Creepy crawly alert!

I forgot to mention in the post about conservation that occasionally you also see some insect damage. I had to check for bugs quite a lot as a volunteer – my seminal moment was finding a ‘book louse’, as identified by the conservator. She takes bugs very seriously; any sign of them gets the infected item or box a sentence of two weeks’ quarantine. Another option is freezing, if the item is made of suitable material. Usually, though, what looks like some kind of sinister, paper-chomping insect turns out to be a squashed, dead spider.

Silverfish can be a problem in archives; it's hard to spot them or get rid of them in rooms piled high with old things.  Although they may seem relatively innocuous when whizzing round your bathtub, in fact they are little horrors if they get out of hand.  Before I started, I had no idea that silverfish ate paper, but in fact, because their diet is of starch and sugar (pretty much like mine really), they enjoy eating wood, paper or carpet (OK, not like me). For us this means they can damage any paper item including drawings, prints or photos. The example I was shown was a portrait from which the person’s face had pretty much disappeared because the bugs had taken the surface off the paper; I couldn’t find a similar picture to this to show you but here is a map and its frame that have had a bit of a chomping (all pics from Creative Commons of course):

 

Something else I've come up against is woodworm holes.  The woodworm (and I’ve only recently learned this interesting fact) isn’t actually a species in its own right, that’s just a term we use to describe damage made by the larvae of wood-boring beetles. I very often find holes on the stretchers of old paintings, but the worst case I've seen was on a wooden cover of a book from the Brotherton Collection’s Incunabula (or printed, pre-sixteenth century books to you and me).  A staff member showed me this during a talk and it was absolutely peppered with holes.

I find it very hard to ascertain how old the holes are; someone told me you can consider how clean-looking they are, but they mostly look the same to me!  You also have to consider the insect’s life cycle and that generally only in the summer months will the adult beetles emerge and cause havoc. Here is what the holes look like, though the ones I've seen are smaller than this.

We did find an object recently that had wormholes that looked slightly suspect.  It is a mysterious painting in oil wash, artist unknown and titled ‘Massacre of the Innocents’!  In one regard, it's one of my favourite objects, but as it depicts Roman soldiers pillaging a small town and killing its inhabitants, maybe it shouldn't be.  Anyway, gallery staff wrapped it up in plastic and have kept it off the rack, though it's winter anyway so the pests won't be too dangerous.  It's just a precaution and I'll leave it with them as to how long to keep it like that.  I can still examine it, I just need to keep wrapping it up again!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, because to research it and find images I’ve had to trawl through horrid blown-up pictures of bugs – yuk. Someone has put a sticky trap in the corner near where I work – it’s a really useful way of finding out what insects have been around, but is mainly full of huge spiders and is right next to my chair! Still, it comes with the territory…