His touch gave manuscripts a better shot at immortality

For two days in August 1978, rainwater trickled down seven floors of shelves, damaging thousands of rare books and manuscripts at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

When the collection's curator arrived Monday morning, she told The Inquirer, "I didn't cry. I didn't want to get anything else wet."

Instead the curator, Christine Ruggere, called Willman Spawn to take charge of rescue operations.

Mr. Spawn, 89, an authority on the history of bookbinding and a paper conservator, died of congestive heart failure Friday, April 23, at his home in Center City.

Mr. Spawn, who also saved damaged collections at the Temple University Law Library and Wilmington Public Library, shipped the wet material from the College of Physicians to freezers in South Philadelphia to prevent fungal growth. Then he devised a drying system that used a vacuum to suck the ice crystals out of the books.

Mr. Spawn, who grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., became interested in his profession as a teenager repairing botany books he collected.

During World War II, he served in the Army as an optical technician working on the production of bombsights at the Frankford Arsenal. He was later stationed in Germany.

In 1948, he began a 37-year career as conservator of manuscripts and rare books for the American Philosophical Society.

He also consulted for other institutions, including the rare-books department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, where he met his future wife, Carol Morse, a librarian.

"It was my first day, and he came up to me and asked, 'There are those who do and those who don't. Which are you?' " After receiving a correct answer, he invited her for coffee. They married in 1958.

The couple published a number of articles on bookbinders and conservation.

To repair delicate old manuscripts, Mr. Spawn collected paper from book dealers and antiques shops.

With the vintage paper, paste made out of rice flour and tapioca, and special tools, he could replace a torn-out page in a way that defied detection.

In 1960, a reporter for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin wrote that Mr. Spawn "had the dexterity of a magician and the hands of a card dealer." Mr. Spawn told the reporter that he had begun to use syringes to inject glue into cover corners after getting a shot of novocaine at his dentist.

He became an expert at identifying a bookbinder's work, including 350 volumes produced by Robert Aitken, an 18th-century Philadelphia bookbinder and bookseller. Using tissue paper and a stick of soft lead, he made rubbings of scrolls and curlicues on covers and spines of books and compared them with stampings on known books by Aitken. If the decorations matched, he knew he had an Aitken binding.

His research on bookbinding took him to about 170 libraries in the United States, Canada, and Scotland.

From 1985, when he retired from the American Philosophical Society, until February, Mr. Spawn commuted three or four days a week to the Bryn Mawr College Library, where he was curator of bookbinding.

In 2007, he organized an exhibit at Bryn Mawr, "Bound and Determined: Identifying American Bookbindings."

Mr. Spawn and Thomas Kinsella wrote the books Ticketed Bookbindings from Nineteenth-Century Britain and American Signed Bindings Through 1876.

A longtime member of the  Arch Street Friends Meeting, Mr. Spawn twice served as Clerk of the meeting and had been a member of the finance committee for many years. His research of extensive historic records was included in the architectural study of the meeting house which was published in 1968.

In 2008, he and his wife organized the transfer of three centuries of archives from the Arch Street Meeting House to Haverford College Library to improve their preservation and access.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Spawn is survived by sons Andrew, Peter, and David and two grandsons.

A memorial meeting will be held at the Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St., at 3 p.m. Saturday, May 29, which would have been Mr. Spawn's 90th birthday.

Donations may be made to Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, 19106, or to Friends Hospice, 704 West Girard Ave., Philadelphia, 19123.