Restoring a family story

David

Apr 8

I was recently given a commission by a family who had been keeping a Wedding Remembrancer going for what looks like almost 100 years and they hoped to keep it going for another hundred at least. Whilst it isn't dated, the paper, design and general structure of it places it around the turn of the last century.

The idea is very simple. It is effectively an everlasting diary with every day of the year in it and if a significant event happens in the family it is recorded alongside the year in happened. I don't want to put any photographs of the inside of the book here as they are all personal memories for the family. However, there are weddings, anniversaries, deaths and births all recorded in the book. Even events such as illness and accident have been meticulously recorded. For many of the events, newspaper cuttings have been saved and stuck in the book. Sadly, most of these were stuck in using old Sellotape which I have had to carefully remove and reattach the cuttings back in their original positions. the staining of the paper will have to stay but it is part of the story of the book. Here are just a few of the pieces of Sellotape I have removed!

One or two had something written underneath them so I have moved the cutting to allow the family to see the original entry as well as the cutting.

The signatures were all damaged at the spine and so I have guarded them all with Japanese Paper and also done some tear repairs on the edges of pages where it is likely the tear will continue to worsen. However, I haven't gone overboard as this is all part of the book's life and the family are keen to preserve as much of that life as possible. Finally I used the original holes to re-prick the new guarded edge.

Having completely pulled the book and removed all of the old sewing thread I have resewn the book onto a single tape (how the original was sewn) and the next job will be to work on the covers. I plan to use some cloth cleaner to see if I can bring some of the original colour to life but without losing that history again.

I will put more updates on here as the work progresses! However, one interesting element is that the spine stiffener looks like it was a law document and you can see the traces of it still stuck to the old spine here.