Each year, the staff of Special Collections choose several items from the Rare Books collection to undergo conservation [1]. We prioritize rare or unique items that we believe are likely to be of broad academic interest and whose condition would otherwise make it difficult for researchers to consult them without causing further damage. The goal of the conservation process is two-fold: stabilizing or repairing existing damage on the one hand and preventing future damage on the other. This year, one of the items selected for conservation was Ms. 112, a holograph manuscript (that is, a manuscript in the author’s own hand) of Orestes Augustus Brownson’s 1857 memoir The Convert: Or, Leaves from My Experience. In addition to conserving this manuscript, we have also scanned it and made the resulting digitization publicly accessible [2].
At the peak of his career, Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) was well known as a Catholic author, editor, and publisher who wrote on a wide array of topics, including political and societal realities, ethics, and philosophy. Today, he is particularly noted for his commentary on the American political system and the intersection between American and Catholic identities. However, nothing about his family background or his early years made this career seem likely. Brownson was born in 1803 to Presbyterian parents in relative poverty, and was largely self-educated throughout his childhood. Although he was sent to live with another family as a child, where he was exposed to Congregationalism, he was ultimately baptized in a Presbyterian church in 1822. In the years following, he served as a minister in both Universalist and Unitarian churches before joining with Emerson, Thoreau, and others to become a founding member of the Transcendental Club. His conversion to Catholicism in 1844 marked the end of this religious and philosophical sojourning, though his ideas naturally continued to develop and evolve for the rest of his life. In The Convert, Brownson narrates his journey into the Catholic faith.
The manuscript copy of The Convert in Catholic University’s Rare Books collection is written in ink on blue ruled paper and includes numerous corrections and editorial changes throughout the text. Although the manuscript had been bound into book form by the time it was added to the library’s collection (the bookplate of a previous owner, Bishop Michael O’Farrell (1832-1894), appears on the inside front cover), the pages were likely loose sheets when Brownson was drafting the text. This is suggested by the fact that Brownson wrote very nearly to the edge of each page. It is extremely unlikely that the pages could have been written upon in this way while they were incorporated into a binding, and, as margin would also have been required to accommodate binding in the future, it seems likely that Brownson also did not plan for the manuscript to be bound at the time of writing. When the pages were eventually bound, the binder had no margin to utilize when assembling the text block, and was therefore compelled to sew into the text of the manuscript itself.
This posed a problem both for researchers accessing the manuscript in person and for our plans to digitize it. Because of the way the binding had been assembled, the first words on some pages and last words on others were partially obscured in the gutter of the binding (the “valley” at the center of a book, where the pages come together at the spine). Not only were readers unable to see these obscured portions, but a scanner was also unable to capture these portions of the text.
In consultation with the professional conservators at Quarto Conservation, we determined that the best way to capture as much of the text as possible during the scanning process was to remove the pages from the binding carefully, so that each page could be scanned individually and in its entirety. While this might sound like a drastic measure, it is actually accepted as best practice in cases like this, and is common even at institutions such as the Library of Congress.
An additional challenge emerged once Quarto began work on this project. As is usual with bound volumes of this type and era, the pages of the manuscript were sewn together. That stack of assembled pages, often called the text block, was then affixed in the binding using glue. Unfortunately, in this case, some of the glue seeped between the pages, adhering the pages to each other in addition to adhering their edges to the binding.
Separating some of the pages held together by this glue could have damaged the writing near the edges of the pages, and such damage would have been irreversible. In order to avoid that, therefore, we chose to keep those clusters of pages together. This is not ideal for research or digitization, but it is unquestionably the best option for the preservation of the manuscript. While some of the text near the edges of the pages does remain obscured, having removed the sections of pages from the binding still made scanning easier and will permit future researchers significantly improved access to the text.
Once the manuscript was returned to Catholic University, a member of the Special Collections team scanned the entire manuscript. The resulting digitization is now freely accessible on Catholic University’s JSTOR page here. To see the manuscript in person, or to visit any of the other items held in the Rare Books Collection, please make an appointment by emailing lib-rarebooks@cua.edu.
[1] Blog posts about previous conservation projects can be found here: 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025.
[2] Many thanks to the experts at Quarto Conservation for their excellent work on this project and to Darren Stephens for scanning the manuscript.