Friday, September 28, 2012

Dear Papa: Letters to Hemingway get crucial repair at Northeast Document Conservation Center


Art Daily Newsletter
Hemingway curator Susan Wrynn, right, and intern Jessica Green collate documents from the Hemingway collection. AP Photo/Stephan Savoia.

By: Bridget Murphy, Associated Press

ANDOVER (AP).- The paper conservator's scalpel picked at the red and black specks, flicking away the fly droppings that had stained Ingrid Bergman's letter to Ernest Hemingway. "I shall remember people like you and forget the rest of the world," the actress wrote to her author friend from Rome in 1950. Six decades later, an effort to preserve that memory, and others that are part of the writer's legacy, recently began inside a New England lab. From mold, to mice, to moisture, the JFK Library and Museum in Boston is trying to save its collection of Hemingway's incoming letters from different damage that has been degrading the batch as it ages. Box by box, thousands of letters to the author are heading to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover for mending, washing, flattening and other repairs. The center is a nonprofit that has also treated other parts of the Library's Hemingway collection, as well as materials including Abraham ... More

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