ASMR at the Museum | Library experience: handling and care of precious books | V&A

We're a closed access library and a reference library, so that means that the books are all held in stores behind the scenes, so you can't go to the shelves to find what you want, you have to use an online catalogue, find what you want, order it and then we go to the shelves and get the books for you and bring them to the reading room for you to then have a look at. So I've got a book sofa here and a weight and the book sofa is just filled with the sort of feeling you would get in a normal beanbag, that's essentially what it is. Create a bit of a well in the centre to support the spine and the two sides of the book. Position that carefully in the middle. I know that you want to see the middle of the book but the pages, if they're left without any help, they will flick over. So I'm just going to give you a weight, one of our book snakes, to hold the pages carefully in place without putting too much pressure down the middle of the book. But obviously you also want to read right into its gutter, so we do need to use the weights here just to hold the pages back slightly. We position them on each corner of the book like this, so it's not putting on too much pressure but able to do the job there. Okay and that's our book nicely supported but you can still read each page properly. Obviously the book weights for snakes are different shapes and sizes because of the different shapes and sizes of the books that we have in our collections. Some of our books are really big, some of our books are really small, so you need corresponding weights. This is quite a big heavy one. These are little beads of lead inside here it's got a satin cover so that it doesn't mark or damage the book in any way. And this is positioned on the corners of the page so that it doesn't bow or flick over in the breeze or anything like that. And it's often used when people are doing photography with their own cameras because we allow people to take their own images, that's no problem. Just tidy that one away. Excitingly someone has ordered one of the treasures of the library's collection today. It's Audubon's Birds of America which is a book which is in nine volumes and we've got one of them out here today. It's what's known as an elephant folio which as the name suggests means it's a really big book. So we've had to do a certain amount of preparation before the book arrived in the reading room. We've had to provide lots of supports so that we can open that book carefully and my colleague here is also going to help me open the pages for the reader so that they can look at the beautiful illustrations within without damaging any of the pages. This book is so big that it takes two people to actually turn each of the pages safely. So as we go through the book the shape of the spine changes slightly as you're putting more and more onto this side so we have to slightly adjust the support so that it remains supported as you're moving the pages. So we're going to tie this book because the textbook is coming away from the spine and we're going to use the linen tape to tie it together to keep it secure when it's going back on the shelf. So you need to measure out a piece of tape that's roughly twice the width and twice the length of the book and then you want to lay the tape out flat on the surface. Place the book over the top. Make sure it's flat going over the back. You want to make sure the knot's at the top so that when it goes back on the shelf it's not bulging against any books on the shelf and the knot needs to tuck in nicely so it's not going to catch as you pull it off.