This is a guest post by RBML researcher Elizabeth McCall, who visited the archives this spring as part of her project on archival housing.

Archival Layers of Keeping

In preparing a project related to archival housing, I have been spending time in the reading rooms of Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. My broader project explores how archival objects are continually shaped through different practices of keeping, from bindings and wrappers to boxes and conservation housing. What first struck me in my reading room encounters was how rarely archival objects arrive alone. Books emerge from fitted boxes; loose papers come nested in folders; altered volumes carry layers of wrappers, coverings, and later conservation housing. These surrounding structures are easy to read as purely protective, but they also shape how objects are handled, understood, and encountered.

One example is an 1886 printed book brought to the reader in its altered state and now additionally maintained within institutional conservation housing. The original publisher’s binding remains intact, but it is covered completely by a velvet wrapper with fitted silk doublures stitched by hand to fit the original cloth boards. The intricate handwork was part of the gift, presented by the artist to her sister. The front cover’s velvet is decorated with blue grosgrain ribbon with picot edging. Inside, watercolor illustrations and gilt illuminations not only enhance the printed pages; blank pages have been filled with additional handwritten poems and illustrations. Neither the velvet binding nor pictorial intervention replaces the book as issued; both sit alongside it, altering its appearance without displacing its earlier form. The result is a volume that appears both co-authored and co-bound.

Seen in person, the silk velvet cover does more than protect the book. Before the volume is even opened, it establishes a sense that the object has already passed through someone else’s care, and the delicately soft cover suggests a continued obligation of care in handling. The added decorations introduce handwork into the space of the pre-printed page, extending the book beyond its original structure. The later conservation enclosure functions differently again: less intimate than the textile wrapper, but equally part of the object’s continued life in the archive. Together, these additions make visible the many ways a book can accumulate different forms of “keeping” over time.

Another case also makes this clear. A small set of German prayers dated 1738 survives not as a bound volume but as loose gatherings kept within a fitted leather box, now further stabilized through institutional housing. When brought out for consultation, the tooled leather enclosure is what first establishes the object’s coherence. Without it, the text would be difficult to handle as a unit, its order easily disrupted. The leather box does not simply protect the prayers; it provides the condition under which they remain together in use.

At the same time, its enclosure does not fit the text in the way a binding might. The gatherings remain separable, capable of being examined individually. The fitted box and later acid-free housing hold them together without fully determining their arrangement, maintaining a balance between containment and flexibility that reflects successive moments of care.

Across these two cases, archival objects emerge as things shaped by layers of keeping that accumulate over time. Wrappers, boxes, enclosures, and conservation housing do not simply surround objects after the fact; they become part of how those objects persist and how they are encountered by later users. Spending time with these materials at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library has made it possible to notice these latent histories of care, which remain visible in the archive long after their original makers and keepers have gone.