Pages Through The Ages

She has access to ancient texts, cares for private libraries around the world and has read the footnotes of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison meets library conservator Caroline Bendix

AN inky fingerprint in a 17th-century edition of the works of Aristotle, housed in the Codrington Library of All Souls College in Oxford, moves library conservator Caroline Bendix as much now as when she encountered it for the first time, quite unexpectedly, 30 years ago. It’s a man’s print, an occupational hazard in an early printing workshop, an accident accidentally preserved across a gulf of centuries. Its shape and its distortions, the impress and curves of the mark, suggest an arthritic finger. ‘Each time I come across it, I put my fingers on that print and talk to the man responsible,’ Miss Bendix says. ‘I find it exciting.’

Recently awarded the Royal Warrant Holders’ Association Plowden Medal, one of the country’s most prestigious conservation awards, for her work with books and libraries, Miss Bendix describes this sort of interaction with books’ makers, owners and first readers as one of her passions: the possibility offered by physical engagement with old volumes of ‘feeling something of the people who read the books’.

In her long and distinguished career, she has experienced ‘connections’ of this sort in numerous libraries, most recently at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where, at the invitation of the National Trust, she undertook a five-year project to conserve in situ the collection of 11,000 books assembled by husband-and-wife writers and gardeners Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. The collection is predominantly of 20thcentury works. Many are books reviewed by the couple and heavily annotated, even, in one case, on the book’s cover, on which Vita scribbled an unambiguous verdict, ‘very bad’. Others were gifts from their authors.