Lecture 2 - Fiona McLees ACR

Fiona McLees ACR, Paper Conservator, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Overview

The Bodleian Library holds the majority of the surviving papers of the influential and singularly original author Franz Kafka (d.1924), including his drafts for Das Schloss (The Castle), Der Verschollene (Amerika), Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and Das Urteil (The Judgment). Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of these manuscripts, however Brod preserved them and they have a complex history of movement and ownership since Kafka’s death. They narrowly escaped the entry of the German Army into Prague in 1939 as Brod took them to Tel Aviv, and were later brought from Switzerland to Oxford in 1961.
Kafka’s drafts were written in shop-bought stationer’s notebooks which have deteriorated because of the materials used, but also exhibit damage relating to Kafka’s working methods and their later use by Max Brod in Tel Aviv. The selection and application of appropriate conservation treatments to stabilise the manuscripts was complicated by the need to preserve the important evidence of Kafka’s working processes and their later history: for example, torn out pages, writing over skinned areas, repairs and modifications such as the use of postage stamps to hold together cut areas, and home-made book wrappers to protect the covers.

About the speaker

Fiona has been at the Bodleian Libraries since 2014, with previous experience at the Chester Beatty Library, the National Archives, Imperial War Museum, and Tate Gallery. She trained for an MA in Conservation at Camberwell College of Arts (2010). She is currently a trustee for the Institute of Conservation.