Mapping Out Document Repair

Eric woke up with a cold this morning so mine shouldn’t be far behind – I’m thinking Thursday or Friday. But I’m afraid I'm just going to have to reschedule it, as there is absolutely NO time to loll about with Kleenex and TheraFlu, dozing and reading all day. I am in full throttle over here getting ready for the book fair which is just five weeks away. Yesterday I took on the job of repairing the hand-colored 1834 map of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and the settled portions of Michigan I found in the closet and showed you a couple months ago. It’s beautiful, but almost every fold had a tear and the section by the leather cover that protects it when its folded back to size had so many fold tears I had to ease it onto a piece of cardboard just to transport it from place to place. Last week I ordered from Talas, that magical wonderland of bookish equipment in Brooklyn, the Japanese paper needed to make the repairs. It arrived Monday, so I decided that yesterday was the day to tackle the job.

Of course it’s one thing to talk about it and another to actually alter a document of historical and monetary value. I had laid the map out face-up on the cardboard to relax the folds a month or so ago, but of course had to turn it over to work on it. This was not as easy as it sounds due to both its fragility and the leather cover inconveniently attached at the most vulnerable section. I could have made a sandwich and eaten half of it by the time I succeeded in getting the map to flip because just before turning it I zeroed in on a huge little problem. A very small section right in the middle had a vee-shaped tear that had resulted in a hanging chad. The tip of the chad was already gone which means that what remained was the equivalent of a partially severed limb that must remain attached at all costs.

It did – sort of --  but things got hairy enough to actually make my heart pound. Only the outer layer of the paper was torn, not the entire piece, so it should have been easy enough to have repasted it from the front before I turned it over. But I couldn’t because the tear straddled the torn fold and in one area there was a sliver of paper missing, so at that part the repair paper was needed as backing. I ran upstairs and re-read the directions for repairing documents I’d found online at a book conservation site, but nothing was mentioned about hanging chads. All I could do was wing it. So I did – and almost landed in big trouble.

I decided to repair the edge tears first and work my way in to the middle of the map which was a good move, as I had never used Naga Uda, the thin natural colored repair paper which costs more than seven dollars a sheet. It’s a fair sized sheet though and I only needed a small bit, but it had none of the characteristics I expected. I had been thinking fibrous art paper and what I got was glorified newsprint crossed with strands of fiber. It was easy to tear though – you have to tear rather than cut to get the strongest hold. Also, the thready edge that results from tearing produces a softer finish, though this paper is more about utility than softness and beauty. But at least the tearing process was old hat to me, as I do it all the time when I play with my art papers. What was tricky was lining up the torn pieces of map while making sure that it remained flat. Everything went well until I got to the problem spot. Gently – oh, so gently – I lifted the little green chad with the tip of my microspatula and eased the pasted repair paper across the torn fold. Success!

Feeling slightly more confident I then turned the map over (easy to do since most of the tears had been repaired) and carefully pasted the hanging chad. In retrospect, I really should have seen coming what  happened next. Any time you wet a small piece of paper that’s hanging by a thread  it’s going to fall off. Which it did. And then I couldn’t find it. Only I HAD to find it – quick!—because it had paste on it. Seconds stretched as I carefully felt around the face of the map with the tip of one finger. Nothing. But just as I was about to drop to my knees and crawl around on the floor I spotted it two inches north of the map, a tiny green speck on the workbench. Carefully, I picked it up on the tip of my finger, transferred it to another finger so I could repaste the back (the paste seemed to dry especially fast on the map paper), and then applied the new paste with a piece of narrow gauge wire. All that remained was to reposition the chad in the tiny space available. But of course a snippet of paper was already missing, so it wasn’t as simple as snapping a puzzle piece into its matching shape.

For a few seconds I studied the map like a chess board, then gingerly placed my precious piece of map where I thought it should go ...

Dammit, dammit, DAMMIT! Close, but no cigar. 

Now what? I couldn't take it off without making a worse mess and I couldn't leave it on because it didn't line up. Only one swift course of action was left to me -- jockey the wet little scrap into position without tearing it. I think at that moment an angel assigned to map-repairing amateurs flew down to direct traffic because under my nervous hand the little green chad slid quietly one smidge to the left  -- and landed perfectly in place.