In the bowels of the British Library, the first object the conservator showed Seales was a manuscript that was so mangled, he says, “We almost ran screaming from the room, because there was nothing we could do. We had no tools that could help.”

Seales tells me such manuscript fragments exist in the nooks and crannies of almost every archive. “Exactly how many? It’s hard to tell,” he says. “In the old days, these kinds of manuscripts were cracked open and painstakingly laid out on paper with tweezers and a magnifying glass. Libraries stopped doing that with all of these damaged objects because they didn’t have the manpower to do it, and they weren’t getting the results they wanted.” —Alicia P. Gregory —Digital Exploration: Unwrapping the Secrets of Damaged Manuscripts (UK Odyssey)

Via MGK.