After the Flood

Front facade of Houghton Library

See HCL News for the full story on the discoveries made by paper conservator Christopher Sokolowski in the course of treating a number of items damaged in a water leak in 2008. Perhaps the most interesting of these relates to a collection of drawings from an early-17th century French ballet. Under x-ray fluorescence analysis, Sokolowski discovered that parts of the drawings were decorated with silver and gold, now tarnished with age. Using imaging software, Soklowski was able to simulate how the drawings might have originally looked.