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The second floor of Shannon Library at the University of Virginia is home to a place where books go to get well. Or, at a minimum, usable.

“My goal is not necessarily to get it looking like it once did,” explained Sue Donovan, a special collections conservator for UVA Library. “We want these to be as intact and true to their history as possible.”

A medieval Italian choir book, believed to date to the 14th or 15th centuries and held in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, illustrates the challenges Donovan faces. Classes in Special Collections, UVA-based Rare Book School, University faculty and even real choirs on occasion used the leather-bound volume, which was in distress before Donovan began working on it. The leather on the book’s spine had become so dry it was flaking off. Even opening the book risked damaging it.

Donovan carefully opens the book to avoid further damage to its spine. The book’s size indicates it was meant for a group of people, such as a choir, to be able to read at once.

After months of work, the choir book is in good shape again. Not bad for an object that’s twice as old as the United States, and then some. Donovan estimates she spent about 100 hours analyzing the book’s construction, repairing its spine, and even taking it to UVA Health for an X-ray.

UVA Today followed each step of the process. Not every project Donovan or her fellow conservators take on is as complex, nor is every object so old. �鶹�ƽ�� conservation lab will also work on 20th-century children’s books, for instance, or an ornamental sword belt from 1841. But each project requires care and skill.

Origins and condition

The choir book came from a Franciscan household or monastery, according to Rare Book School faculty member Martin Antonetti. Archivists believe this because a leaf from the book, recently sold at auction for thousands of dollars, depicted Saint Francis receiving the stigmata.

Much of the choir book’s leather had peeled away from the spine, while the rest stubbornly clung to the book, held in place by a strong adhesive applied in the past. Donovan carefully pried off old pieces of leather with a knife before working up a bovine gelatin mousse – prepared similarly to gelatin and passed through a sieve – and applying it between the book’s raised sewing supports that bound the folded parchment signatures together. She tested the process to make sure it would work before applying this treatment to other sections of the spine.

“This is leather that has failed. It used to serve a purpose as helping connect one board to the other, but now it’s very friable,” she said.

Donovan saved scraps of the leather for future research. Although it’s unclear what kind of leather the 35-pound tome was bound in, testing the scraps to see what animal it came from could give conservators clues about when and where a book was made and what purpose it may have served.

The physical components of the large choirbook illustrate the 500 years of changes and use that the manuscript has lived through. During the 1700s, someone added a page of paper to the choir book, while every previous page had been made of animal skin. Someone also may have added brass coverings to the iron bosses on the book’s leather-bound wooden covers. According to Antonetti, people even covered the Latin words in the book because, while the music stayed the same, the liturgy would change.

Once the spine was clean, Donovan glued pieces of paper to the spine between the sewing signatures. Gelatin, once again, came in handy.

“I’m using gelatin as an adhesive for the first spine lining, and I’m using gelatin because we know it can be removed with water later. There’s a reversability aspect to this, because someone down the road might need to do a much bigger intervention than what I’m doing now,” Donovan said.

Later on in the process, Donovan applied strips of airplane linen, attached with a pungent fish glue, on top of the paper to strengthen the spine and help with board attachment. Fish glue and gelatin are “compatible,” so they stick well to each other. She also used glycerin, which helps the glue shrink less as it dries. She dyed and toned the cloth so the color was similar to the leather binding. Then, she made a coroplast sled for the book, which allows it to be stored and transported safely. She also built a cradle so researchers and conservators can handle the book with minimal wear.

In November 2021, the . The X-rays and CT scans produced from this visit helped Donovan gather evidence about how it was made without damaging its integrity. The scan revealed a striking observation: The media used to draw the musical staff was visible in the X-ray, which indicated the presence of metal. In 2025, using a hand-held analytical device, Donovan concluded the lines were made of vermilion, which contains mercury.

A new life

A group of students at Rare Book School was among the first to see the newly conserved book and examine its components. The book is a complex composite of parts: its vellum pages are so large that many of them have holes that were patched prior to being used; the hand-drawn illustrations in vibrant shades of blue, red and green would have cost a pretty penny. Remnants of what could be a loop on the back cover could have been installed to prevent thieves from stealing it off the lectern.

“This is a deluxe manuscript,” Antonetti told students.

It survives thanks to Donovan and her colleagues.

“I want people to still be able to use this 100 or 150 years from now,” Donovan said.