By Megan Dougherty
Photos by Matt Williams
Opening the glass-paneled doors of her bookcase and picking up a cloth-bound book with gilded pages, Virginia Klaasen slowly turns to the inside cover and points to an inscription that reads “Christmas 1902.” Her mother had penned it many years before. “I grew up loving books,” Klaasen says, “loving the physicality of them—holding them, smelling them. Books have a smell, a wonderful smell.” On the shelves sit books from her past—books such as Wanted—A Chaperon, Girl of the Limberlost, and Flower of the Dusk, once belonged to her parents and grandparents. These novels are not among the list of classics most would render meaningful, but to Klaasen, they have great value. They are heirlooms that remind Klaasen of her family, some of whom she has never known. Still, she considers these mementos a part of her personal history.
Susan Lunas has a knowledge and appreciation for books that helps people like Klaasen stay connected to these histories. Lunas is a book conserver who founded Many Moons Book Conservation in Eugene, Oregon, nearly 26 years ago.
Lunas’s interest in book restoration began when she was restoring textbooks as a librarian at North Eugene High School. When a bookbinder came to town offering an instructional class, her supervisor at the high school encouraged her to take it. Later, Lunas and her husband relocated to Wyoming, where she learned of a program in New York that could lead her further into the world of books. Lunas initially passed up the opportunity because she was hesitant about traveling from Wyoming to the East Coast, but when her husband landed a job that led the couple to New Jersey, she was close enough to commute into New York City for school. She soon enrolled in Columbia University and the New York Institute of Fine Arts, where she received degrees in book and paper conservation and library sciences.
Lunas says her schooling translated into an education in “book structures, the chemistry of paper, adhesives and leather, and the heating ventilation systems of buildings … Anything that could cause something to deteriorate.” When Lunas graduated the market for book conservation was relatively small, and when she began working as a professional in the field, she found it difficult to find a job. So instead, in 1987 she opened Many Moons Book Conservation in New Jersey. After moving back to the West Coast to be near her family, Lunas re-established Many Moons in Eugene.
Now one of the Northwest’s few book restorers, Lunas stays busy fulfilling requests for her specialized services. “I repair and restore books, but I also restore family documents and anything that’s on paper. It can be a Japanese folding fan, military papers—anything,” she says.
Working out of her home in an attached second-story studio, Lunas is surrounded by the tools of her trade. Her many paintbrushes, scales, pastes, and magnifying lenses sit atop her worktables, and her desktops are covered with stacks of paper—projects from around the country that customers have sent to be restored. In one corner of her studio, covered by carefully placed parchment, sits an intricate drawing of a cat that she is restoring, while a Bible and an aged book titled New England Legends and Folklore lay nearby. Folders containing old, loose-leaf papers await the day Lunas can begin placing the pages in a restored book format where, together, they can tell the story they once told. Lunas’s work requires a great deal of expertise, which she’s gained through experience. “I’ve learned to think about myself as an artist,” she says.
One of Lunas’s more special projects is restoring a Winnie the Pooh book for Klaasen—it’s one of the many texts Klaasen’s family cherishes as an heirloom. Klaasen grew up reading an original copy of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh after she received the book around the age of three, and she says its stories are a vivid memory of her childhood. Through the years, the book came to have more meaning as it was passed down through the generations of her family. She has enjoyed reading the same book to her children, grandchildren, and now, to her great grandchildren. “The memory of the Winnie the Pooh books is probably one of the most deeply ingrained of my whole life,” she says. When Klaasen had children of her own, her mother gave the second book in the Winnie the Poohseries, The House at Pooh Corner, to Klaasen’s son, Christopher. Klaasen read these books to her son, and he grew to love the series just as she had. Later, after he was grown, Klaasen sent The House at Pooh Corner to Lunas for restoration. The damage was minimal, but the original binding was worn. Lunas gave the book a new binding and placed it, and the book’s original cover, into a custom-made book box. Klaasen then sent it to her son in British Columbia.
