How to Dry a Damp Book

Video Transcript

"Once you have gotten your book dry enough so that it is no longer saturated or even partially wet you have a damp book. This is characterized by mainly the covers being wet, you might have a couple of pages inside that are a little bit damp but for the most part the pages move freely, they are not sticking together and you don't have any super obviously wet lines across the edges of the page. This one you see a little bit of dampness in the margins for the far inside. This is going to be solved by how we dry a damp book. As I said earlier, as your book progresses from saturated to partially to damp you are going to follow all of these steps in order, but of course if you start with a damp book then this is all that you will need to do and this is; have it up on end and have it fanned out as much as possible. You want to be able to get the pages as separate as possible so that they can more thoroughly dry particularly if the inside of your book, if the spine is wetter then it is also a very good reason to have your book as spread out as possible. The only thing that you have to worry about is that you don't want your book, the pages of the book to fall forward too far so you can put something absorbent underneath them if they are coming out too far just to keep them raised up a little bit higher than the covers so this will help prevent it from pulling out, you might have to worry a little bit about the glue coming away from your edge of your book, you can see that this one is pulling a bit and you can have that fixed by a book conservator if it is very important to you, otherwise as long as the pages are staying in you don't have to worry about it as much."