Wordfest Book & Document Conservation Clinic

We set out our stall in the Cathedral for the ‘Wordfest’ weekend 6 to 8 July – including our new explanatory banners. One is entitled 'Caring for rare books', the other 'Agents of deterioration'.

    

The banners were designed to promote the care of collections in the wider sense providing a window on what we do at Gloucestershire Archives caring for collections and also encouraging people to look after their own collections.  We did this using images of real documents about Gloucestershire that we hold here (plus one of the rat used to illustrate pests as an agent of deterioration).  People were often very interested in the archives illustrated including our earliest manuscripts, such as the Winchcombe Cartulary.  

The ‘Wordfest’, a celebration of all things ‘word', was an event run by the Cathedral over the weekend of 6 to 8 July.  Billed as 'an amazing weekend of talks, poetry, music, comedy, storytelling, crafts and much more', they hope to turn it into a regular event.  As well as talking to people about caring for their own treasured books and documents, we were able to talk about the new Heritage Hub. 

On Friday and Saturday, we were in the Chapter House, and on Sunday the Cloisters (also known to many as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry), so we are now claiming to have held  a Heritage Hub event at Hogwarts!

We met many interested and interesting visitors including a calligrapher who is keen to use historical examples from our collections to inform her work and that of her students; a local man who went to school in Hucclecote and used to play football in the empty warehouses at the docks, he has a collection of photographs of before the area was re-developed; and a man from China who was very interested in the paper samples we took along as his wife imports western papers into China.  Other distinguished visitors included a County Archivist (Heather Forbes), an ex County Archivist (David Smith), and a Cathedral Archivist (Rebecca Phillips).  We enjoyed meeting and talking to everyone especially the children puzzling over the piece of parchment Rachel gave them to identify (the Harry Potter connection was useful again here).

Ann Attwood - Collections Care Development Officer