From rotting leather bindings to unstable photographic materials to fragile, crumbling papers held together with aged plastic tape, there are a plethora of challenges faced when preserving historic documents and books. The condition of materials is based upon many factors including how the documents are currently housed, how they were stored prior to becoming part of the Society’s collections, and how they were treated as they were created or originally collected. The following images are from A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding. Published in 1856, James B.

When the Conservation Department received this 1807 land agreement from the Louis H. Carpenter Collection, it looked like this: