Learning a historic craft is a form of preservation. Katherine L. Beaty, a rare book conservator at Harvard Library, has spent the last nine months exploring Italian archives from Torino to Roma to Palermo. She surveyed examples of Italian archival bookbinding structures from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries, while exploring the origins, evolution, and transmission of this medieval record keeping book binding style. After a thorough and methodical documentation of over four hundred books, Beaty returned to the studio to reconstruct samples from across Italy. In studio 255, you will get to handle facsimiles of medieval record-keeping books made using historical methods. You can also explore the materials used to make these bookbindings, including paper, thread, historic dyes, leather, and parchment; and see books in the process of being bound.