Information: A short chapter in the book ‘Conservation of Books’ that discusses polymers encountered in book and paper conservation, their structure and how they deteriorate. Download: No Download available from this site, but you can find a PDF on the web if you look hard enough.
Abstract: Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with ‘’letterlocking,’’ a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence....