This is cool

Did you ever wonder how tears in book pages were repaired before tape existed?

Well, here's one way of doing it.

They embroidered fancy darning work over the holes! Granted, it's parchment, which is made from animal hides and therefore is thicker than cellulosic paper, but still, this is something different and something I would never have thought of as a repair.

They used silk thread, so it was a protein fiber used to repair something that (I presume) was primarily protein. In some cases the thread has rotted away (the black thread especially) because the dye agents caused it to break down. The modern conservators of the book used a spray glue and thin silk scrim to further stabilize those parts so the black thread wouldn't disappear altogether.

This method of repair makes me think of the Japanese tradition of repairing pottery with very obvious seams and repairs, in contrast to the more typical Western tradition of trying to hide repairs and make them "invisible." I am not sure if Kintsugi (that is what it is called) is mainly to show the strength of the repair (gold and silver are usually used) or if there's also some element of "honoring" the piece and its history and the fact that it broke in service. (Another story on kintsugi is here.

I have a few pairs of socks where I darned small holes using a matching, but not perfect match color (because I didn't have any of the original yarn, and was unsure that using a close-match embroidery floss would work well). I admit I always felt self-conscious about those repairs (fortunately they tended to be in hidden places, like the sole or the toe) because they weren't "perfect" and "invisible" - but then again, I couldn't just throw out the socks, they still had use in them, and besides, there was a lot of work that went into making them.

I do wonder about differences in attitudes towards repairs; in the US it seems we are obsessed with making them as invisible as possible so the piece remains as "mint" as possible (And yet, at the same time, there are some things - like repainting old painted furniture - that are a no-no if it's something really valuable.) I wonder if other cultures, or if at different historical times, people were less troubled by the idea that things would sometimes have to be patched. (and I wonder if our desire for things to be new and up-to-date and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses has something to do with our discomfort about patched clothing or repaired ceramics)