Roger Powell to work at his studio. He asked, “What do you know about bookbinding?” I’d been doing it since age thirteen, so I had ten years of experience and I said, “Everything.” For the next few years, he proved to me how little I really knew. But it was interesting to me because I was a bookbinder in those early years and the thought of conservation didn’t really enter my head at the time. When the flood happened, I was teaching at Southampton College of Art as well as working with Roger and Peter. I will say this about Peter: I think we have lost a little bit of his skill in our profession. He was one of the finest binders I’ve ever worked with. I used to use him as my personal standard. When I was working with him, if I could do the work as well as he could, I thought I was doing fine. Peter and I had a very good relationship over the years. I wouldn’t be standing up here if it wasn’t for Peter.

Fig. 1. Flood-damaged books piled up at the Biblioteca Nazionale.

Some recovery activities had already begun before the British team arrived in Florence. The most significant of these was sending wet books to the tobacco kilns to be dried. To the untrained and inexperienced, the first thought would be to dry these wet, muddy, and oil-stained books, and that’s what they did. But the drying process in the kilns did, in fact, cause a tremendous amount of extra work. It’s sort of like the leather is burnt. Some of the books looked like pieces of roast beef. You would see marks on the fore edges of some of the books where they were set onto hot railings or metal rods in the kilns. There’s nothing you can do with burned edges, so it was a major problem going in. In retrospect, I don’t know what we would have done if we had been there up front before the books got dried like they did. I can feel sympathy for the Italian workers and students who thought they were doing the correct thing.

Fig. 2. International book restoration volunteers responding to the Florence Flood. From left to right: Bill Boustead, Don Etherington, Frank Tushingham, Desmond Shaw, John Corderoy, Joe Nkrumah, James Lewis, Chris Clarkson, George Jolly, Alfredo Cotogni, Stella Patri, Sheila Waters, and Tony Cains.

For many of us who arrived early on, the sheer size of the problem was a first. Some people would have come and seen three hundred thousand books soaking wet and covered in mud and oil, and would have lifted their arms and said, “This is impossible.” Somehow I didn’t go through that. I seemed to accept the challenge quite well, without feeling that the problem was too much that it overwhelmed my thinking. From the beginning we were all thinking, “What can we do? What’s the best way?” We didn’t think, “Oh, we can’t do anything.” That was the theme through Peter’s and Tony’s reigns there.

Fig. 3. Books damaged by heat-drying in tobacco kilns.

I traveled back and forth from England to Florence for various stints over a two-year period through 1967 and 1968. Southampton College was very generous in allowing me those extended periods of three to six weeks. My role was to train the new Italian workers in sound book conservation procedures. Some of the staff had some training and skills that were useful, particularly the leather workers from the famous leather trade in Florence. I had about three or four Italian men working with me on rebinding or repairing the books. There was a woman by the name of Barbara DeFreida who worked with us. She was from Florence, an American, and sadly she’s not with us anymore.

What became very useful in this training was the specification card developed by Roger Powell and Peter Waters and designed by Sheila Waters. It was produced in both Italian and English, so it became very useful for the Italian workers.

One has to realize, too, that many of the books at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in those early years were rebound using, if possible, the original covers. The floodwaters had often washed the original leather covers off the text blocks nearly intact. The covers were treated, but I don’t know what they were treating them with. One assumes it was some sort of oil to soften them. When you hear about soluble nylon being used, and benzene—we would never be allowed to do that today because of safety concerns. Workers rescued the covers and then hung them up on lines to dry, but a great deal of detective work was required after they were dry because in those early materials, books weren’t titled on the spine. It took a team of experts to try to match covers with text blocks.

A new conservation workshop was designed by Sheila and Peter for the British team and housed in the main reading room of the Biblioteca Nazionale. It was truly a remarkable lab, with specially designed workbenches that had light tables inset flush with the working surfaces. The nipping presses also were installed flush with the bench. When you mended something, you just slid in the boards—you didn’t have to lift them. There was good light for working.

Fig. 4. Book examination and documentation form developed by Peter Waters and designed by Sheila Waters.

From Florence to the Library of Congress

My work in Florence led to my being asked to help Peter Waters establish a new conservation program at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Peter asked me to come over from London as the training consultant. I came in 1970, one year before Peter and Shelia moved permanently to the United States. I started by training the new people. We advertised a lot for people, and at the interview, prospective hires did a test in front of me and a couple of other people. It was a dexterity test, if you like, and it was pretty useful to see how people who’ve never done anything could deal with double-sided tape and polyester film or could judge the grain of paper. I would demonstrate a task and then give them ten samples, and they would see if they could do it. It was a relatively simple test. There was one test where we asked them to draw five lines an inch apart on a piece of paper. Now that’s no big deal, but we watched what they did: whether they used a pencil like this or whether they did it lightly, and did they improve their spacing as they went down the five. Now, you might say that’s a bit esoteric. Indeed, we received some pushback from the employee’s union. But we continued to test the manual dexterity of all our workers.

