Period Fine Bindings

Removing Ink Stains

This content was first published April 17 2007, and updated January 2018

Ink stains happen by a variety of different ways, accidental spills, a child with a biro, or a stamp happy librarian or bookseller (you would think they of all people would know better).
But fortunately it doesn’t matter how long the stain has been there, it can usually be removed by a professional conservator.

These stains are more than a couple of hundred years old and the ink had penetrated through to more than fifty pages of this rare book.
The problem is there is no quick fix solution, the properties in the ink need to be analysed, and the properties in the paper need to be replaced after removal.

A few years ago a person was sent to prison for stealing rare books from institutions and selling them for a fraction of the price. The newspapers reported that the person was a “Master forger” as he had removed  the institutions library stamps with “great care”. The police found his “forger’s” kit in a luggage locker in a railway station, it consisted of….a pair of scissors… with which he cut out the library stamps.
One of the items was a first edition of Newton’s Mathimatica.
Bet he wished he could do it this way.

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