High Flying Pages

As a photographer in the Folger’s Imaging Lab, people often ask me, “how long does it take you to digitize a full book?” I can roughly estimate the number of hours based on the page count—a 200 page book should take between 3-5 hours—but page count alone isn’t an accurate indicator of the volume’s complexity.  

Factors like physical condition, the thickness of the pages, and the way it naturally opens (or doesn’t open) characterize what I call a “fussy book,” i.e. one that takes longer to digitize than the page count would indicate. Today I’ll go over another of the most common aspects of a fussy book: a flying page. 

I only needed to photograph one page from STC 25899 copy 1, but it was a perfect example of a fussy book. As soon as I set up the book on my cradle and the page I needed to photograph refused to lay flat, I knew I’d need to intervene to get an acceptable photo. 

We put most bound volumes on our custom “book cradles,” an adjustable surface that remains stable and safe, to digitize them. Books are held open at around a 90-degree angle with a ribbon of twill that gets clamped to the back of the book cradle while I take photos of every recto page, then every verso page once I physically flip the book around.

This cradle rests on a motorized table that can slowly move up and down for me to adjust the height of a page relative to the camera, which I set to a certain height and do not change throughout the digitization session. I also have a laser pointer mounted to a tripod that I use to ensure that the page’s height is always the same relative to the camera; I check to make sure that the laser’s light hits the middle of the page every ten or twenty pages depending on the paper’s thickness, and this helps to keep everything on the page in focus. Once the cradle, table, camera, and laser are set up, I can begin attempting to wrangle my gravity-defying page.  

One of the first steps I take to make a page lay flat is to prop the book up a bit to bring the board and previous pages closer to the gravity-defying page, in case that will help it settle onto the rest of the book. I use pieces of foamboard glued together into different heights based on need.

If the page is still flying, I’ll put clear spatulas made of plexiglass on the page, placing them to ensure they gently hold down the page while not obstructing content. We patterned these spatulas, or “fingers” as we call them in the Imaging lab, after the plexiglass “book arms” I first encountered while working in the University of Virginia’s digitization lab (shout out to Christina Deane and the department she manages, the Digital Production Group, I owe them pretty much everything).

Once the page is laying mostly flat, I use more foamboard shims to elevate our color target and ruler to roughly the same height. This helps viewers estimate the physical dimensions of the object and get a sense of how big something actually is. It also allows me to ensure that the camera represents colors accurately (the red patch on the target should look red; if it’s blue, we have a big problem!). 

Once the book and target are at a height, I use the shims to prop up our book cradle while utilizing a spirit level to check that the book’s page is level, and therefore parallel with the camera. This reduces the chance of an image being out of focus. 

Once that’s done, I turn on the laser and check that the light hits the approximate middle of the page, raising or lowering the table on which the book cradle rests if needed, so that page stays at the correct distance to the camera.  This, too, keeps the image in focus. 

Finally, it’s time to take the photo, and do a quick check on the resulting image. 

Looks great, if I do say so myself!  

Then I’ll take the spatulas off, unclamp the twill ribbon holding the book open, turn the page, and do it all again. Luckily, we only needed one page from this volume, so I spent less than 5 minutes setting up and taking an acceptable picture. I’ve worked on many books where nearly every single page of a 300-page book needed different levels of intervention to make the next image look like the last. That is why I can give a rough estimate of the amount of time it might take to photograph such a book, and why the actual time might far exceed that estimate; I might just have to (gently, lovingly, with great seriousness and professionalism) fuss with the whole thing.