Chapter 4: Sizing

Sizing is the substance applied to paper to control its absorbency. Without sizing, paper is like blotting paper — porous, thirsty, pulling ink into its fibers in unpredictable ways, feathering the lines, blurring the words. Sizing gives paper its surface, its resistance, its ability to hold ink where it is placed rather than letting it spread. Historically, sizing was made from animal gelatin — boiled hides, hooves, bones — and the paper was dipped in it or brushed with it after the sheet was formed, and the gelatin filled the spaces between the cellulose fibers and created a smooth, impermeable surface on which the pen could move and the ink could sit, precise and contained.

Ruth thought about sizing on Monday morning as she began drafting the treatment proposal for the Grayson collection.

A treatment proposal was a formal document, submitted to the head of the Conservation Division for review and approval before any treatment could begin. It specified the condition of each item in the collection, the proposed treatment for each, the materials to be used, the estimated time, and the expected outcome. It was, in essence, a medical plan — diagnosis, prognosis, prescribed intervention — and like a medical plan it required the conservator to make judgments about priorities, about what could be saved and what could not, about how much intervention was appropriate and at what point the treatment itself risked causing more damage than the condition it was meant to address.

Ruth had written hundreds of treatment proposals. She could write them in her sleep. The language was standardized, the format fixed, the reasoning predictable — if the pH was below 5.0, you deacidified; if the iron gall ink was actively corroding, you stabilized with calcium phytate; if the paper was torn, you mended with Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste; if the paper was cockled, you humidified and flattened; if there was adhesive residue from old repairs, you removed it with the appropriate solvent. The decisions were technical, the judgments professional, and the emotional content was zero, or as close to zero as Ruth could make it.

She sat at her desk — not the lab bench but the office desk in the adjacent room, where the conservators did their paperwork — and opened the database and began entering the treatment plan for letter number one.

Item 1. Letter, Margaret Hollis Grayson to Captain William R. Grayson, dated February 12, 1861. Condition: Good. Paper: rag, linen/cotton blend, handmade, European manufacture. pH: 5.6. Foxing: minimal, three spots in upper right margin, each approximately 2mm diameter. Iron gall ink: stable, no active corrosion. Fold lines: intact, minor thinning at central fold. Tears: none. Staining: none. Previous repairs: none.

Proposed treatment: Surface clean with soft brush. Deacidification in calcium hydroxide bath (0.15% solution) for 20 minutes, followed by magnesium bicarbonate bath (0.25% solution) for 20 minutes to deposit alkaline reserve. Air dry on blotter, flatten under weight for 24 hours. House in acid-free folder within Hollinger box.

She moved to item two, then three, then four. The work was methodical, almost meditative, the language of conservation providing a framework that was both precise and comforting, a vocabulary that described damage and treatment in terms that were purely material, purely chemical, purely physical, terms that had nothing to do with the human meaning of the documents and everything to do with their survival as objects.

At ten o'clock, Dr. Miriam Voss came to Ruth's desk. Miriam was the head of the Paper Conservation section, a tall woman of sixty-two with iron-gray hair cut short and hands that bore the faint chemical stains of forty years of conservation work — the slight yellowing at the fingertips from decades of contact with solvents, the dry, papery texture of skin that had been washed and gloved and washed again thousands of times.

"How is the Grayson proposal coming," Miriam said.

"I'm on item twelve. I should have the full proposal by Wednesday."

"Good. The curator is anxious. She wants to include several of the letters in the Civil War exhibition next spring."

"Which ones."

"She hasn't decided. She wants to see them after treatment. But she mentioned the ones from 1863 — she's interested in the paper quality decline."

"The wood-pulp letters."

"Yes. She thinks there's a story in the material."

Ruth agreed. There was always a story in the material. The material was the story, or at least a story, running parallel to the narrative of the words, a secondary text written in pH values and fiber composition and ink chemistry and fold patterns and foxing distributions, a text that only conservators and paper historians could read but that was as eloquent, in its way, as anything Margaret Grayson had written about muslin and weather and the price of salt.

