By Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa. Ann Arbor, MI: The Legacy Press, 2019. 294 pp. Hardcover $65.00. ISBN 9781940965154.

Reviewed by Courtney M. Gillie, Project Archivist, The State Historical Society of Missouri [PDF Full Text]

Mooring a Field by Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa is a thoughtful look into the sidelining of career conservators and preservationists like Paul Noble Banks. Banks was a forerunner in the field of book conservation and created the first degree-granting program in library preservation within the United States. The book has much more to tell than the simple story of one man, as the biography covers not only Paul N. Banks’s life, but also the creation, formation, and establishment of the professional conservation community. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Cunningham-Kruppa explores the decline of artisan papermakers and fine-press bookbinders, as well as the modern push to use efficient industrial binderies. Banks’s struggle to be acknowledged as a skilled artisan instead of a common tradesman shows the back-and-forth between experience and education that was involved in establishing book conservation as a specialization necessary for the longevity and safekeeping of books and manuscripts.

Mooring a Field is organized chronologically, with overlap between chapters to reestablish the reader in the timeline of Banks’s life. The 1966 flood of the Arno and the international response to disaster recovery for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) is a strong midpoint of Cunningham-Kruppa’s argument. Cunningham-Kruppa follows the funding and operational decisions of American, British, and Italian committees that responded to the emergency and does not shy away from assigning blame and motives when her sources support it, often adding context and anecdotes in the footnotes. The footnotes themselves are extensive and contain regular citations as well as recommended reading and supporting information.

A good portion of the text draws on the author’s life as a former library worker and conservationist familiar with the administrative processes in higher education and as a recipient of the American Library Association’s Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris Preservation Award. Mooring a Field is illustrated, although the figures are placed after the conclusion and do not compete for page space with the numerous footnotes. The book is written conversationally and is an approachable read that does not drag out tedious details for the sake of length. I would recommend it even to those not working in GLAMs, though our professional propensity for acronyms is clearly obvious in the text. Cunningham-Kruppa’s final call is for librarians, conservators, archivists, preparators, and curators to work together to ensure that sufficient funding and training exist to support professional conservators, who in turn, sustain healthy GLAM collections—a worthy goal.