ABC – Ancient Book Crafts

Old books are venerable witnesses of our culture. They seem sublime, almost magical. But what makes an old book an old book? It is the handwritten texts, the scent of parchment, the crackling of old papers, the crunching of the artistically decorated leather bindings: each book is unique and precious. It is not the familiar title page, invented only in modern times, that reveals the age. In the centuries before, dates were given rather arbitrarily. This sometimes raises doubts as to whether the information is reliable. There is also the question of whether the book was written in one piece, whether the binding is still original or whether it has been rebound. The question of the age of a book can therefore only be answered by bringing together various aspects that concern content and materiality in equal measure. Our project is trying to develop a tool by applying both natural science and humanities methods to be able to reliably date unknown or questionable objects. On the natural science side, the chemical structure of the material of ancient cultural treasures is determined non-destructively with the help of infrared light (IR) - IR spectroscopy. For this, the device does not even have to touch the book. As the material ages, it changes, and we use this change to create a model that can be used to estimate the age of a material. To create the model, we need a set of books for which the age is undoubted. This is where the humanities methods come in, based on the evaluation of relevant entries in the books, historical binding techniques and tools. The Library of the Augustinian Canons in Klosterneuburg, as one of the largest collections of medieval books in Austria, offers the ideal resources for this. To check whether our model also works with books in other libraries, the project is coupled with a sister project in Slovenia. There, a set of books is compiled in the National Library of Ljubljana and measured using IR spectroscopy. However, the equipment is slightly different from that of the Klosterneuburg team. The devices will therefore be exchanged so that both devices measure both sets of books. Finally, we will also carry out measurements at the National Library in Prague in order to put the finishing touches to our models. At the end of the project, we want to make these models available to the public so that they can be used in many other libraries, archives, and museums in the future. The non-contact measurement also makes it possible to research sensitive objects that cannot be processed with many other methods. In this way, completely new research questions can also be answered and perhaps even the history of some books will be completely rewritten.