I interviewed Jim Reid-Cunningham, library conservator and master of the ancient art of bookbinding, in his secret laboratory deep beneath the basketball court.

Bob: How long ago did you come here?

Jim: I started working here in 1984.

Bob: What were you doing before? Were you doing other conservation stuff?

Jim: I got out of college in the 1970's and moved to Boston. The Cambridge Center for Adult Education had a class in bookbinding which I thought would be interesting. It was taught by a very old bookbinder, and OK training as a hobby. There's a bindery in Boston called the Harcourt Bindery that has been here since well before World War I. It's really the last surviving hand bindery in Boston. They had evening classes and I took a couple of classes there. So I was working in a psychiatric halfway house in Allston, going to graduate school, and taking these binding classes. I was really interested in doing bookbinding for a living, but there were limited opportunities for studying bookbinding in the United States. After my daughter was born I realized that it would be impossible to go off to Paris for a couple of years and really work with some masters and actually learn to do this, and so I gave up on bookbinding. In 1984 I was looking for a job, and I found this job at the library at the Design School for someone to do book repairs. At that time all we did was minimal mending of circulating books.

Bob: I know the guy who had the job before you. And he did this just one day a week.

Jim: A lot of the job involved sending things out to a library bindery, or just putting bookplates in books. The librarian at the time, Jim Hodgson, was very interested in doing more to preservation the collections.. It was really a fortuitous conjunction: I wanted to learn more bookbinding, and Jim wanted to improve our conservation capacities. The kind of stuff we have at the Design School, where we have lots of large items, lots of strangely sized items, lots of things with loose material, hinged material or big flat maps, a lot of that stuff does not lend itself to assembly line work.

Bob: So much of what you do is the patient, hands-on, one-step-at-a-time type kind of things that drive me absolutely bonkers.

Jim: Most of what I do is stuff that can't be fixed in a fast or rough way. Things that are tough and supple and resilient go to a library bindery. I work on fragile or valuable items, those things with a valuable binding that is worth preserving. I began by doing thousands of five minute repairs, but we have changed the focus of the program, and now I work on a smaller number of rarer books, whick are done with the idea this should be the last time that most of these items are ever going to be repaired. In the old days, we used to repair things with tape, which falls off after a few years. A small group of books--maybe a couple of thousand items in the library--that really got used a lot would cycle through repair once every five to ten years. Now I do one good binding that's strong, that has chemically stable materials, and that opens easily especially for photocopying. That way I shouldn't have to do the same books over and over.

Bob: You mentioned Paris. You can't learn this at a regular library school like Simmons.

Jim: Until the 1960s, bookbinding was a skill that you learned as an apprentice. It was a trade, a field that somebody who wasn't particularly bright or educated or had much money could go into. As the trade became more mechanized the hand craft aspect of it died out. So there were fewer and fewer people who would teach any of this. In the sixties and seventies there was a renewed interest by baby boomers in craft fields because crafts appeared to offer a more interesting career than pushing papers around. There has really been a sort of Renaissance in bookbinding in this country in the last twenty five years, but it's still difficult to get training. The only place in the United States that has a bookbinding program is the Bennett Street School in Boston, where I studied for two years in the 1980's. It's the only place you can go and have endless hours of bench work, which is essential for a field like this. It's not something you can pick up in your spare time, you have to work on objects every day.

Bob: Even from Gutenberg times to almost the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a standard way of making books, where they were sewn together in chunks.

Jim: Sheets were folded and they were sewn through those folds around some kind of cord or tape as a support, and that cord or tape was laced into the boards of the book. That is why we refer to a book as bound, because it's tied together. The development in the nineteenth century and the twentieth century has been away from sewn structures, especially in the last fifty years. Now most books are made up of single sheets that are glued on end, kind of like a pad of paper. You can just peel the sheets off.

Bob: I've had college textbooks that did that as I was reading them.

Jim: Most books are not of any value at all. If you destroy them and throw them away it's no loss. It's unfortunate that, by and large, publishers don't produce well made books anymore. The shabby structures and materials make repair infinitely more difficult, sometimes impossible. I mainly work on nineteenth and twentieth century books and so I don't get to work on a lot of books that were made out of fine materials to begin with. Things that are made of good materials are easier to fix and they come out looking better. Books made of poor quality materials still look kind of lousy even after my best efforts.

Bob: We have a lot of things from back before the turn of the century that are still, they're kind of brittle but they're still in solid shape. And a lot of the stuff we get recently just kind of falls apart.

Jim: There's also beeen a change in people's tastes in books. Glossy paper for example is very popular now, and glossy paper is almost impossible to repair because simply it can't stand moisture or heat. If you glue down a tear it's very stiff where that tear is glued down, where with matte paper you can paste it down and you really won't notice the repair. It will be almost invisible especially if it's well done. We're getting more and more books that you can't really make look good, no matter how high quality the repair work is.

Bob: About how many people are doing this kind of work now?

Jim: There are not a lot, considering that this is the biggest university library in the country. You would think that Harvard would be a leader in library conservation, but we have always been behind the curve on conservation. It has to do with the structure of the school and "Every tub on it's own bottom." If you set up a conservation unit at the Design School, the Design School has to buy all this equipment: board shears, presses, you name it. If you set up a bindery at the Med School, they have to buy all this stuff, and on and on. In an ordinary institution where the administation is unified, you'd only have one set up one bindery, and half a dozen people would use it. So it's simply cheaper and easier in any other type of setting. Maybe that's why Harvard libraries have traditionally almost avoided doing this kind of work. There are about a dozen people around the University that do various kinds of conservation, although here at Design we have the best facilities. I can do most any repair, from the simplest mending up to relatively complex repairs. There ís a bindery at Widener that does lower level work, but they have insurmountable problems, just because of the volume of what they have.

Bob: Also the age of Widener's collection--a huge amount of the collection is ancient.

Jim: It's much older. Our collection is mostly nineteenth and twentieth century stuff. There is very little before 1800, and before 1700 it probably doesn't amount to 100 or 200 books. Then again, those are the most enjoyable items to work on, but they're the ones you're less likely to fix in the first place. You're more likely to box them and keep them the way they are, unless actually using them will destroy them.

Bob: I need a good summing up question. Any advice to other people who want to get into the profession? Don't! Don't! Whatever you do!

Jim: No, I actually hesitate to recommend to people that they go into bookbinding. This is a good field to go into if you really want to do this kind of handwork. But it has always been a difficult field to get training in. And it is hard to find a job. Up until the seventies, virtually everyone in the field was self-employed. The trend in seventies and eighties was for institutions to open places workshops, and so a lot of people now work in institutional settings, but we've gotten to the point where few institutions are opening new facilities, so there won't be many more jobs. In most fields it used to be simple to find a job, but it is increasingly more and more difficult these days. In bookbinding, it has always been hard to find a job. Binding has always been this way--it's just that the rest of the world that caught up.

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