The treatment goals of the project were to :
- Repair and stabilise the damage to the textblock
- Enable the hidden or hardly accessible annotations accessible
- Prepare the manuscript for digitisation
- Rebind the manuscript as two separate volumes to enable better protection of the manuscript as well as improve the physical handling and display potential
The manuscript consists of two volumes – the text and the illustrations which had been bound together as one volume in a late nineteenth/early twentieth century Museum-style half leather binding with cloth sides and exposed cloth jointed endpapers. The size of the paper used for the text is slightly smaller than that of the illustrations indicating two separate volumes. The tightness of the binding prohibited the full reading of the annotations that can be seen in the gutter area. The volume not collated (no page numbering) but the drawings are numbered and correspond to the text.
The current leather binding was showing signs of deterioration with red rot exposed where the surface of the leather has abraded. The leather had also discoloured the paste downs as well as the first and last leaves of the original paper where they were in contact. Due to the smaller size of the text part, all edges of the textblock were vulnerable to dirt accumulation and mechanical damage, tears and losses.
The main damage to the volume appears to be water damage as it was evident that at one point moisture had migrated into the textblock from the foredge inwards. This largely affected the drawings resulting in staining and corrosion of the paper caused by the inks and pigments (iron and copper).
Treatment
Before the treatment started the whole volume was collated with a soft pencil to ensure that the leaves would remain in their current sequence even if the leaves were treated individually and out of numerical sequence. The current cover was removed and the spine was cleaned of all adhesive residues. Prior to digitisation, the textblock was stabilised and any breaks in the paper due to the copper corrosion were repaired with gelatine coated Japanese paper. General paper edge repairs - mainly at foredge- were also treated with Japanese paper and wheat starch paste.
Despite the stabilisation and careful conservation that has been carried out on the volumes by the professional conservator, there remains many weak areas in the leaves due to the degradation of the paper caused by the copper corrosion and so the manuscript will always have to handled with great care. It is essential that this manuscript will continue to be kept in the best environmental conditions possible in order to prevent the progression of further copper corrosion.