During her examination of the manuscript, Hanna finds a fragment of an insect’s wing and a small white hair, which she slips into glassine envelopes for later analysis.

“To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history,” she tells Ozren Karaman, the Muslim librarian who risked his life to save the Haggadah while Sarajevo was being shelled. Hanna is opposed to “chemical cleanups” and “heavy restorations,” believing that damage and wear reveal much about how and where a manuscript has been used. extracted from tree-dwelling insects” and the blue, “intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli.” Looking closely at the parchment of the Haggadah, she can tell it comes from “the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep.” These lush details, at once celebratory and elegiac, will appeal to the sort of reader who picks up a book just for the feel of it. She’s familiar with “the intense red known as worm scarlet. To understand the work of the craftsmen who created the medieval texts she restores, Hanna has made her own gold leaf and created white pigment by covering lead bars with the dregs of old wine and animal dung. It’s the spring of 1996 in Sarajevo, and Hanna has been called in to examine the book before it’s put on display. When Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator, first touches the centuries-old Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, she feels a “strange and powerful” sensation, something “between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.” The manuscript is small, the binding soiled and scuffed, but its lavish illuminations miniature scenes “as interpreted in the Midrash,” created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” are stunning.

March by g brooks