In the summer of 2012, tragedy struck when a mudslide leveled his home, pushing Christopher’s house off its foundation and down a mountainside. Nearly all of his family’s possessions were destroyed. About a month after the slide, Christopher went searching for items that may have survived the disaster. In the ruins of his basement, he saw a hole in the wall made by debris during the slide. Inside the hole, Christopher found The House at Pooh Corner. “He was so amazed and so touched by it, he sent the book to me with one of the most beautiful letters I’ve ever received, telling me about this experience,” Lunas says. “He asked, ‘Do you think there would be any hope of it getting restored again?’”
So once more, The House at Pooh Corner sits on a table in Lunas’s studio. This time, in much worse condition. The book box is so badly bent and distorted Lunas cannot open it to take out the book. She says the restoration process will be involved. Lunas expects she’ll need to first humidify the book box before she can open it and get to the book inside. Then she’ll reassess the condition of the book itself, which she expects may require another humidification process for its cover and its many pages. “A lot of things I work on just have sentimental value,” Lunas says. “Others may have a really high dollar value, too. But most of the time, it’s just something that someone really likes and wants to keep.”
Because books are often shared among families or given as gifts, their pages can become carriers of emotion and memory for their owners. “A lot of the books I do are Bibles or religious books and cookbooks,” she says. “Those are the two things that people use a lot, or have used a lot, and they fall apart.” Although these documents may not be valuable in the monetary sense, their personal meaning can render them priceless.
Lunas is also working on a book of love letters. In its current state, the project is a correspondence written in the form of telegraphs and letters on college fraternity letterhead—words written between a young couple separated during college. The couple’s great-grandchildren found the letters and wanted to preserve them as part of their family’s history. At their request, Lunas is binding the papers into a book that will forever be in the family’s possession.
Although books can link people, places, and events from the past, their place in the future is uncertain. Lunas says she is unsure what role the printed book will hold. Although mere paper, ink, and binding, have held countless pieces of sentiment, culture, wisdom, religion, and adventure since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press around 1449 CE, times have changed. Written books have taken on new meanings and adapted to new formats. Lunas, who has restored documents dating back to 1572, says many old-looking books are now being used as decorative pieces of furniture in homes or museums. She believes these texts representing pieces of history, if left unrestored, will fade into the past. Even documents from just 40 years ago, Lunas points out, have elements that no longer exist. “On older books you can actually feel the imprint of the text,” she says. “Now [books are printed] with a process where you can’t feel the imprint of the press, and that’s something you can’t feel with an electronic device.”
Although digital books, which can be purchased and downloaded with the touch of a button, are rising in popularity, traditional books still exist to be used in a practical sense. “Although a lot of people enjoy using Kindles, Nooks, and tablets to read on, it seems that people still enjoy the tactile use of a real book,” Lunas says.
But amidst the ever-advancing digital age, the effect is evident. The Eugene Public Library began digital audiobook lending in 2006, began offering Kindle format eBooks in September of 2011, and then added Adobe ePUB format eBooks in 2012. Jessica Stinson, an adult services library reference assistant, has taught classes on the use of digital literature at the Eugene library for the past three years. She teaches a class called Welcome to eReaders and Tablets, and she’s planning to add three new courses specifically designed for iPad, Kindle, and Nook users. “I do prefer an E-Ink device to any book that consists mostly of text,” Stinson says.
Stinson prefers electronic books because she likes having several books available in one device. She also likes that digital readers are easier to transport and more convenient because she can download a book at any time. However, she still sees value in paper books. “They don’t run out of battery power; they are more private; they don’t require computer skills, and the tangible books can be made of materials that are pleasing to hold, smell, and experience.”
Lunas believes no matter what the future holds for the printed word, books will forever be valued. Maybe not in the same way they used to be, but as a way to connect with history and to cherish memories of people and times past. “If we lose the paper book, there won’t be anything to have an emotional attachment to,” Lunas says. “By keeping the tangible book, they will still be there to know, love, and read in the future.”
