Though Christmas is not yet behind us, we are already spring-cleaning and re-organizing our collections in the Bollandist library. The beauty of the task is coming across our forgotten treasures, re-discovering them, holding them, opening them. In a library with more than 500 000 books, of which tens of thousands were published prior to 1800, one would expect to become blasé about antique volumes. Well, this is not the case with us. The excitement of opening an old forgotten member of our family is as great as ever. A number of these leather bound books need treatment to preserve their bindings. This is a meticulous job requiring a lot of care so that the oil does not seep into the paper: spines, crevisses and cracks are hydrated using professional materials and methods. We are aware that many libraries have stopped oiling their leather-bound books and prefer to protect them in archival boxes. But having consulted several professional book-restorers, we decided to re-condition the leather covers of these books. This is a time-consuming exercise, but which we consider as a gift to our books and to posterity.
