Virginia Vadillo
Murcia, Mar 31 (EFE).- There are historical books so deteriorated that it is not even possible to turn their pages. The restoration workshop of the General Archive of the Region of Murcia is the place where these documents can recover their functionality to be consulted again after undergoing a meticulous cleaning and recovery process completely handmade.
The hands responsible for carrying out the process are those of Esther Marcos, the restorer of the General Archive, where the only graphic document recovery workshop in operation in the autonomous community is located.
It deals with public documents of all kinds, from notarial protocols to records and minutes, maps and plans and any type of material on paper or parchment, coming from the archive’s own funds or from the region’s town halls.
In all cases, Marcos explained to EFE during a visit to this particular laboratory, the objective is that the pages of these books, darkened by the action of fungi and bacteria, pierced and torn by insect larvae, oxidized by old inks and stained by human action, return to being clean, whole, “so that the pages can be turned without tearing”.
Marcos restores the support, not the content, he clarifies: where the writing has been lost it is not possible to replace it since the documents dealt with are mostly originals of which there are no other copies to compare the missing parts.
HOW DO I RESTORE A DOCUMENT?
The restoration of a document begins by numbering, one by one, all its pages and then disassembling the book completely, since the pages are treated individually.
Thus, a “dry cleaning” job begins. Brush in hand, Marcos sweeps away all the surface dirt from each of the pages, which he then goes over with a scalpel and completes with different types of erasers.
Iron the sheets to remove any wrinkles, “just like a linen skirt,” he explains, since that material and cotton are the main components of old paper, called “rag paper.”
Once all the imperfections have been removed, it is time for a bath: the leaves are placed in a bucket with water where they are washed because, far from the general idea that paper and water are not good companions, the former needs the latter to stay hydrated. , since water is part of its manufacturing process, he emphasizes.
In this way, the sheets remain clean but are still torn, and Marcos is in charge of manually manufacturing the paper pulp with which he will replace those spaces, using linen and cotton fibers and different natural dyes that he mixes with water in different proportions in a “paper mill”, a machine about the size of a pot.
The sheets that had been washed in the tray are protected with a sheet of kozu paper, an extremely fine vegetable fiber that has two functions: protective, against rust caused by the inks, and reversible, that is, the restored material is can undo
An almost magical process then begins: that of filling in all the holes and broken parts, which is done with a “mechanical reintegrator”, a machine in which the washed pages are placed, which are covered again with water and fiberglass. paper made in the mill.
As the machine empties the water, you can see how the holes are filled with the paper fiber: when there is not a drop left, there is no hole left either, the sheet is whole again and it would be impossible to distinguish the original part of the addition except that the restorer takes the precaution of making the pulp slightly lighter than the original paper.
And it is that, as in painting, sculpture or architecture, all restoration must be “discernible”, that is, “you have to notice” which is the restored part and which is the original, he emphasizes.
Once the process is complete, the pages are left to dry before reassembling the book, which is bound by sewing it by hand on a small loom, with a needle and awl.
The duration of one of these restorations varies greatly depending on the size of the document and its state of deterioration: a notarial protocol from the 16th century, like the ones that are currently working, take an average of two months to work on, explains this expert, who has worked in the workshop since its opening in 2008.
THE ORIGINS OF THE LABORATORY
At that time there were three restorers at the center, which was closed during the crisis, in 2011 and 2012, due to lack of funds, and which resumed its activity now only with Marcos, who laughs when asked if there is much material left to be restored in the General Archive.
In it, he explains, there are currently 23 linear kilometers of documents, the oldest of them dating from 1284 (restored, by the way, by Marcos herself).
It forms part of the very scant one percent of the total that the restorer estimates has been processed, from funds that continue to grow each year: “There will always be documents to be restored as long as the archive exists,” he concludes.