Buster Brown Before Treatment
The conservation lab is working on two printed and bound editions of comic strips that originally ran in The New York Herald at the turn of the 20th century. The books are part of the Cooper-Hewitt Library collection.
The first is Buster Brown, a strip chronicling the adventures of a naughty young boy from a wealthy family growing up in New York City. The strips feature the predicaments Buster Brown finds himself in and the strip ends the moral that Buster finds at the end of each adventure.
The second strip is Little Nemo in Slumberland, a surreal strip depicting the fantastical dreams of a little boy named Nemo. The images depict peacock drawn carriages, rabbits hatching out of eggs and giants. At the end of each strip Nemo awakens before danger befalls him.
Little Nemo in Slumberland Before Treatment
The books are both staple bound with very little of the original covers remaining. The paper is brittle and there is loss around the edges and at the staple edge due to stress. The original binding obscured the edge of the strips and caused breakage at this stress point. The challenge is to rebind the books so that they open flat and retain as much of the original covers as possible.
Buster Brown After Treatment
The solution is to take the single sheets and create sections that can be sewn into a new textblock. A new cover is created using new binder’s board covered in toned airplane linen. A frame is built around the cover enabling the original cover pieces to be inset into the new cover. This new binding opens fully so that the entire strip is visible and the cover ensures that the original cover pieces will not deteriorate further.
Buster Brown After Treatment
—Katie Wagner
