Job

So today I was at work, holding a 200 year-old pamphlet about the French Revolution- and going at it with a knife.
Now, before you get all upset, no, I wasn't damaging it. I was taking the animal glue off of the outside, so that it could be sewn into a protective covering. But still.
I spend at least ten hours a week gluing miniscule (and I mean MINISCULE) bits of paper onto other bits of paper, fixing rips and holes, trying to "stablilize" the decay that old paper experiences. What's amazing to me is that the tiny little bits of woven-together-fibers that I attach to these pamphlets keeps the things together. Who knew a couple plant fibers had so much strength?
And truly, it surprises me every day that the papers I'm working with are as strong as they are- not brittle, not moldy, not so thin you can see through them, not moth-eaten, not bug ridden. They're two-hundred years old! How can paper be so sturdy? Sometimes I imagine where they must have started out... first, printed on that new-fangled contraption, the printing press, then hastily bound and sold on a street corner... carried in some revolutionary's pocket, read... maybe re-read, and then abandoned somewhere. Or maybe kept in loving memory of someone. Who knows? Of course, the ones I get can't have been the ones that men carried faithfully in their pockets as they went about their revolutionary business. Those were probably destroyed ages ago.
But mostly it's the most uneventful thing in the world to hold History in your hands and glue a bit of paper to it, and promptly move on to the next bit of History - until you start going at it with a knife and realize what you're doing.
E.O.