A day in the life of a Conservation Assistant

Meet Dorothy.

In the brightly lit room where she works to preserve the oldest and the rarest books in the Law School’s Langdell Library, Dorothy Africa shows a visitor her latest repair project— a 16th century edition of Roman law, written in Latin and printed and bound in Venice.

Her guest hesitates to touch it, fearing its fragility, but Africa encourages the exploration.

“Go ahead,” says Africa, the conservation assistant to the preservation librarian at Langdell. “What are you going to do to it that hasn’t been done already?”

Indeed, the book, while in need of repair, is in surprisingly good shape for such an old object.

“Look at the pages, that’s linen rag paper,” Africa points out. “You will never find paper as nice as this paper. They didn’t even know it at the time, but we do now.”

Africa also knows about the chemistry of papers and vellum. She knows how to research the materials used. And she knows the mechanics of books, which she calls “simple machines with moving parts” that need to be repaired according to how often they’re used.

Africa repairs objects from the library’s collection of more than 200,000 rare books and nearly 2,000 linear feet of manuscripts. That means more than simply gluing and taping bindings together. In fact, because the books are often one-of-a-kind historical objects that are more valuable for their physical attributes than their contents, tape and glue are the last tools Africa reaches for when restoring them to functioning order.

“My job is to save as much of the original item as I can,” says Africa, whose favorite tools are needle and thread. “We have a responsibility to the piece we’re working on, so a lot of it is forensic. Before you fix a book, you have to figure out why it broke. But modern materials can be just as interesting to work on. Not every item worth attention has to be old, nor does age alone make something valuable.”
Book conservation is Africa’s passion, though she pursued her Ph.D. in medieval studies at the University of Toronto in the early 80s. She was studying Irish history when she came to Harvard with her husband in 1981 to do final research for her thesis.

“I needed a job while I was here,” says Africa, who eventually found a job at Langdell. “I started here with woman who was the library’s first book conservator. We became friends, and I became more interested in what she was doing.”

Africa so enjoyed conservation work that she sought training at the North Bennett Street School in Boston. She took her current post in 1987.

In 2000, Africa began to work part time, hoping to write a book on women in Celtic history. But it has yet to materialize, since Harvard’s Celtic Studies department hired her to edit its journal. “There goes my book,” she laughs.

No matter. Africa has other books to console her. And, much like other artists who take pride in their work, Africa says she loves to look at the books she has repaired.

“I visit the stacks sometimes,” she says. “Just like Michelangelo – when he finished the Sistine Chapel, he could go look at it. That’s what I do.”