AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

When requesting a book from the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can expect to be presented with a rectangular, book-shaped box, or 4-flap. What you might find inside that enclosure could be a shoe, a bottle, a can of soup, sheet of pasta, or a very small book in a much larger enclosure. The Watson Library’s holdings of over 1 million books includes an international collection of over 10,000 artists books which relate to the Met’s art collection and utilize the book format in some way. A key focus of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation is ensuring these materials are accessible to patrons with minimal intervention from staff. Only around 80 items in the collection require handling assistance. The inclusion of greater numbers of artist books and books with non-book-like formats on library shelves requires streamlining the design of special housing for books of unusual size, shape, and materials, while keeping in mind shelf space, upright storage, usability, ease of production, and the sustainability of materials. The poster is focused on easily integrated methods of producing housing for items that must be stored individually on library shelves and will be handled by patrons rather than curators, conservators, or library staff.

We will illustrate in our poster 3 to 5 specific housing solutions, designed for specific objects, that have been integrated into our workflow. For example: an early 3D printed book, “Orihon”, by Tom Buronwood (2014), is a fragile, plastic, and sizeable object (13 x 20 x 20 cm). It consists of eight leaves hinged together in an accordion style. The housing used was a clamshell box fitted with padding for shelf stabilization and an easily constructed drawer made of mylar. It includes simple worded instructions for patrons to operate the drawer, remove, and replace the book.

Another one of our examples is a miniature book, Le Nouvel Almanach Sans Titre: Mais Très-galant, et Chantant (1776). This delicate embroidered binding measures 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 cm and is made of white satin and decorated with intertwined silver gilt thread and flowers. Because each of our miniature books are shelved separately, we need an easily constructed custom insert, not made of foam, that securely holds small items in a container that won’t damage neighboring books or get lost on the shelf. An insert designed by a prior Library intern and pop book artist, Kyle Olomon, allows us to use standard book size 4-flaps and custom fit them with a simple folded and pasted bristol-board insert to secure the book inside of the enclosure.

In addition to these and other selected solutions, we will have on hand a series of printed images of various housing solutions tailored to the challenges of many other artist books from our collection.