Plant remains in heritage books

 Up at the Athenaeum today we had a little conundrum.

We had been donated a book dating from the early 1870s, which had been given as a Sunday School prize to a member of a local family still resident in the area.

The book's exact provenance is unknown - there are some markings in pencil that suggest that at some time it had been resold in a second hand book store, but there's no doubt about its origins - the original dedication is intact which gives the name of the recipient, the date, and the location - in this case Three Mile, a now vanished mining settlement on the outside of Beechworth.

Unfortunately, the book is a wreck. The spine's is broken, there are loose pages, possible insect damage, and foxing, and is probably not worth conserving, but might be worth retaining as is because of its local connection, especially as the family still live in the area.

But when I was leafing through it to check for damage I found this

someone had at some point put a small plant inside, possibly as a keepsake or a bookmark.

Now, if we decided to preserve the book because of its connection to a local family, rather than simply photographing the dedication on the fly leaf, what do we do about the plant remains?

Well I didn't know. Google was singularly useless, so I appealed to mastodon.

No one replied, but I had a brainwave.

When I was a much younger man, I had a girlfriend who was a field botanist.

When we went for a bushwalk, if she found an interesting plant she hadn't seen before she would take a sample, wrap it in a bit of newsprint and put it inside a field guide for later identification.

Putting it inside a field guide kept the sample flat and the newsprint absorbed the moisture (more or less).

Proper herbaria - reference collections of dried plants - are a little more elaborate, but not by much, with the plants being pressed flat on absorbent acid free paper and then transferred to a fresh sheet of archival paper and attached with archive quality paper tape and then stored in a sleeve or folder.

And this gave me an answer to my own question

1) transfer item to sheet of archival paper
2) secure in place with archival tape
3) photograph, document etc
4) fold paper to make a packet without damaging the item
5) place in archival storage box in labelled acid free or tyvek envelope

Given that the book is so damaged if we decided to retain it would probably make sense to tie it up with cotton tape and place in an archive box, in which case we would simply put the plant packet in the box along with the book, that way we keep the association between the two objects ...