"The wood-pulp letters will need more aggressive treatment," Ruth said. "The pH on some of them is below 4.0. I'm recommending a double deacidification — calcium hydroxide followed by magnesium bicarbonate — plus a sizing treatment to restore some of the paper's strength."

"Sizing?"

"Methylcellulose, probably. Or gelatin, if they want to keep it historically appropriate. The wood-pulp papers have lost most of their original sizing. They're friable. If a researcher handles them without treatment, they'll lose material."

Miriam nodded. She understood. She had been doing this work for longer than Ruth, and she understood the particular anxiety of a paper that had lost its sizing — the way it crumbled at the edges, the way fibers lifted from the surface when touched, the way the paper seemed to be dissolving not from the inside out but from the outside in, losing its surface layer by layer, the words receding as the paper flaked away.

"Do you want to prioritize the exhibition candidates," Miriam said.

"I'd rather treat the most damaged items first. The exhibition isn't until next spring. The corrosion won't wait."

"Agreed. I'll tell the curator."

Miriam left. Ruth returned to her proposal.

She worked through the morning, the language flowing with practiced ease, each item a variation on the same structure — condition, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis. The repetition was not tedious but comforting, the way a musician might find comfort in scales, the familiar patterns reinforcing the foundational skills, the hand and the mind working together in a groove worn smooth by years of practice.

By noon she had completed proposals for twenty-four items. She saved her work, closed the database, and went to the lab.

James was at his bench, working on the Gutenberg fragment. He had moved past the resewing and was now cleaning the vellum surface with a mixture of deionized water and a mild surfactant, applying it with a cotton swab in small circular motions, lifting centuries of grime and candle smoke and handling soil from the surface. The vellum was emerging from under the dirt like a face emerging from behind a veil, the text becoming sharper, the letterforms more distinct, the black ink of the Gutenberg press standing out against the cream of the cleaned vellum.

"It's beautiful," Ruth said, looking over his shoulder.

"It's getting there," James said, which was his way of saying that it was beautiful and that he was proud of his work and that he would not say either of those things directly because direct statements of aesthetic judgment were not part of the conservator's professional vocabulary, or at least not James's version of it, which was spare and technical and occasionally, when he was pleased, understated.

Ruth put on her gloves and visor and returned to the Grayson letters. She had examined thirty-six of the sixty-three items and had twenty-seven to go. Today she would work on the later letters, the ones from 1863 and 1864, the ones written on wood-pulp paper, the ones that were in the worst condition.

She set the first of these on the light table. It was dated April 7, 1863, and it was in trouble.

The paper was brown — not the warm cream of aged rag paper but the dark, uniform brown of wood-pulp paper that had been acidic from the day it was made and had spent a hundred and sixty years getting more so. The fibers were short and brittle, breaking when she touched the edges with her gloved finger. The ink had feathered badly — the paper's original sizing had degraded, and the iron gall ink had spread along the fibers, blurring the letterforms until some words were barely legible. The foxing was heavy, covering the margins and encroaching into the text area, the brown spots overlapping to form larger stains that merged with the overall browning of the paper.

Ruth tested the pH. 3.8. Dangerously acidic. At this level, the cellulose was actively degrading — the acid-catalyzed hydrolysis of the glycosidic bonds was proceeding at a rate that would reduce the paper to crumbles within another few decades if nothing was done.

She photographed the letter under all four lighting conditions and noted the condition on her form. Then she read it.

My dear husband — I write to you on such paper as I can obtain, which is poor indeed and I apologize for its quality. There is no good paper to be had in the county and what there is costs more than I can spare. We had word that there was a battle near Fredericksburg but no details have come to us and I do not know if you were engaged or not. The children are well. Thomas has a cough that will not quit him but I have dosed him with honey and whiskey and he improves. The garden is not yet planted as we have had rain every day this week and the ground is too wet. I think of you daily and pray for your safety and for the end of this war which has taken everything from us that it could take and still continues to take more.