Fig. 5. Book conservation workshop in the reading room at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, 1967.

The recovery from the Florence Flood taught us about working at unimaginable scale. Before Florence, restorers were trained to do one book at a time. All of a sudden now, we were faced with three hundred thousand books. It takes a whole different mentality to think about solutions at that scale. When Frazer Poole brought us over to the Library of Congress, we saw thousands, even millions of books in the library’s collections that needed work. Following our experience in Florence, our response was, “You can’t treat one book at a time thinking of all the millions of books in the Library of Congress.” The concept of designing mass preservation projects at the Library of Congress was a direct outcome of the Florence Flood experience.

One of the earliest mass treatments was the flood itself. It was the first mass deacidification project, because the Arno River had a lot of lime mud in the water. All the books got deacidified. That’s a silly way to look at it, but that’s what happened. A lot of the early books didn’t need deacidification anyway, but there were a lot of twentieth-century materials that did.

One of the first things I did at the Library of Congress was design what I called the “phase box.” Now we all know what the phase box is, but I designed it because I used to teach typographic design at Southampton College of Art. One of the things I had to teach there was how you lay out a cigarette package. It’s in two parts: the outer part and the thing you pull in and out. You have to set up the type on the packaging so it is always aligned with everything—the folds and all that. But in doing that course, I learned about folding and cutting, because when you set up for printing cigarette packets, there’s a cutter that’s in between rubber. When you print it, it cuts as well as prints. It creates little segments of the box. That’s where the phase box idea came from.

The first large phase boxing program was designed for the eight thousand books in the European Law Library collection, which were mostly vellum. Many of you know that a vellum binding gets distorted and it gaps at the fore edge, either because of the materials inside, which may be parchment, or because the covers themselves warp. We designed this phase box, but at first, we did it in one board. We soon realized that if you cut it out in one sheet of card, you have a tremendous amount of waste. It didn’t take long for us to decide to cut in two pieces. We had two parts and then they were put together. These were constructed with buttons and ties so as to place a little pressure on the warped vellum covers. That was the phase box.

Also, just like the specification card for the Florence Flood books, we designed a card for the Library of Congress Law Library books. Every book was photographed and recorded on a different card showing all the deterioration. That card stayed with the book.

We didn’t at first have skilled staff to do all this restoration on these early books. The idea was that after a number of years, we would have trained staff, able to restore the vellum-bound books in a professional manner. Carleton W. Kenyon, head of the European Law Library, thought of the phase boxes as “book coffins.” He said once, “You make these boxes, nobody is going to see the book.” It took six years to prove him wrong. We trained people, and after six years, we started work on the collection, as the conservation staff then had the skills to conserve them correctly. It was a big job, but working in stages could get it done.

When we arrived at the Library of Congress, they had two laminating machines working full time. Some of you most likely know these operate at 360 degrees Fahrenheit, with pressure, and they made all these manuscripts look like placemats. Thousands of documents from George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson at the Library of Congress still look like placemats, and it’s deplorable. In those days when we first arrived, the people working at the Library of Congress in conservation were Government Printing Office people. They were working on these machines—about sixteen of them, I think, eight to a machine, maybe. Those numbers got diminished, and we got rid of the machines within a very short period of time. One of the major problems then became, What are you going to do now with the really fragile documents? What was the answer? Encapsulation. In those days, it was double-sided tape and polyester film. Later on, Bill Minter invented a machine—still in wide use—that uses ultrasound to “weld” two pieces of polyester film together. So the tape and all the risks of using it weren’t needed anymore. (Except I would say if you don’t have a machine, you can still use tape. Just be careful.) These mass projects were a continuum, as you like, from Florence.

After our very bad experience in Florence dealing with books dried in kilns, we worked with the Library of Congress research and testing lab and a number of companies to develop a freeze-drying technique for wet books. This work also included working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Freeze-drying remains the standard practice for dealing with large numbers of wet books.

