Katherine Beaty wins Rome Prize

We are thrilled to share that one of our very own has been awarded the Rome Prize! Katherine Beaty, Book Conservator for Special Collections at the Weissman Preservation Center, has been awarded the Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. She will be spending the 2024-2025 academic year at the American Academy in Rome working on her project titled A Technical Study of Italian Archival Bookbindings.

Katherine works on a bound volume of business records from Baker Library’s Medici Collection at Harvard Business School. Photo credit: Jon Chase, Harvard Staff Photographer

In Katherine’s words, “With their iconic brown leather overbands and white crossed lacings, the Italian archival, or stationery, bookbinding style spread throughout Europe along with the Italian business practices and method of record keeping. Over the past 10 years, my research of Italian archival bookbindings at Harvard has only scratched the surface. At the American Academy, I will use this dedicated time to visit and document the vast collections of archival bindings in Rome. Through a methodical investigation and documentation of Italian archival bookbinding features, I will explore the origin, evolution, and transmission of this binding style. I plan to create historical bookbinding facsimiles based on examples observed in archives, and reverse engineer the lacing patterns found on the covers. My goal is to create a foundational work that will allow custodians to better understand their collections and to provide a reference resource for colleagues in allied fields.”

Congratulations, Katherine!

Katherine in front of a 3D scanned binding from the Barberini Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection and the 3D scans of the books.