makeitdewey:

marbleflan:

I didn’t want to leave this in the tags of someone’s heartfelt post I just read but I just want to let you all know:

Parchment doesn’t yellow with age. “Yellowing parchment” is not a thing. Parchment is animal skin. It’s pretty much the color it is once it is tawed unless it gets dirty in which case it’s gonna look browner.

Yellowing is something that happens to paper, made of organic fibers like linen, cotton, hemp, or wood pulp. It happens due to a combo of environmental conditions and paper composition causing acidification over time. Machine-made wood pulp papers are more susceptible to acidification because of how wood pulp is chemically treated to make it suitable for papermakibg. Handmade rag paper can yellow and become brittle, but it doesn’t happen as much/to the same degree unless something happened to the paper later on (example: the book was washed and bleached to clean it. Don’t do this it’s the worst).

Moral of the story:

700 year old medieval manuscript written on parchment: not yellow

400 year old book printed on handmade rag paper: probably looks whiter than a crest commercial

Paperback from 1961: old yeller

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

091 Manuscripts