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0:00 Hi, I'm Emily Rainwater. I'm a postgraduate
fellow in the paper conservation lab at the National Museum of American History.
0:11 So, before we could even think about taking
the Jefferson Bible apart, we needed to know how it was put together. So we started out
by simply drawing page for page, and stub for stub, what we saw when we opened the book.
0:23 The stubs are these little compensating pieces
of paper that the binder folded around Jefferson's folios so that they were the same thickness
as the spine as they were in the center of the book where Jefferson had added his clippings.
0:36 We then went through the book and looked for
sewing. Back in the day all books were sewn they weren't put together with glue. And so
we located all of the sewing stations.
0:46 And from those sewing stations we figured
out which pages were conjugate to each other. Conjugate means that they're folded together.
0:59 And then we could recreate a model of how
the book was put together with the stubs and the sewing.