How to Care for Rare Books

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Erik Bosse. I'm with the Aldredge Bookstore. When you find yourself beginning to invest significant money into building a book collection it's important to protect that investment and to take care of your books. Lighting is an important issue. Sunlight and fluorescent lights and a lot of incandescent lights can play havoc on bleaching out some of the pigments in the bindings or the dust jackets. So, take consideration into how much light you have in your library. Another thing is you might see a lot of these dust jacket protectors. They've become very popular among collectible book dealers. It's basically a bit of plastic and paper surrounding the dust jacket. It does a great job keeping the jacket from chipping. What a lot of dealers don't tell you and some of them don't seem to know themselves, is that most of these library jacket covers are not made of archival plastic or archival paper. Their good to keep on your books for the short term. But eventually you want to be able to go to some place where you can buy archival material. Because eventually this paper is going to start discoloring and having some impact on the dust jacket itself. There are archival plastics like this Mylar here. Which even on a hardback book without a dust jacket can help keep anything from scratching or marring the cover of the book? Leather bindings. It's important to keep the leather from getting too dry and cracking. There are leather creams out there that are make specifically for books. You might want to talk to your local antiquated book dealer and see if he or she has a source for them. If not often times we use neat foot oil or other types of leather creams without any dye on it. And you basically sort of rub it into the leather and let it sit for a while to let the oil soak in and then rub it off with a clean cotton cloth. For things like paper items and paperbacks that are very fragile. It's often good to find again an archival type of plastic envelope to put it in."