One important development that began in the Florence workshop early on was the discovery that limp vellum bindings seemingly flowed with the floodwaters and came out with only minor damage—a result of their nonadhesive binding form, as there was hardly any glue used in limp vellum bindings. The attachment of the covers to the text block was mechanical, with a thong or bands—it was a whole different way of binding than what we had experienced in England, where none of us encountered much limp vellum binding. Christopher Clarkson decided he would like to take the bull by the horns and study the whole issue of limp vellum binding and some stiff board vellum bindings. Chris was learning on the spot. He then showed me and we worked together to perfect our limp vellum binding technique. Chris, Desmond Shaw, and I all worked to understand these vellum binding structures. We produced a number of various styles of vellum and paper bindings for use as training aids for the staff at the library. I know if you’re not a book conservator, you may not think it’s such a big step, but for us, one of the major impacts of the Florence Flood was the still ongoing study of limp vellum and its adoption in the conservation studio. Chris wrote extensively about the technique, so now many conservators are using nonadhesive structures in their rebinding of early books, including the use of concertina guards.

Another really important outcome of the experience of conservators in the Florence Flood is the knowledge and availability of high-quality materials for treatment. The extensive use of Japanese paper for mending early books was developed in Florence. The Japanese paper manufacturers have likely benefitted from the now normal conservation practice of using Japanese paper throughout the world.

Now, I’m treading on somewhat tenuous ground here, but I don’t think Japanese paper was used in the repair of early printed materials until Florence, because prior to Florence, we were always trained in mending Western papers with Western papers. Nearly every restorer I knew, particularly Bernard Middleton, would have drawers and drawers of old paper that they saved from end papers and so on, which they then used to match the original. That repair technique is called “scarfing.” When you scarf the original, you take away some of the thickness of the paper at the edge with a knife or sandpaper, and then you “scarf” the edge of the repair paper, and you overlap and paste the edges together—it was a very effective method. In fact, I can tell you there are some papers I’ve seen that I treated but I didn’t know they had been scarfed and mended—they were that good.

By way of example, Harold Tribolet in his shop in Chicago was famous for making up damaged-looking replicas of the Declaration of Independence using paper that matched the original, printing with broken type to match the broken type that was on the original, and inserting it in the document to make a damaged Declaration look like new. It was a very good method, but what are you doing when you do that? You actually are damaging the original by sanding some of it off. The conservators at Florence felt it was awful to do that. But I know we all did it prior to Florence.

The use of Japanese paper and the long fiber technique was very important because one of the golden rules of mending and filling in losses is that the mend must be weaker than the original. If you always go by that as a golden rule, you won’t go far wrong in mending. That’s why the practice now is that the long fibers along the torn edge of the Japanese paper are the only thing that overlaps the original. Japanese papers can be a problem, however, if used to mend or fill original papers that are weak. If strong Japanese paper and paste are used on brittle materials, the strength is in the mend now: if the paper is stressed, the mend holds, but the original breaks again.

Heat-set tissue was also invented in Florence by Sidney Cockerell. Heat-set papers were produced by coating sheets of glass with an acrylic adhesive and then dropping lens tissue on top. When dry, the sheets of tissue could be removed safely. Heat-set tissue was used for twentieth-century and nineteenth-century material; we never used it for the early materials and still don’t. Now various companies produce and market a variety of heat-set tissue.

Another positive outcome of the restoration effort in Florence was the development by Italian paper makers of some really fine paper for end papers and for limp paper bindings. Also, we managed to persuade an Italian company to produce some really fine cord for sewing supports—it was wonderful to work with; it’s nothing like what you see in the store now or what you can get from supply houses. Another company produced some good-quality alum-tawed leather based on our specifications.

Not everything worked out as we had hoped. The wonderful program in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale de Firenze started by Peter Waters and Tony Cains never really got off the ground. An international center for the book, which could have had a wonderful home in Italy, never materialized. I think it’s pretty sad, and I’m a little upset that the International School for Book Conservation that Peter envisioned and we all supported never came to be. It was the one time, if you can imagine, when all this equipment, all these wonderful benches that Sheila helped design, drying cabinets, everything, were there. If there was ever one chance to have done that—not in the reading room of course, I know they would’ve moved it from the reading room—with a little ingenuity, you’d think the Italians could’ve worked it out. I don’t know what happened, but the opportunity was lost.

The impetus for conservation treatment that the Florence Flood disaster spawned in the United States—and, to a certain degree, in Europe—reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s with new labs opening in various parts of the country. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we have seen a marked decline in the field of book conservation. Many institutions have closed or downsized their conservation labs. The advent of digitization and scanning has contributed to this decline. I personally worry that we are slowly losing a skilled workforce in the conservation of rare books and archives. The current conservation degree-granting programs are starting to develop book conservation programs, and hopefully these programs will begin to develop skilled book conservators.