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Comment by ComputerPerson | Hacker News Reader

The issue is mold. Sealed plastic bags for old books is a recipe for mold. At least they're individually stored, so they would develop mold at independent rates. (And maybe the seal allows airflow.)

Most books have some mold by the time they're ~100 years old, it's just not enough to cause a serious problem. Sealed enclosures (wrappings, bags, tubs) are a nightmare situation. Even packing books too tighly on shelves accelerates mold growth to problematic levels.

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Dealing with mold in an archival environment is a nightmare, and yeah, the only thing sealing the books in plastic does is make it easier to either throw them away, or to freeze them to try to kill and then manually clean out the mold. https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/3...

How about irradiating them? Would kill the mold without the humidity problems.

If I did that I'd seal them with silica gel to keep the humidity down.

I would think this totally dries the pages out and then they just turn to dust, from experience.

A well-organized system derived from binder clips works for small/medium scale collections of debound books. It's a quick and easy, and relatively cheap, way to "rebind" them in parts. The clips even provide good surfaces for labels.

Archivists recommend standard ambient conditions or a little drier for long term storage. As you've said, too dry and the pages fall apart; permanent damage.

I suppose the fancy silica gels that maintain specific humidities would work in bags.

>> If I did that I'd seal them with silica gel to keep the humidity down.

> I would think this totally dries the pages out and then they just turn to dust, from experience.

They used to sell Boveda two-way humidity control packs that would keep a bag at a constant low-ish 32% humidity, but last I looked those were discontinued (it looks like they've pivoted pretty heavily to marijuana storage and higher-humidity products).

My understanding is that the fibers in paper can become brittle if they are too dry. However, this doesn't cause the paper to break down, it just makes it vulnerable to damage if flexed. So storing paper dry is fine if it is then humidified before being stressed.

It's possible. My only experience is with vintage newspapers that were allowed to dry out, and then when trying to open them just shatter like a carbonized volcano scroll.

It's truly humbling how much knowledge professionals from different fields have, and how easy it is to fall into a Dunning–Kruger effect trap where a bit of knowledge — extremely extrapolated — would've led me down the path of hubris and guessing so many wrong answers. Thanks all.

One of the best things about this site is how many people there are on here who are way smarter than me, with much deeper domain knowledge.

Or we just reflexively look stuff up.

I think that we all have varying degrees of The Knack [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/g8vHhgh6oM0?t=50

Though newspapers are printed on some of the lowest quality paper possible, so they're probably suffering from other issues than just dryness.

Like the short lifespan of acid paper. Drying might actually slow down that degradation.

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