The National Library of Medicine’s Bathtub Collection is an archive of binding materials removed from the Library’s rare books during conservation. The collection began in the 1940s, when curator of rare books Dorothy M. Schullian salvaged early vellum bindings discarded during rebinding operations. In her bathtub, she soaked and separated scraps of manuscripts and early printed works that made up the bindings. Staff in the History of Medicine Division dubbed this collection of binding fragments “The Bathtub Collection.”
The collection continues to grow slowly. When a collection item needs to be disbound for conservation treatments, the curator may put the binding materials in the Bathtub Collection if they have unusual characteristics or contain provenance information.
Some of the materials found in early bindings are fragments of early printed books or manuscripts on parchment, which are treasures in their own right. The Bathtub collection includes a wide array of interesting items, including:
- printed sheets of playing cards,
- lottery tickets,
- musical manuscripts,
- 500-year old legal documents,
- and religious texts.
Items in the Bathtub Collection are available for study in the Reading Room at the National Library of Medicine. Plan your onsite research.
Dorothy M. Schullian
Dorothy Schullian, Curator of the Rare Book Collection for the National Library of Medicine in 1944. Learn about how she started the Bathtub Collection.
Treasured Leaves
Early book binders recycled manuscripts and printed paper when making new bindings. Explore some of these discarded leaves that survived by chance and are treasured today.
Publications
Learn more about this collection, medieval manuscripts, and conservation.
- De Hamel, Christopher Cutting up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit. The 1995 Sol. M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography. (Charlottesville: Book Arts Press, 1995).
- Schullian, Dorothy M. "Here the Frailest Leaves." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953): 201-217. (Download PDF: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/bathtub/leaves.pdf)
- Shailor, Barbara. Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984). Vol. I: MSS 1-250: MS 3 contains a detailed description of 53 fragments removed from NLM bindings.
- Watson, Andrew G. "The Post-Medieval Library of All Souls College, Oxford," in Medieval Manuscripts in Post-Medieval England. (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004).