Re: [GBW] Re: washing family documents

[Steven Hales <hales@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Tastes change and our knowledge advances, and both have led to the  
> decrease in the washing and bleaching of older materials.

I think that Dorothy is spot on here. It seems to me that attitudes  
towards washing, cleaning, and binding are often a matter of fashion  
more than anything else. I'm not denying that there are/have been  
damaging practices, but all binding and conservation work is a matter  
of risk assessment. There's a scale from "put it in an acid-free box  
and never touch it in any way" to "wash it, mend it, resew it,  
rebind, do it all."  But it strikes me as excessive moralism to  
stridently denounce anyone whose assessment of which risks are worth  
taking differ from one's own.

>  As to bleaching, it is hard to justify purely for the sake of  
> appearances.

Likewise, it is hard to justify rebinding a book, when we could just  
put it in a box in a dark, climate-controlled chamber for eternity.  
Books, prints, and maps have an aesthetic value too. Which is to say:  
appearances do matter. Untouched preservation for posterity is not  
the only thing that counts.

Steve

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