"Making and sharpening knives" to be held at Oxford Conservation Consortium in September 2010 (360G-Wellcome-093859_Z_10_Z)

This two-day workshop will offer training to mid-career book conservators in a skill which is fundamental to their practice. The skills developed in this workshop will be used in on-going work to conserve a collection of books which belonged to Charles Daubeny ( 1795-1867), a lay fellow in medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a practising physician at Oxford's John Radcliffe Infirmary. Daubeny's heavily used working library is catalogued onto the University of Oxford online library catalogue (htt;://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/olis/) and is housed in the laboratory/lecture room which Daubeny built. The first phase of work on this important collection began in May 2009 and it is hoped that funding will be found to continue the work in the future. Edge tool sharpening is directly relevant to book conservation as a large array of small and large knives, often made by the conservator him/herself, is needed for activities such as lifting original leather when re-backing, edge paring and thinning . new leather to a particular thickness, shaping and scarfing parchment when repairing, etc.; the success of these operations is greatly enhanced by using edge tools which are custom made for specific purposes and suitably sharp. Sharpening is not always taught on book conservation courses and is a skill which can be picked up but often with difficulty. Other trades which use edge tools, such as carpentry, have very different sharpening practices designed for the requirements of their tools, such as woodworking planes, chisels, etc. which are sharpened to very different angles in comparison with book conservation edge tools. While there is some cross over, book conservators still often experience difficulty in adapting the sharpening techniques of woodworkers to their conservation tools and requirements. In addition, there are very few suppliers from whom it is possible to purchase ready-made knives. This course will be a first in the UK, offering participants the sharpening and knife-making skills tailored to their requirements and delivered by a practising book conservator and knife maker, Jeff Peachey. . Oxford Conservation Consortium seeks funding to offer this course to book conservators who wish to improve their sharpening skills, make new knives for specific purposes, improve their existing tools such as spokeshaves. The number of participants has been held to eight conservators so that individual attention is ensured. We have explored other options for providing sharpening training, such as attending the residential course at West Dean, and engaging a woodworker to deliver the training. We were recently informed that the West Dean course is offered only occasionally, and furthermore, being a five-day residential course, a significant financial/time commitment is needed which may not be practicable for many book conservators. Initial discussions with a woodworker were abandoned, as it became clear that there was a clear divide between the sharpening techniques and nature of edge tools used in carpentry and those useful to book conservation. The course description, budget, and biography of the course instructor may be found below. OCC's small training budget (£1545/annum) is shared between five conservators and is also used to support accreditation (3/5 staff are Accredited Members ofthe Institute of Conservation). We hope that the Wellcome Trust RRMH small grants scheme will be in a position to support this training opportunity by funding the cost of this workshop which we hope to run in September 2010 at OCC.