Ashes to Ashes, Books to Dust
It's happening in a hundred places all over the northland right now: with winter arriving, there's finally time to read that good book. You settle into a comfy chair, open the book and suddenly have a lapful of brittle paper shards.
Northern climates are hard on books, as librarians can testify. The low humidities in Interior homes desiccate the glues that hold books together; the soggy coastal weather fosters the growth of hardy molds that blotch pages and covers. Low sun angles means that light can reach and attack books on shelves well back from windows.
Northern peculiarities don't help, but the self-destruction of old pages goes on everywhere. The problem is that the paper is polluting itself.
For nearly 2,000 years, ever since the Chinese first invented it, paper was based mainly on fabrics. Linen and cotton were favored--when pounded to separate the fibers and properly reformed, they yielded a long-lasting web of cellulose.
After about 1850, as more people clamored for more to read, business boomed for papermakers. They looked for cheaper and more plentiful sources of fiber, and they found it in wood.
Economically, this seemed a wonderful idea. Wood scrap could be used and trees harvested that were no good for lumber. The processed wood pulp wasn't quite as good for making paper. Because it had shorter fibers, inks tended to bleed or feather into the paper, making for blurry letters. The technologists of the last century solved that problem by turning to chemistry. They discovered that certain additives produced a perfectly acceptable, and still inexpensive, paper stock.
One of the best additives was and is alum-a compound of sulfur and a metal, usually aluminum. But over time aluminum sulfate decomposes, combines with water vapor in the air, and produces sulfuric acid. The acid attacks the paper, making it brittle. It may take a few years or many decades, but the eventual result is that pile of yellowed shreds in the laps of the startled would-be readers.
Northern readers are not the only ones making this unpleasant discovery. According to an article in a recent issue of Science magazine, there are now some 76 million books in U.S. research libraries that will crumble into confetti if handled.
Once a book is that brittle, it can't be restored. For those less far along the path to destruction, possible treatments exist. It was discovered at the Library of Congress that books can be deacidified with diethyl zinc vapor in a pressure cooker, but the process is expensive, risky, and can be used on only a few books at a time. The Canadian Library and Archives uses a different chemical process to deacidify books; they can treat up to 50 at a time, but the process is even more expensive, Smaller libraries are conconcentrating on storing book contents on microfiche or microfilm.
This century's technologists are working on the problem (even NASA got involved with the Library of Congress on the zinc process), but so far there have been no breakthroughs. About all the average book owner can do for now is slow down the inevitable action. Book paper and bindings do best away from light, heat, and excess moisture; rare book dealers dream of sales held by impoverished European nobility, because perfect book-storing conditions exist in some castle dungeons. Mending torn pages with transparent tape speeds the decay, for the tape's glue hardens and yellows swiftly. Dust, especially in a city with poor air quality, also shortens book life. The British Museum keeps a flock of attendants busy with vacuum cleaners among its books.
For new books, one hope is different paper. A few publishers (including the University of Alaska Press) are insisting on acid-free paper for their volumes. Alkaline paper stock is usually more costly than acid, and converting a paper mill to produce alkaline stock is expensive. Worst of all, no one is positive that the new papers have solved the self-destruction problem.
The moral of this story is not only that you should read quickly before the pages vanish, but you may need to look quickly as well. Many prints and other paper-based artworks are done on acidic paper, and matt boards are usually acidic as well.
