The Record
2008–2026 · 4 · The Record
Principal Conservator
Atelier Vogel
Vienna2019 — Present
- Private practice for institutional and collector clients across Austria, Bavaria and northern Italy.
- Between forty and sixty objects a year, plus condition surveys for two monastic libraries.
- Every treatment ships with a written report a future conservator can reverse.
Senior Conservator, Manuscripts
Kremsmünster Provincial Library
Upper Austria2014 — 2019
- Led parchment and binding treatment for a collection of roughly 1,200 pre-1600 codices.
- Rebuilt the reading-room handling protocol after a 2016 survey found a third of damage was recent and avoidable.
- Trained four interns; two of them now run their own benches.
Conservator
Institut Marbach, Basel
Basel2011 — 2014
- Bench work on incunabula and early printed books for clients across three countries.
- Ran the atelier's iron-gall ink programme — the treatment nobody wants to be responsible for.
Assistant Conservator
Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Florian
Sankt Florian2008 — 2011
- Cleaning, humidification, paper repair and a great deal of documentation photography.
- Three years of being told to stop before I thought I was finished.
The Gallery
The Marchfeld Antiphonary
Parchment codex, c. 1420 · 2023
Eleven months on a choir book that had been rebound in the 1890s with animal glue and good intentions. Removed the Victorian spine, reattached forty-two detached leaves, and left the nineteenth-century repairs that were still doing honest work. The visible seam is deliberate.
Iron-gall survey, Kremsmünster
Collection survey · 2017 — 2019
Assessed corrosion across 1,200 codices and produced a triage order rather than a wish list. Forty-one objects were treated; the rest were re-housed and left alone, which was the harder recommendation to defend to the board.
Blaeu atlas, private collection
Hand-coloured folio, 1662 · 2021
Water damage along the fore-edge of nine plates. The owner wanted the tide line gone. It is now legible rather than invisible, and I put the reasoning in writing so the next owner knows it was a decision.
The Salzburg letters
Correspondence bundle, 1809 — 1841 · 2022
Two hundred letters that arrived in a shoebox, fused into three bricks by damp. Separated over five months by humidification. Sixty per cent recovered legibly; the rest are stabilised and honest about being lost.
The Index
- Treatment
- Parchment repair, paper deacidification, iron-gall stabilisation, leaf reattachment, humidification
- Binding
- Historical sewing structures, limp vellum, wooden boards, tooled leather, clamshell housing
- Analysis
- Fibre identification, multispectral imaging, pH and gelatine testing, condition survey
- Languages
- German (native), English (fluent), Italian (good), Latin (reading)
Letters
Sr. Magdalena ReiterLibrarian, Kremsmünster Provincial LibraryAlbrecht told our board that thirty-eight of the objects they wanted treated should be left alone. It cost him the larger contract and it was the correct advice.
Henrik LauritzenPrivate collector, CopenhagenHe returned the atlas with a nine-page report explaining what he had chosen not to repair. I have never received a document like it from anyone in this trade.
Standing
Accredited member
International Association of Book and Paper Conservators
2013 — Present
Bench instructor, parchment structures
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, conservation programme
2018 — Present
One intensive a year, six students, no more.
On Reversibility as a Promise
Journal of Paper Conservation
2020
An argument that most of what we call reversible is merely regrettable later.