By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
Today the Church of England remembers the life and work of Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva from 1602 until his death in 1622. He gets a Lesser Festival in the Church of England – more than a Commemoration but not quite a Feast or Holy Day – but he is a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Francis de Sales was Bishop of Geneva at a difficult time; Calvinists controlled Geneva so De Sales lived in Annecy, about twenty miles south. Despite his banishment from Geneva, de Sales became known for his patient and peaceful approach to the religious turmoil of his day.
The church calendar is an excuse to delve into lesser-known books in the Exeter Cathedral Library. As it turns out, the Library has a number of works by Francis de Sales. The one pictured, Les oeuvres du bien-heurerux Francois de Sales, published in Paris in two volumes in 1647, has seen better days. There appears to be both fire and water damage on both volumes, which suggests two possible scenarios: either the books caught fire and were doused in water to extinguish the flames, or, the books got wet and were left by a very hot hearth to dry out. Whatever happened, the leather on the binding is hard and brittle and has lifted from the pasteboards underneath. The boards themselves are warped and much of the leather spine covering is missing.
The books might seem obvious candidates for conservation but, in fact, they would be very low down on any priority list. First, the binding has done exactly what it was supposed to do – it has protected the text block from damage – and has remained largely intact. The bindings are stable; they still function as bindings and are housed in an environmentally controlled store, which is, at least, preventing further deterioration. Second, the books remain in their original 17th century bindings and any invasive repairs would likely interfere with the original structures and possibly remove evidence of the life story of the books.
In fact, the damage is rather useful to our understanding of how books were made in the 17th century. We would not normally see the pasteboard beneath the leather covering or the sewing structure on the spine. It is interesting to see how the structure of books changed over the centuries – and where bookbinders made economies. Here, for example, each book is sewn on double cords but only one of the pair of cords is laced into the pasteboard – that sort of shortcut would never have passed muster in the 14th century!