Inside the conservation studio behind the Shakespeare Recovered exhibition

I'm David Wright and I'm the Exhibition Curator for the Shakespeare Recovered Exhibition. The Conservation Studio at Palace Green Library I think is a really unique space. So often in my job it's very public facing, I'm in the public areas, I feel like I'm always running around from place to place, I'm always talking to people, trying to do too much and I find the Conservation Studio very calming. It has this atmosphere to it and environment that everything feels quite orderly. I think some of that's to do with how the space like looks and feels but it's also to do with the team that are in there who are so expert and precise and patient in the work that they do. It's something that I've actually really come to appreciate more and more over time, it's kind of opening the door into there. Not many people have a key to get in and you can step through the door and it closes behind you and you feel a bit calm and safe and protected somehow. When I'm working with the conservation team to assess an object to see if it's suitable for display, my general approach is to try and touch the objects or handle the objects as little as possible. Yeah in my training as an exhibition curator that was something that was really drummed into me and when you've got amazing historic interesting items in front of you it can be really tempting, you want to touch them and pick them up and see how they feel but in general that's not always the right thing to do for the object. Minimal amount of contact is usually good, that's particularly true in the case of the first folio which is incredibly fragile and delicate. Whenever I've seen it or been in the same room with it, it feels quite ceremonial in some ways when it comes out of the store room and then out of its very specifically designed box and packaging that it's stored in. In the exhibition we're looking at all of these separate pieces that it's in because of the vandalism it suffered and thinking about the best way to present those and in a way they sort of become, those individual pages are becoming like artworks or relics almost in themselves. In all of my work as an exhibition curator the collaboration with the conservation team is really essential. In my experience they do so much more than just advising on object conditions or ideal methods of display, it really is a collaborative process a lot of the time between curators and conservators thinking about the stories that you want to tell with objects really, thinking about what their condition allows you to say about them, thinking about the optimum way they can be presented to visitors. So in the Shakespeare first folio exhibition the dynamic between myself as an exhibition curator and the conservation team has almost flipped in a way, so conventionally with an exhibition I might draw up an object list and take it to the conservation team for discussion and we'd think about how we're going to display and present these objects. For the Shakespeare first folio project it was the conservation team coming to me with this amazing object, with this rich history, so many interesting research angles that are possible with it and thinking about how do we actually turn the conservation work that's happening with this object into an exhibition. So I am sewing a book and this is a modern proximity of Shakespeare's first folio, it's been bound in a 17th century style so I'm recreating a sewing style that would have been used at the time. So we know this sewing style was used because we can look at the book and see about signs of Herbie Richard Binder read it. So I'm sewing it on five hemp cords which I'm using a good strong linen thread to essentially bring the sections, these folded sections of pages together and attach them to these cords which will form kind of like a back skeleton. So this sewing style is a bit different from modern bookbinding so 19th, 20th century bookbinding. First off it's on these cords so you might when you think of an old book you might think of those bands you put on the spine and those are created by these cords. These sit proud of the spine and when the leather's got a bit molded over these you get those raised back. The other thing that's a bit unusual is the pattern that I'm sewing I'm going around each cord twice, I'm making two loops which is a style known as packed sewing and you get this uninterrupted wrapping around the cord there's no gaps there at all and again that's not really practiced out there. So bookbindings from the 17th century are generally at higher quality than modern books. As time goes on from the medieval period onwards you see books being bound ever more cheaply using cheaper materials, thinner materials and generally weaker constructions. So yeah the finio is fairly robust there's certainly a lot of material that goes into the binding and all that material is really good quality. Now these these cords and threads should last hundreds of years and many So yeah it's a lot more labour, it's a lot more time intensive to make books like this hence them being kind of luxury items at the time. So yeah bookbinding is really enjoyable there there is especially sewing a book there's a rhythm to it and actually you've got to take time to sit down and sew an entire book in one go which is always better. You actually form this rhythm and that produces a better quality sewing structure. There's a tension so as I'm sewing pulling on the thread you want to maintain consistent tension through the entire book. It's much easier to do that if you can just kind of relax and shred and get on with it. So by looking at old bookbindings you can tell an awful lot about the person who made it and the environment in which they work and there's some kind of like idiosyncrasies for some binders and you can actually trace the work on particular bookbinders based on how they're putting their books together. As the industrial revolution comes in the books are mechanically produced so you can use that entirely but during the hand printing and hand binding period these are full of little telltales. My name is Katie, I am an oil particle designer here and so I work on different materials books, paper, cotton, plexiglass. So the techniques that we use when dealing with paper, we kind of clean, surface clean, there's minimal intervention, preventive things that you can do but then the interventive side of things, you can wash, resize paper, fix any loose material and what I'm doing at the moment is repairing some paper that I've already washed. So that involves shaping repairs from Japanese paper which has really long fibres so you can infill with that and adhere that with wheat starch paste which is a reversible adhesive so if for any reason they needed to be or they could be. So that's what I'm doing at the moment, it's repairing a stack of paper that was booked but is currently disbanded and won't be being found again after they're finished. So after the conservation process we would expect the object to last for hundreds of years, a lot of parchment materials should last in the right conditions, it should last for thousands of years. I don't usually get anxious, I've got quite a lot of experience now and you really get feel for things and I actually really enjoy working on super fragile things. I like the challenge of that, so some paper that's been really mild damaged and really slack and dry but I actually really enjoy working on that kind of thing. Definitely need patience to be a conservator, you need to be able to sit for hours and get really absorbed in what you're doing for