Shelf Life

“Our worst offender is Plages, Issue #35: it has a moldy potato,” Lydia Aikenhead, Assistant Conservator for Watson Library, explains. “It doesn’t really look like a potato anymore because it’s sprouted and moldy.” She’s holding a copy of the recently acquired art magazine. For this issue, titled “La Bouffe” and published in 1987, artists were invited to submit compositions about and including food. Its pages contain a piece of toast, tea grounds taped to a page, two deliquescing hard candies, a bag of alphabet noodles, unidentified goo, and a pristine communion wafer seemingly immune to the passage of time.

As a book conservator, Aikenhead reckons with how to best stabilize these decaying objects: “It’s a lot more complicated than an incunable, printed on beautiful, stable paper.” Take the potato: “I can't clean [the potato] because it’s pigmented and I don't think freezing it would do anything at this point,” acknowledging the advanced stage of decomposition. She explains that containment is the primary method of intervention, creating anaerobic environments that will prevent the growth of living matter. “My plan is to photograph it, remove it from the page and vacuum seal it in polyethylene, and then put the sealed potato back in place.”

After containment comes monitoring, where the object is revisited on an annual basis to ensure it remains in stable condition. Objects that continue to deteriorate receive ongoing conservation treatments; removal from the collection is considered a final and largely preventable step.

While Plages, Issue #35 is particularly dense with perishables, it is far from the only item in Watson’s collection made from foodstuff. Almost all the edible books can be found in Watson’s collection of artists’ books. For example, Michael Rakowitz’s A House with a Date Palm Will Never Starve features a tin of date syrup accompanied by a book of recipes. Cy X and Neta Bomani’s Hibiscus Rose Tulsi is a miniature zine printed on the tag of a teabag. The Color Curtain Project II contains packets of rice and sauce, vacuum sealed and accompanied by a palm leaf plate and bamboo fork. In contrast to Plages, Issue #35, these examples are definitionally shelf-stable, featuring food that presents low volatility for long-term storage.

However, not all canned goods are created equal. Elsewhere in the stacks lives a series of tomato soup cans created in Andy Warhol’s legacy. Although swathed in many layers of protective containment, the cans are stored on the lowest shelf: the metal is slowly eroding and there are concerns of the tomato soup leaking through its enclosure. While conservation seeks to slow the effects of time, there is a limit to entropy management. Objects must age, and sometimes that’s integral to the artist’s own vision. Plages, Issue #35 was made as a commentary to the art world and institutional collecting. Aikenhead reflects, “What do you do for this magazine that does not want to be a permanent, stable object, but is happy to be ephemeral? Artists can make our lives complicated.”

Decomposition isn’t the only concern when it comes to books made from food: there is the perpetual risk of pests, too. “We are on the ground floor in the middle of the park, so there are inevitably pests in the building. Pests are a normal part of museum and library life,” acknowledges Kelsey Talbot, Watson’s Collection Specialist. She rattles off a list of a book’s natural predators: bookworms, silverfish, moths, cockroaches, and mice.

Considering that all books must be safeguarded against these devouring critters, traps are set and regularly monitored. Pests can present a particularly acute threat to books such as Mindell Dubansky’s The Candy Button Book, which contains pages upon pages of candy, or Terrence Koh’s Such Things I Do to Make Myself More Attractive to You, with a packet of licorice jellybeans. Encased in layers of containment, mice have yet to orienteer their way to such troves. After all, with over 1.5 million texts in Watson’s collection, these are needles in a haystack for critters to find. Given our robust pest management practices, “We’ll find the mice before they find what they’re looking for,” says Talbot.

These edible books may be viewed on request. Given the fragility of books such as Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age happenings, however, which features a brittle piece of matzoh that could easily shatter, we encourage patrons to first consult digitized versions via Watsonline or the online collection search.

While edible books present unique challenges for conservation and circulation, they demonstrate the breadth of form artists’ books can take: uniquely evoking sensory experience beyond touch and sight, they modify conventional notions of what a “book” can be. That said, we request that patrons please refrain from eating the books.