Paper Repair
Library conservators are faced with a variety of tears and losses (also known as lacunae or holes), and are trained in a range of paper repair techniques.
“Unlike his printers, who had their own ideas about punctuation, a scholarly editor publishing a letter like this one aims to reproduce it exactly as it was written, with no omissions, changes, or corrections. In this particular case, we couldn’t do that without help from the Library’s conservators. The manuscript had been pasted to some backing, and was torn, obscuring what was written on one side. The text seemed to show no punctuation after ‘well enough’ (line 6, right margin), followed by lowercase ‘but.’ But when the conservators ever-so-gently removed the backing, we could see, perhaps for the first time since 1876, that ‘well enough’ was followed by a semicolon. It’s the sort of thing that makes your whole week.”
– Bob Hirst, curator of the Mark Twain Project, discusses a letter from Mark Twain that needed conservation treatment.