Ruth set down the letter.

She thought about Margaret Grayson writing on whatever paper she could get, apologizing for its quality, not knowing that the quality of the paper would determine whether her words survived to be read by a conservator in Washington a hundred and sixty years later. The good paper — the imported rag paper of 1861 — had survived beautifully. The bad paper — the cheap wood-pulp paper of 1863 — was dying. The accident of material, the accident of war, the accident of a blockade that cut off the supply of European stationery to a Virginia farmhouse, had determined the physical fate of these words, and Margaret Grayson could not have known this, could not have known that her apology for the paper's quality was also an unintentional prophecy of its destruction.

Ruth added the letter to her treatment proposal. It would need the most aggressive treatment she could offer — double deacidification, phytate treatment for the iron gall ink, resizing with methylcellulose, humidification and flattening, and possibly lining — the application of a thin sheet of Japanese tissue to the verso of the document, adhered with wheat starch paste, which would reinforce the weakened paper and prevent further losses but which would also change the document's feel, its flexibility, its material character, in ways that were subtle but real.

Lining was a significant intervention. It was the conservation equivalent of a skin graft — it added new material to the document, changed its physical properties, made it stronger but also different. Conservators debated lining the way surgeons debated radical procedures — it could save the patient, but it altered them. A lined document was no longer entirely itself. It was itself plus the tissue, itself plus the paste, itself plus the conservator's judgment that the original paper was too weak to survive on its own.

Ruth made the recommendation and moved on.

She examined eight more letters that afternoon, each one a step further down the material decline that mirrored the historical decline — the paper getting worse, the ink more degraded, the foxing more extensive, the pH dropping, the cellulose weakening, as though the war that was destroying the Confederacy was also destroying its paper, as though the political and military collapse of a society could be read in the pH of its correspondence.

The last letter in the collection — item sixty-three — was the one written to the captain's mother. It was dated July 1864, two months after William Grayson was killed at the Wilderness, and it was written in a hand that Ruth almost did not recognize as Margaret Grayson's. The careful, educated letterforms of 1861 were gone. The writing was small, cramped, the lines close together as though the writer was trying to fit as many words as possible onto a single sheet of paper, which she probably was, because by July 1864 paper of any kind was scarce. The ink was pale, watered down, stretched. The paper was the worst yet — thin, brittle, deeply acidic, the fibers so degraded that the letter had split along both fold lines into three separate pieces.

Ruth held the three pieces together on the light table and read the letter under magnification.

Dear Mother Grayson — I cannot write to you what I feel because there are no words for it in any language I know. Your son was my husband and the father of my children and he is gone and I do not know how to live in a world that does not have him in it. I write to you because you are the only person who can understand what I have lost because you lost it too. He was your son before he was my husband. You knew him longer. You loved him first. I am sorry that I am writing to you on such poor paper but it is all I have. Please know that the last letter I received from him, dated April the 20th, spoke of you with great tenderness and he asked me to send you his love and now I do.

Ruth set down the magnifying visor.

She sat at her bench in the quiet lab and looked at the three pieces of the letter laid on the light table's glow and she thought about the word treatment and what it meant. In conservation, a treatment was a physical intervention — a chemical bath, a mending, a lining, a housing — designed to stabilize a document and extend its lifespan. It was a technical procedure, governed by protocols, executed with tools and materials, documented in a proposal and a report. It had nothing to do with the content of the document. It had nothing to do with what the words said or what the writer felt or what had happened to the people whose lives had produced these papers.

And yet.

And yet Ruth sat at her bench and looked at the three pieces of the letter and thought about Margaret Grayson writing to her mother-in-law on the worst paper she could find, apologizing for the paper, apologizing for everything, writing the word sorry on a sheet that was already dying, that was already acidic, that was already beginning the slow chemical process that would, over a hundred and sixty years, reduce it to three separate pieces held together by nothing except the attention of a conservator in a laboratory in Washington.

