CCAHA
Past Issues
2011
November/December 2011: Known as the "Poet of the People" for his ability to capture in writing the struggles of ordinary Americans, Carl Sandburg produced a wide range of critically-acclaimed works in his lifetime. CCAHA recently surveyed 2,500 volumes from Carl’s personal library at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Read more here.
September/October 2011: This issue features the story of a private collector who decided to honor her great-grandmother's memory through preservation of her portrait, a crayon enlargement completed in the late 19th century. Read more here.
August 2011: Buena Vista, in New Castle, DE, was home to several prominent Delawareans, including Clayton Douglass Buck, governor and a United States senator. After receiving conservation treatment, historic documents that he displayed there -- and that now belong to the Delaware Public Archives -- will once again hang in the house. Read more here.
July 2011: German-speaking immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries documented their religious beliefs, as well as important events in their personal lives, through decorated manuscripts called fraktur. The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College has selected 32 fraktur to receive treatment at CCAHA through a Save America's Treasures grant. Read more here.
June 2011: From June 9 to 17, CCAHA welcomed visitors from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Natalia Avetyan, Tatiana Sayatina, Natalia Laytar, and Evgeniia Glinka learned the basics of photograph conservation, a field that does not yet exist in Russia. Read more about their visit and the initiative to establish a photograph conservation department at the Hermitage.
May 2011: The New York State Library’s collection of letters, contracts, maps, and other papers from the Manor of Rensselaerswijck documents 200 years of business transactions, daily routines, and traditions in one of America's earliest European settlements. Read about CCAHA's treatment of many of these fire-damaged manuscripts here.
April 2011: Vilmorin-Andrieux & Cie, the 19th-century seed company, was known not only for its quality product and research but for its impressive publications. Eleven plates from its celebrated Album Vilmorin, owned by the National Agricultural Library, recently received conservation treatment at CCAHA. Read more here.
March 2011: The 1864 engraving Reading the Emancipation Proclamation was one of few images commemorating the freedom order to focus on the reactions of freed slaves. Read about treatment of one family's cherished copy here.
February 2011: CCAHA book conservators treated and digitized nine unique botanical volumes from Pennsylvania Hospital. The books will be featured in the exhibition "Flower to Pharmacy" at the Hospital's Historic Library in Philadelphia, PA. Read more here.
January 2011: For the past 115 years, the Swiftwater Preserve fly-fishing club has been fishing the same stretch of stream in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. A 1938 hand-drawn map that details the area just received treatment in CCAHA's paper section.
2010
December 2010: CCAHA's book section treats Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered the first geographical atlas and the most comprehensive summary of 16th century cartography. The volume is from Boston Public Library's Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.
November 2010: CCAHA conserves performer and activist Paul Robeson's letters, writings, Broadway posters, and concert programs, all from the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection of Temple University (Philadelphia, PA).
October 2010: CCAHA conserves the Meade Album, the result of a Civil War veteran's life-long project to assemble photographs of all the officers in the Union Army of the Potomac, from the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia.
September 2010: CCAHA's book section treats Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original manuscript for The Adventure of the Empty House, a Sherlock Holmes story, owned by the Rosenbach Museum & Library (Philadelphia, PA).
August 2010: CCAHA treats a 1920s large-format poster advertisement for a renowned Parisian seafood restaurant.
Book conservator Theresa Cho mending pages of a diary from the late 1800s (July 2010 FOCUS)