 One repair that we're not gonna do too much as part of the redevelopment, but it is a handy repair to know about and especially good for rare books is gonna be a Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste repair. So this one involves more supplies than the other ones that we talked about. So you gotta kind of round up your supplies first. You need your wheat starch paste. You need some distilled water. You also are gonna need your Japanese tissue. You're gonna need this little space age fabric which is called hollytex and you're gonna need some blotter paper as well. You also are gonna need a weight and a micro spatula for positioning your tissue on your mend. So these kinds of mends are helpful on books that have some value or that you don't wanna put a piece of tape. All tape is a slow-moving liquid and will eventually permeate through the paper and it's going to yellow and harden and leave a stain. And eventually the tape will fail and it will fall off and you'll be left with the tear that you had in the first place. So this mend is a true conservation mend. It is completely reversible. You can, if they invent some better technology in the future, all we need to reverse this repair is some water. If we apply water to this, the wheat starch paste will release and we'll be able to remove the tissue. But as you can see on this particular item, if you do it on the back of a page, you can hardly tell that the page was mended. And another benefit that the Japanese tissue has over tape is that it doesn't have a sharp, fine edge. So whenever you apply a piece of tape to a mend, you're gonna end up with a weak spot, right on the edge of the tape. So with this Japanese tissue that has many fibers that spread out, you don't inherently weaken the paper right next to your mend, which was probably already brittle to begin with. So this is a good example of the front page and if you do a good job on your mend, you know, if you look at it, you can hardly tell until you look at the back and see that there's a tissue mend on there. So to get going, the first thing you need to do is mix up your paste. You're gonna, we're gonna use instant wheat starch paste. Most of our materials don't warrant. True, some conservators think the instant stuff isn't as good, but for our collection, I think it's totally fine. And it also takes a long time to cook up the wheat starch paste and it goes bad quite quickly. So if you're not gonna do a bunch of these repairs at once, it's not worth the trouble. So I'm gonna put a little bit of my wheat starch paste in my cup and then I'm gonna continue to add distilled water until I get the right consistency. And what we're going for is something, the consistency of cream. We don't want it to be too thick or clumpy, but you don't want it to be too runny either. The first thing you need to do is position your book. On some books, you might need to prop them open or with other books or weights to position them in the right place so you can get at your mend. We're gonna do this one first. We have two of them and I could probably do two at the same time on these pages because they're facing each other, but typically you're only gonna be able to do one mend at a time and you're gonna have to wait for it to dry until you can mend another page in the book. So the first thing we wanna do is below our tear, we're gonna take a piece of blotter paper and then we're gonna take a piece of this holotex fabric. So you get that under there, make sure you're lined up and you're covering your whole area. This one has a little crimp so I'm gonna wanna make sure that goes down when I apply my tissue. So sometimes too, you gotta make sure you have this thing lined up on the right side and it actually wasn't. So that's the way we want that to go. We wanna make sure the tear is gonna end up as flat as possible. So now it's time to rip our paper. We don't wanna cut this with scissors. When we rip the Japanese tissue, we wanna fray it as much as possible so we get all of these nice little fibers exposed. So rip it slowly and kinda tear it apart so you end up with as many fibers as possible. We're gonna do a pretty small repair so I don't need a big piece but you're gonna wanna make sure your piece is big enough that you can leave one little area dry to handle it because as soon as it gets wet, it's gonna wanna turn to mush. So this was the side of the sheet so I'm also gonna rip this side just a little bit so I get some more fibers on that side as well. That looks like it's about the right size. We're gonna lay it down on our men just to make sure it's a little long but that's okay. I'm not gonna obscure the picture. I'll rip a little bit more off and that looks like it'll be pretty good. All right, so now what we do is you kinda hold on to your one side that you're gonna keep holding on and then on a piece of wax paper or scrap paper, take your paintbrush and wet your tissue. Try not to do that and fold it over because you might not be able to salvage it and have to start over. So once it gets wet, it is awfully mushy and very fragile, even though it dries quite strong. So you position it over your tear. You take a microspatchela and kinda try to splay out those fibers as best you can. And then on the top, you're gonna wanna do the same thing you did on the bottom whereas you take a piece of holotex and blotter paper. We actually have a few boards that have blotter paper and the holotex wrapped around. So I will often use these on the top but they aren't that great to put on the bottom cause sometimes they can leave a little bit of a crease if by lifting up the page. So I'm just gonna put this entire thing over the top and then we don't need as much weight as we do on the hinge tightening so we're not gonna put a big heavy book or a box but we're just gonna put one of these nice little small weights on top. And then that's it, let it dry overnight.