She thought about treatment. She thought about what it meant to treat something. Not just the paper. The word itself. To treat: to deal with, to handle, to address, to care for. To treat a patient. To treat a wound. To treat a document. The word carried within it the assumption that something was wrong and that something could be done about it, that the damage could be assessed and the remedy applied and the outcome improved, even if the improvement was only a delay, a postponement, a buying of time.

She thought about the letters in her closet.

For the first time in four years, she did not put the thought aside. She held it. She turned it over, the way she turned a document over on the light table, examining it from both sides, recto and verso, looking for the damage she already knew was there.

She knew the treatment. She had always known the treatment. Deacidification, phytate stabilization, resizing, mending, housing. The same treatment she was proposing for Margaret Grayson's letters. The same materials, the same procedures, the same chemistry. It was not complicated. It was not beyond her skill. It was, in fact, well within the scope of what she did every day, with her eyes closed, with her hands moving from memory, the practiced motions of a woman who had been repairing paper for twenty-four years.

The treatment was not the problem. The treatment was never the problem. The problem was the examination — the first step, the step before treatment, the step that required her to look at the letters, really look at them, not with the quick clinical glance she had given them four years ago but with the sustained, detailed, thorough examination that her training demanded, the examination that would require her to handle each letter, to photograph it, to test it, to record its condition, to spend time with it, to hold it in her gloved hands and read not the words — she could not read the words — but the paper itself, the ink, the evidence of her mother's hand, the pressure of the pen, the quality of the paper, the particular shade of the iron gall ink, which would tell her what kind of ink her mother used, which would tell her something about where her mother bought her stationery, which would tell her something about her mother's daily life in Lagos, which would tell her something, however small, about the woman who had written these words that Ruth could not read.

The examination was the problem. The examination required proximity. And proximity — to the letters, to her mother's handwriting, to the material evidence of her mother's life — was the thing that Ruth had been avoiding for four years with the particular skill of a woman who was trained to see damage and who had turned that training, in this one case, toward the opposite purpose: toward not seeing, toward not examining, toward keeping the letters in the dark, behind the sweaters, in the shoebox, where they could continue their slow deterioration without her witnessing it, the way a patient avoids the doctor not because the doctor can't help but because the diagnosis would make the illness real.

Ruth completed her examination of the Grayson collection. She secured the materials in the vault. She went back to her desk and finished the treatment proposal, all sixty-three items, every pH value, every foxing distribution, every corrosion point, every tear, every stain, every fold-line weakness, all of it documented, all of it diagnosed, all of it prescribed for.

She submitted the proposal to Miriam at four-thirty.

Then she sat at her desk and looked at her hands — her own hands, ungloved now, the hands of a fifty-six-year-old woman who had spent twenty-four years repairing paper, the fingertips slightly calloused from the microspatula, the nails cut short, the skin dry from decades of washing and gloving — and she thought about what her father had said.

Because you preserve things. It is what you do.

The sizing of a sheet of paper — the gelatin, the methylcellulose, whatever substance was used — gave the paper its surface, its ability to hold ink, its resistance to the spreading and feathering that would make the words illegible. Without sizing, the paper was permeable, porous, open to everything, and the ink would spread and blur and lose its definition.

Ruth had always thought of her professional competence as a kind of sizing — the training, the vocabulary, the protocols, the clinical distance, the ability to handle documents that contained other people's grief and fear and love without absorbing those emotions herself, without letting them feather into her own fibers. The sizing kept her functional. It kept the words on the surface, where they could be read without being felt, where they could be treated without being experienced.

But sizing degraded over time. That was the thing about sizing. It broke down, it lost its effectiveness, the paper became permeable again, open to whatever liquid was applied to it, unable to resist, unable to maintain its surface, the words bleeding through.

Ruth went home. She made tea. She sat at the kitchen table.

She did not open the closet. But she thought about it, for the first time in four years, with the specific, sustained attention of a conservator who was beginning, against her will and her training and her twenty-four years of professional distance, to examine something she had been keeping in the dark.