How to Judge Water Damage to Books

Video Transcript

"In order to determine what you are going to do as your next step you need to determine how wet your book is. You can see that this book is completely saturated, the cover is barely coming off of the front page, this is going to be treated with the most delicacy because you don't want the already soaked pages to be torn or ripped or damaged even further. So this is our saturated book. You'll then have your partially wet book, you can see that the cover is wet and the pages are wet but you can also still open up the pages a little bit. They are not all entirely sticking to one another, although some of them have gotten wet most of the way though. This one is going to have a different treatment than our totally saturated book. Lastly we have our just plain wet book, this is a book where the cover might be soaked but for the most part the pages are fairly dry, you might have a little bit of wet around the edges, it's almost hardly damaged in getting wet. Now for all of these steps we are going to start with the saturated book and move our way down to the least wet book, because for every time you get a book more dry you are going to move onto the next type of book steps."