A Master at My Shoulder: Tony Cains, Mentor

Abstract

In May 1984, having completed my apprenticeship as a bookbinder and print finisher in Dublin’s College of Technology and finishing the Advanced City and Guilds in Bookbinding exam, I was a self-employed journeyman. Along with hand binding periodicals and re-casing books for a local priory library, I worked weekends as a print finisher on the production line of a Sunday newspaper. It was at this point, I was seriously considering the offer of a well-paid position in an enormous print finishing company in Norway. Fate then intervened in the guise of a phone call from Brian Kennedy, head of school at my old college, informing me that there was a six-month position available in the Conservation Department of Trinity College Dublin. The position was to supervise a preservation team, comprised of students, that each summer, worked through the early printed books in the Long Room Library, cleaning, consolidating, and recording the volumes. It was because of my interest in hand binding that Brian Kennedy had recommended me to the head of the department, Tony Cains. ‘Once you’re in, you’re in’ Brian told me in the course of the call, adding that when I phoned Trinity I should ask for a Ray Jordan, ‘he’s a Dub like yourself, the boss can be tricky’. Later I discovered that Brian Kennedy had spent time as one of the Angeli del Fango volunteers working under Tony’s direction in Florence, after the floods of 1966. On the day of the interview, I met Ray outside the enormous oak door at the west-end of the Long Room Library building; he led me up into the attic space, the home of the Trinity’s Library Conservation Laboratory. There, I was interviewed sitting on a stool, surrounded by the staff, including Tony, who was enjoying a cigarette with his coffee. After some questions and my dry hands and red suede desert boots receiving favourable comment, Tony left for lunch. After the ‘interview’ I was taken on a grand tour of Trinity Library by Matt Hattonththt, the other member of tony's team. Totally disoriented, I eventually found myself back outside the oak door of the Library. As I stood chatting with Matt, I felt a sharp slap on the back and a heard a cheery ‘see you next week’ both delivered by a passer-by in a green waxed cotton Barbour® jacket. So began a relationship and a steep 18-year learning curve with Tony Cains and his TCD Conservation Department. Tony had also come through the apprenticeship system and was a very strong advocate of this method of learning; it was his opinion that it took ten years for a book conservator to acquire the necessary range of skills and be self-assured in decision making and with a degree of natural talent, capable of producing work to a good standard. Tony had strong views in relation to workshop practice (he never warmed to the term ‘laboratory’), in the first place, he held that the conservator should, where possible, take the work from start to finish, without delegating different procedures such as sewing or forwarding to other conservators, although the division of labour was necessary for the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, where Tony supervised a large staff, conserving the water damaged material from the floods. Following on from this, he assigned to each conservator a dedicated space in which to work, an area that included all the necessary equipment, a light table, a nipping press, etc. This approach was heartening as it gave a sense of autonomy and responsibility to each of the staff and provided an environment in which to learn our craft and obtain the necessary skills, as well as shedding some already acquired as bookbinders. Tony saw this step of unlearning as essential. Typically, the conservator was presented with multiple items requiring the same conservation treatment, and the sight of 8 or 10 re-backs on my bench was the norm; learning through repetition was Tony’s mantra. On that first day, however, standing at my bench after some initial instruction, a voice over my shoulder advised ‘remember, all that matters are the books’. Each project commenced with documentation that consisted of a series of tick-boxes on a folded A4 card and which, I later learned was a modified version of the one developed in Florence when the flood-