Preserving history

As Paul Boncella stretches out a map from 1541 on his worktable, I immediately lean in to look at the location names and the intriguing illustration of a tribe of cannibals and an unidentified dog-like animal that draw the eye. For Boncella, however, the real story is in the map’s edges, the back and the paper itself.

“These maps actually have lots of clues about their origins on them,” he said.

Boncella is the book mender and map conservator at the Linn-Henley Research Library. It’s a job he began four years ago after a stint as a music professor for local community colleges and a few years as a concert organist. He also teaches genealogy classes and helps out at the circulation desk, but much of Boncella’s time is spent repairing, stitching and encasing various materials that the library doesn’t want to see deteriorate.

“When it’s all done, I know they are going to survive through the centuries,” Boncella said of his materials.

Boncella is called upon to repair a variety of books and pamphlets, but he said city directories are probably the most frequent item laid on his table. The books are heavily used by researchers studying the history of homes or their own ancestry, and the directories take a lot of damage.

“They were basically books that were intended to last for one year … but we’re still using the ones from the 1880s, and everything else up to the present, so they get an awful lot of wear and tear,” Boncella said. “By the time I get to them, they’re usually fragments.”

The tools of Boncella’s trade include several types of fabric and cloth, acid-free adhesives, replacement covers and sometimes a needle and thread. Boncella said many types of book repair can end up causing more damage to the book in the long term, so he’s always careful to put in the extra time to mend them properly.

On the mend

Boncella showed me the cover of one city directory sitting on his shelf to be repaired. It was no longer attached to any of the pages, and pieces of the binding seemed ready to fall away if I breathed too heavily. Then he compared it to a freshly mended directory, with a brand-new cover and all the pages secure within.

“When I get done, basically that raggedy old thing gets transformed into something like this here,” Boncella said, holding the mended directory.

For the people who come to Linn-Henley from across the U.S. and even other nations to do their research, Boncella’s work is critical to making sure they’ll have access to the years of records they need.

Linn-Henley has a surprisingly large collection of old donated maps, and working with them is Boncella’s favorite part of the job. He estimated that he works with a few hundred of them per year.

“We have the luck of having a number of map connoisseurs living in this town, who when they died left us their collection,” Boncella said. “The real bonus was the maps. I never imagined I would work with as many maps as I do here. As a matter of fact, it’s exceedingly rare.”

His approach to the maps is different from the books that come to his office. Boncella wants to conserve as much of the original condition of each map as possible. When a new map arrives, he looks for things like tears, sale prices, dirt spots and more that make up the story of each document. One memorable map had what appeared to be grease spots, but a look with a magnifying glass showed they were tiny cinder burns from the map being read near a fire.

“These maps actually have lots of clues about their origins on them,” Boncella said. “People in the future — because we haven’t scrubbed them to death — can actually study them, perhaps in microscopic detail.”

A lot of maps, like the one from 1541 that so captured my interest, have made their way through the ages with minimal damage. Boncella said this is partly due to high quality paper at the time, which had less acidity than later paper maps. But much of it is due to the preservation work of the owners before the maps arrived at Linn-Henley.

Other maps, however, come into the library “abused terribly.” They have been stored or displayed poorly, and Boncella has to do his best to reassemble maps that have turned brittle and broken into fragments. Some of those jobs can take eight to 10 hours to complete.

Boncella said he has worked with two maps that had fallen into such disrepair that many pieces were about the size of confetti. Indeed, one is still in his office, enclosed in plastic to keep the pieces together, until he can get the right kind of Japanese mulberry paper and about 20 hours to put the pieces back together again.

Once a map is repaired, Boncella places it in a Mylar plastic enclosure so researchers can continue to study it without the risk of further damage.

“When it’s all done, I know they are going to survive through the centuries,” Boncella said.

Tracing roots

When he’s not hard at work on a book or map, one of Boncella’s main loves is genealogy. He teaches classes around the area as well as at the library, and his main areas of specialization are African American and Native American genealogy. 

Due to the difficulty of tracing slave families prior to the Civil War, Boncella has gathered and studied a variety of records in Jefferson County for people to “bridge that particular gap” in studying their ancestry. He said he’s almost finished with another set of research on pre-1865 slave residents of the area.

“It is difficult, and it is challenging for them, but they can do more with it than you might think they can,” Boncella said.

Between old books and old families, Boncella has plenty at Linn-Henley to keep him busy.

“I think I probably have the best job in the entire system because I get to do things with my hands; I get to do research for my classes, which is really fascinating,” Boncella said. “I can’t imagine a better job in a library than the one I have.”