I was very honored to get an email, nearly two years ago, from Mary - a real "Mud Angel" - who offered to send me her photos to post here on Florence Flood. It has taken way too long to do this, but here they are - a real treasure trove of people coming together to save some of the treasures of Florence - specifically books in this case. The photos here are actually from February 1967, a few months after the flood - this description is from Mary:

"...I was in Florence working on the books from the National Library that were brought in from the tobacco barns in the countryside. 

I was there at least a week and we worked every day at Fort Belvedere, primarily scraping mud from the pages that had been unbound by the Italian students, packaging them up & lowering them down for transport to the railway station for washing.

The people I was working with were all sorts (students, airline stewardesses on layover, etc.) but primarily decisions were made by the British bookbinders.

The weather was good enough that we sat outside for lunch and were enthralled by the descriptions of the problems they encountered "the last time we rebound the Book of Kells!!"

(This is the first half of the photos, I will be posting the rest in another album closer to the 45th anniversary of the flood on November 4th, 2011)