One
of life’s minor pleasures is opening old leatherbound covers to a view of rich
swirled marbling. Madder lakes of contiguous beauty are raindropped with navy
blues or rose pinks, then rippled with golden lacing fine as spider web.
Sometimes the marbling can be mistaken for a river bed. Sometimes the marbling can be
mistaken for mould. Fuzzy brown globules or acrid green oozes have to be
touched for reassurance. They are, yes indeed, the rare quality inks an Empire
could extract from deepest darkest London suppliers. Such a relief.
The
all-seeing eyes of the librarian perceive disaster. It has a disorder, a
colour, a disintegration, a velvet growth. Despite having the air-conditioning
on 24/7, there is an outbreak. The history books
may suddenly be history. Spores are the issue. The risk is ever-present. They
could spread with minimal assistance. The fumigator smothers the disaster with a noxious
bomb. The bathroom fan speaks warm words to saturated pages. The paper towel
stays entirely absorbed in its single task. There’s fold upon fold, and there’s
mould. There’s cold, and then there’s mould. There’s tolds and untolds, and
then there’s mould. However, all is not lost and the cost is low. It is not
hugely expensive and peace of mind is more important. The all-seeing librarian
turns the pages outward toward the sun. At least there is something to show for
it. Restoration is a prospect.
Melvill
Dewey broke the mould. He believed he was doing everyone a service. Or rather,
he remade the mold, according to the laws of American plain speech. Only his
committee quite understood. It’s hard to argue with a quorum. Mould spreads and
contracts. Say what you will, it proliferates and prolongs regardless of you or
anyone. Words likewise take hold in the conditions. Books give them new life,
taking on appearances that weren’t there yesterday. They exist inside and
outside the book, at the same time. They settle in and will not be moved,
resident organisms for a protracted period. Dewey would defy mildew. His
classifications bring temporary order to the mass of monographs. The elements
are kept at bay in bay after bay, regimented where water must not go. But Dewey
himself thrived on idealism.
It
can get in anywhere, a faulty skylight, a tipped tile. Deluge comes under the
door in a sudden storm. A mineral water bottle dropped in a return chute has the
weekend to wreak havoc. It accumulates quietly on cold nights down to tables of
contents. It is immoveable after the sprinklers finish, soaking though where it
cannot run off, adding new designs to the watermarks. It drinks up pages that
will puff, expand, crinkle, and moulder. The books meet their maker, the lucid
element that trips tree life forward toward the clouds. That registers each
leaf the branches hand out. That nestles and nets the fibres of pulp into the
mould and deckle geared for endless A5, more perfect quarto, fabulous folios.
That evaporates now into cyclic existence high above the reading mind, the
riffling page, and into wordless atmosphere in form of said clouds.
Some
libraries will not install sprinklers. If a fire breaks out, books destroyed by
flames can be claimed on insurance. Books saved by water then bulge and become
unusable. Their survival means that claims will not succeed. Susan Orleans
describes the water effects of the Los Angeles Public Library fire of 1986. “They
had to move quickly and freeze the books because mold spores begin to bloom
within forty-eight hours after being activated by water. If the books got
moldy, they would be unsalvageable. That meant the staff would have to pack,
move, and store seven hundred thousand damaged books somewhere cold before mold
erupted.” The staff froze the books in the huge freezers of fish packing and
food storage facilities in the Los Angeles area. Mold, as Orleans calls it, did
not erupt.
When
we are smaller than a full-stop we wander through the fungal forest sprouting
out of the hardcover. Pseudo-roots plunged into films of water appear little
different to the canopies that afford small protection for a microdot from sun
or, more troubling, water. The greenfield lie of the land transforms gold leaf
letters and inkjet graphics into ruins of title and author, sunken beneath the
stands of mould agglomerating and spiralling in mirkwood circlets and
crescents. Innocently each type of mould rests with its funky Latin term atop
acres of unreadable dead organic matter. Step over the edge of this encyclopaedia
or novel or textbook, hard to tell which, and we are weaving about oases of
foxing as far as microdots can see, to all corners of flyleaf flatland. Even
this close up, explanations for foxing don’t come easily. They may be alive but
growth is indiscernible, a brown stain before blue heaven. We brush past page
after page of these mystery circlets, their water source since vanished while the
colour they keep to themselves will not fade.
Jane
Greenfield advises that “thoughtful housing and handling can wipe out human
error and careful surveillance is the best antidote to mutilation.” Her well-chosen
words are inserted into discussion about insects, mould, and flooding.
Scripture moves us to consider that we not store up our treasures where rust
and moth destroy, mould too being a rust that may infiltrate and corrode.
Still, we live with the possibility that the contents of books will bring light
and life. They are a possession the value of which money cannot buy. It does us
well to learn the difference. What kind of treasure is a book if it cannot be
used? Light must enter for the contents to be seen, as meanwhile Greenfield
instructs, “If possible, store books away from all possible sources of water.”
Though how we can ever wipe out human error is a question that hangs in the
air, after we put down her book. Such questions are the cause for any number of
new books, even those on the care of fine books.
Sources
ANZTLA-Forum,
e-list of the Australian and New Zealand Theological Library Association, exchange
of emails between Andrée Pursey, Annette McGrath, Hazel Nsair, and Jenny Clarke
on Thursday the 31st January, 2019
Greenfield,
Jane. The care of fine books. Lyons & Burford, 1988, pp. 69-71
Orlean,
Susan. The library book. Atlantic Books, 2019, pp. 35-36
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