Mostly they were studio shots of stern faces — stiffly-dressed men on settees and in uniform, women in fancy hats looking slightly away from the camera, boys in leggings posing with dogs.
You could tell they’d rather be somewhere else.
These are my ancestors — who I am, I’d tell myself as I tried to find a faint resemblance.
I would stare at the images, knowing they were long dead, even the children.
Over time, the ornate leather cover tattered and tore. The stiff pages separated and floated free in clumps.
I put my heritage in a drawer, out of sight, for years. One day, I resolved to try to put this precious document back together.
But would there be someone locally who restores such things?
I found Water Street Bindery by letting my fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages.
I walked into the squat old 11-w-story former home on Water Street and there was Tony Haverstick hunched over a work table.
I started to tell him I knew this wasn’t a valuable document, and he stopped me.
“It’s worth what it’s worth to you,” said Haverstick, 62.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve restored a New York Times Cookbook for people who got one when they got married.”
He turned the Victorian photo album over in his hands and from its markings and binding material placed it from the late 1800s.
Haverstick, who taught philosophy at Syracuse University in the 1960s, began his love affair with the printed word by becoming a rare book dealer.
Then, one day in his late 20s, he sat in on a lecture in Philadelphia by Fritz Eberhardt, who the Du Ponts had brought to America to do work for themselves after World War II.
Haverstick was enthralled. He went to work for Eberhardt, helping him to restore old books and watching him design new book covers that honored the past.
In 1970, he set up shop himself and eventually located at 28 N. Water St. Afterward, he found out a Lancaster bookbinder, Charles Kraus, had lived there in the mid 1800s.
Karma?
Haverstick, who lives on a family farm in Manor Township, told me how bookbinding was a bustling and essential profession for much of this country’s history.
Any form of communication in the early days, whether a book, political pamphlet or courthouse record, needed a bookbinder.
That remained the case until the first mechanization of binding in 1880.
He thinks about his predecessor in the house. “The skills that Kraus had as an immigrant binder would have been useful in 1840. They would have been irrelevant 40 years later.”
Haverstick spends much of his time restoring or replacing the ravages of age.
The work ranges from rebuilding the cracked or ripped paper of a birth certificate to de-acidifying weakening paper to designing and building a new period book cover with hand-tooled markings and gold leaf inscriptions.
He’s restored fireplace billows, Japanese fans, a 1790s gun holster, a Mickey Mouse pop-up book from the 1930s and numerous family Bibles, maps and birth and marriage certificates.
In his quaintly cluttered shop now is a family Bible made of Nigerian goat skin. And he just finished creating a cover for a handwritten speech given by Teddy Roosevelt in Philadelphia in 1904.
He’s been entrusted with lots of literary gems through the years.
He’s worked on the first book cover ever printed by Benjamin Franklin, a first edition of playwright Ben Johnson’s works from 17th-century England to more than a few copies of the Christian tome, “Martyrs’ Mirror,’’ that were printed at the Ephrata Cloister in 1748-49.
He still uses many of the tools of yesteryear, such as an 1881 turn-wheel guillotine to trim book edges.
The quality of his work has spread without advertising, except for a web site, www.waterstreetbindery.com, and he gets commissions from all over the country.
It’s painstakingly slow work but Haverstick loves it. For the same reasons, I suppose, people like to rummage through used-book stores, holding old books with their peculiar smell and aura of things from the past.
(The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.) 