This first three-volume edition of Athanasius Kircher's great work, Oedipus Aegyptiacus , printed in Rome between 1652 and 1654, came into our possession with a late 18th-century binding in badly deteriorated half-leather. The leather had suffered to the point of having completely lost its grain and had lifted, exposing the cardboard at the box, the corners of the covers, and the ends of the spine. The paper boards were also scratched, the leather labels cracked, and the stitching of the headbands had begun to unravel. In the text block, besides the inevitable rust and damp stains, the most worrying alterations, from the point of view of the work's integrity, were the tears in the folded prints. Some of these tears, whose cause must be attributed to the frequent folding and unfolding of the large sheets inside the book, exceeded 21 cm, practically two-thirds of the total width of the sheet.

Aside from repairing the tears, we had to consider whether the irreversible condition of the leather justified a complete rebinding, with the consequent destruction of a part of the book's history. We ultimately decided to replace only the outer covering with a full leather binding that would do justice to the importance of the work, while preserving everything that formed part of the book's construction and is still sound, but which also gives these three volumes a patina "from within." We are referring to the preservation of the stitching over corded bands, the headbands, the labels, and the thick boards of papier-mâché that, beneath the new covering, reveal their subtle irregularities.
It's not about creating a historical forgery - it's obvious that the leather is new, as are the endpapers; it's about preserving a job well done, some data
historic and unique.