Coming Home Damaged

Shakespeare First Folio conservation at Durham has meant confronting real damage. Durham’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio — one of only 235 known surviving copies of the roughly 750 first printed in 1623 — was bought by Bishop John Cosin in the 1620s and has belonged to his library in Durham since 1669. It was stolen from display in Cosin’s Library in 1998 and returned ten years later badly damaged, its binding gone and some of its earliest leaves missing. This film follows the team working to conserve it, made for Shakespeare Recovered, the exhibition at Palace Green Library exploring that work, where it was shown in Cosin’s Library alongside the Folio itself and the pages removed when it was stolen. The same Shakespeare Recovered project also produced Binding the Bard, a film following bookbinder Dominic Riley and the judging of a competition to design a new binding for this facsimile.

What Was Lost

“When I saw the book itself, its binding not just removed, but brutally ripped off, with all sorts of contingent damage — it was a horror,” says Professor Richard Gameson, “not just because it was a damaged book, but because of the amount of copy-specific information that had been removed at the same time.” Conservator Lauren Moon-Schott describes the physical evidence: sewing-thread tunnels left empty where cords should be, the opening of the book’s early pages relying on a strained adhesive spine lining rather than the sewing supports that should carry that weight.

You can actually see cracks in the adhesive layer, where it’s been strained as it’s been opened over the years.

As Durham’s Head of Conservation Tony King puts it, “without those really important cords, we’ve lost all that integrity from the structure.”

A Book as Its Own Witness

The damage created a real dilemma for the conservation team. “Binders of the past would easily have rebound the book, done anything necessary to get it back into a binding,” Moon-Schott explains. “But we have found that there’s actual evidence of the book’s history in its physical being, and making alterations to that structure removes that evidence.”

Its fabric is a witness to great trauma, but at the same time that has brought to light features we cannot currently see in any other copy — how it was put together, what remains of its sewing. It’s uniquely revelatory as well as uniquely traumatic.

— Professor Richard Gameson

Reading the Evidence

Durham’s expertise in heritage science, and its facilities at Palace Green Library, let the team bring a wide range of techniques to bear on a single book. Professor David Messinger uses hyperspectral imaging — capturing hundreds of colour measurements per pixel — to detect material differences invisible to the eye: a later addition to the words “Troilus and Cressida”, done by a different hand at a different time, is revealed this way. Professor Andy Beeby uses X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to analyse the gilding on the book’s edges, checking its composition against other books bound by the same binder. And Alexander C. Q. Jansen is building high-resolution 3D scans of the fragile spine, creating a baseline to monitor the book’s condition over time.

Every Copy Different

Shakespeare First Folio conservation also means understanding what makes Durham’s copy unique among the survivors.

Every First Folio is a little bit different in its materiality and how it was made. They were all made by the same processes, but with so many hands working on it, over so much time, each one came out just a little bit different — that’s why it’s such an exciting example of bibliographic study. You can find something new in every single one.

— Lauren Moon-Schott, Conservator

A Pared-Back Approach

Shakespeare First Folio conservation has meant asking hard questions about intervention. The conservation team’s guiding question, Moon-Schott says, has been why, and what they are gaining, from any treatment. “What we might have gained from putting the book into a new binding did not outweigh what we can learn from the book in its current condition. So we’ve chosen a very pared-back method of treating it. The book will always be the best witness to its own history.”

This project sits alongside my wider work as Filmmaker and Podcaster in Residence at Durham University.