Signet Library conservator Jo Hockey has recently completed the restoration of the Signet Library’s rare complete set of Sir Patrick Geddes’ Celtic Revival journal, The Evergreen. These beautiful volumes, famous for their beautiful leather Tree of Life bindings and Celtic page decorations, were originally published seasonally in the mid-1890s. They inspired a revival in interest in Celtic and Highland culture, including the Gaelic language, and were a platform for major artists and writers such as John Duncan.
The Evergreen was just part of the astonishing career of the polymath Sir Patrick Geddes, who began life as a biologist but found fame as a city planner, an educator and a campaigner for peace. In Edinburgh he is remembered for his attempts to revive the Old Town, creating community gardens, encouraging inhabitants to improve their environments, running international summer schools, building Ramsay Gardens and renovating Milne’s Court as student residences, and, most famously, transforming the Outlook Tower into an international university of town planning and an international inspiration for the restoration of communal life. His memory in the city is preserved in the Patrick Geddes Centre at Riddle’s Court: he himself would eventually leave Edinburgh for a late career blossoming in Israel, India and France.
Those copies of Geddes’ Evergreen that have survived have suffered heavily from discolouration and the decay of the leather in the bindings (most bookbinding leather of the time was treated with sulphuric acid in the production process, which means that bindings from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards display deterioration beyond their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalents). Jo Hockey has treated the leather to halt the decay and restore much of the dwindled colour, and has replaced the long-lost leather book spines with Japanese paper tinted to match the shade of the boards.
Jo’s full account of the restoration of the volumes, along with a full account of Sir Patrick Geddes’ revolutionary life and career, can be read here. An exhibition of The Evergreen alongside other Geddes materials from Signet Library collections will run in the Upper West Library until the end of July.
