California State Library Internship

The last two weeks I really packed on my workload and it has been a great challenge seeing what I have been capable of accomplishing. The reason for my cramped schedule is due to the recent start of my internship at the California State Library. In just a couple weeks I have already learned so much and each day I am excited about the wonderful things the library offers.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Dan Flanagan of the Preservation Unit at the end of February. Our meeting turned into almost two hours of talking about books and everything that goes along with them. As I went on a tour of their lab I was shown a leaf of a Gutenberg Bible, which I most certainly got overly ubber excited about. I can’t help but laugh at how I must have looked in my giddy state. A view of the vault revealed other great treasures including leaves of The Birds of America by Audubon.

I was surprised that the library had all this great information and I had never known about it being so close to home. It is a research library for California residents, but it is where much of the research for the Legislature and the Governor.



The purpose of this lab is to preserve books, but it’s more focused on paper. Not much rebinding goes on, but lots of paper mending and repairing the quick fixes others have made. Its always important to know the purpose of a lab and what it is capable of.

Dan is absolutely wonderful and always throughly answer all my questions. It’s like a one-on-one history lesson behind each questions and I really feel I’m getting a good understanding of all the processes and the reasons behind why something came about as a preservation technique. One recent discussion is why do late 19th century leather bindings not hold up as well as leather bindings from 400 years ago? Much has to do with how the leather was prepared from the start and how that process has changed today for time constraints. It’s all very fascinating.

Another great opportunity of being at the library is talking with Gary Kurutz, Special Collections Librarian. This week he brought back some of the rare books from the Sutro Library in San Francisco, to be worked on and among them was one of the volumes from Blaeu’s Atlas Novus. It is the only surviving copy from Aldolph Sutro’s private collection during the San Francisco earthquake fires of 1906, with a note inside saying “pulled out on Battery St.” Dan went through identifying the map that badly need flattening and mending describing how he would approach the treatment. Very cool!

I'll be posting pictures over in my Facebook album.