Repairing Books, Not Erasing Time

At the City Archive, paper conservator Hana Okafor spends much of her week repairing books that were never designed to last for centuries. Cheap paper, weak glue and repeated handling have left many volumes with broken spines or loose pages. Visitors sometimes imagine that Hana’s aim is to make these books look new again. She says the opposite is often true. A successful repair should allow a book to be read safely while preserving evidence of its age. A faded label or carefully written note in the margin may be historically valuable, even if it makes the book look less perfect.

Before any repair begins, Hana studies how the damage happened. A torn page caused by one accident may need a different treatment from paper that is gradually becoming brittle. She also checks whether an earlier repair is creating new problems. In the past, librarians sometimes used strong tape because it seemed like a quick solution. Decades later, the adhesive can become dark and hard, pulling on the paper around it. Removing such tape can take far longer than repairing the original tear would have done. For Hana, this is a reminder that a treatment should be judged not only by how well it works today, but by what it may do tomorrow.

One of Hana’s current projects is a collection of school notebooks from the 1930s. The handwriting is ordinary, and the notebooks are not beautiful objects. Yet together they show how classroom routines changed over time: what children copied, how teachers corrected work and which subjects received the most attention. Some pages contain small drawings or private comments that were never meant for anyone else. Hana handles these carefully because their value lies precisely in their everyday nature. If only formal certificates and prize-winning work survived, she says, historians would receive a misleading picture of school life.

Conservation involves plenty of technical skill, but Hana is cautious about dramatic interventions. She uses thin Japanese paper to support tears and makes boxes that protect fragile covers. However, if a stain is stable and not damaging the page, she may leave it alone. Removing it could require chemicals or washing, both of which introduce new risks. This surprises visitors who expect restoration to remove every visible defect. Hana compares her role to helping an elderly person walk safely rather than making them look younger: the goal is continued use, not the removal of every sign of age.

Digital copies have changed the way the archive manages fragile material. Researchers can often begin with scanned images, reducing the number of times an original item must be handled. Hana welcomes this, but she does not think scanning makes physical conservation unnecessary. A digital image cannot show exactly how thick the paper is, how a book opens or whether several kinds of paper were used in one volume. These physical details can matter to researchers. Digital access protects originals, but it also creates new reasons to preserve them carefully as objects.

Hana says the most difficult part of her job is sometimes deciding not to act. People naturally notice a repair that has been carried out, while a wise decision to leave something unchanged is invisible. That can make restraint feel less satisfying. Yet she has learned to value uncertainty. If conservators are unsure how a material will respond, future techniques may offer a safer answer. In such cases, doing less today can keep more possibilities open tomorrow. For Hana, conservation is not about defeating time; it is about making sure time has not finished the conversation.

The archive also photographs major repairs before and after treatment. These images are not intended to make conservation look dramatic; they provide a record of what was changed and what materials were added.