Our nation’s three most important and revered documents are enclosed in titanium display cases in the rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and they rest on custom-made archival paper created at the University of Iowa.
Tim Barrett, the now-retired director of the UI Center for the Book, says he got the call in 1999 to create the special paper to cradle the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Was that his dream job?
“I and my coworkers were all more immediately focused on, ‘Okay, they want us to go ahead and do this. Now, we actually have to do it and we can’t mess up. This is kind of a big deal,’” Barrett says, laughing. “Rather than letting it go to our heads, we really focused on making the paper and getting it to the National Archives.”…