Editorial Contents - THEO publishers

8
The “Golden Age”
of Restoration
It all started with the intelligent investment
of fifty florins. The beginning
of restoration and conservation
work in Czech archives and libraries
can be dated to 1869,
when the archives adjunct
at the Prague Municipal
Archives, Josef Emler, asked
the city council for
funds to repair damaged
manuscripts in the collection.
The city council approved
the sum of fifty florins,
and the work was
carried out by a bookbinder
from Prague’s New Town,
Eduard Fleissig. Repair work continued
to be done in subsequent years
by Vladimír Bukovič, generally regarded
at the time as the city’s greatest
expert in restoration work, who
also began conservation work on the
manuscripts of the public records of
the Kingdom of Bohemia.
In 1911 Bukovič began to work for
the Prague Municipal Archives; supported
by the municipal archivist,
Josef Teige, he established a conservation
division. In later years this
also developed into a centre for research
and for the testing of conser-
A printed book from 1618 after renovation
The restorer Michala Parmová and conservator
Jan Volgner defrosting and drying documents in the
drying room of the National Technical Museum
in Prague
The National Library in Florence in the wake of the 1966 flood
vation substances. It was also in
1911 that a graduate of Charles University,
Václav Vojtíšek,
became adjunct to the Prague
Municipal Archivist. He
worked closely with Bukovič
and was soon recognized
as the leading theoretician in
the field of the protection of
archival materials and their
conservation. Thanks to his
efforts, a conservation division was
established at the Bohemian Provincial
Archives in 1924.
A further conservation division was
introduced in 1936 at the Archives of
the Ministry of the Interior. In the
1950s the three largest Czech archives
were merged to form the Central
State Archives in Prague. This
institution initiated cooperation with
conservation and restoration units at
the National and University Library
in Prague as well as with various
district archives. The modest material
and technical facilities and even such
factors as temperature and humidity
levels and air circulation in the depositories
where archive materials were
stored slowly improved, along with
public awareness of the need for systematic
attention to the physical condition
of archival materials.