Snakeskin Bookmarks — yes, really
Staff in the African and Middle Eastern Division had found five pieces of snakeskin — thin, desiccated, brownish, each several inches long — among the 500 or so pages of “Muntakhab al-lughāt.” It’s one of several hundred rare Persian-language lithographs Vegh was preparing for scanning and digitization.
Unlikely as it might seem, “they were probably used as a convenient bookmarker,” said Vegh, who, as a book conservation technician, is familiar with finding weird things in old books. In this collection alone, she’s found “leaves, flowers, insects, spiders … breadcrumbs, tobacco and, of course, lots of handwritten notes.”
Welcome to the world of “inclusions,” an ecosystem in which archivists come across all sorts of things readers purposefully or inadvertently left between a book’s pages. Time passes, the item is forgotten, the book goes to a library or museum and, decades or centuries later, an archivist turns the page and finds a talisman.
All of these may or may not be meaningful to researchers and scholars, prompting a professional quandary: What to do with this stuff? Technicians check with curators to see how they want items to be preserved and where. Pressed leaves, for example, are nice but they are acidic and damage the book over time, so they might be preserved separately.
And that, as it turns out, is the same strategy for snakeskin of uncertain provenance and unknown meaning. Vegh mounted the snakeskins in a sink mat (a slender shadow box), covered it with mylar, placed it within a hinged cover and set this inside the preservation box of the book itself. This will allow the snakeskins to be digitized, kept with the book and seen by scholars without having to be handled.
This might seem overly cautious, but the Library measures time in centuries. Who can know what future technologies may come or insights they might bring — even from a snakeskin bookmark?