Rare Book Monthly
A Book Lover's Trip Through Dante's Commedia (or the Care and Preservation of Books)
Vicious discard practices can land books in the dump.
To find your way to Paradiso, Dante suggests that instead of these tapes, would-be repairers use archival tape, or mending tissue, or double-faced acid-free tape.
Dante also suggests that you don't allow your books to be covered with, putting it politely, filth. The Talins recently received a load of texts that left a taste somewhat like camel dung in their mouths. You do not want to get a dread disease by opening a book. A helpful hint: if you see a cloud of dust when you touch the book, vacuum it.
Special circles in Inferno are reserved for the storers. People just love to store little items in their books, ranging from the pressed flower, to postcards, letters, newspaper articles, money, you name it. Things put in books swell the text and break the binding and create acid marks on the endpapers and the pages. If you want to go to Paradiso, put these extra items, if you must, between acid-free paper or tissue and preferably inside an acid-free box or folder, rather than inside the book.
The circles of the gluers find a special place in book Inferno, ranging from the relatively mild infractions of gluing pieces of the binding to the book, instead of keeping them for the bookbinder, to using the horrific "Elmer's Glue" or any other rigid glue, anywhere. If glue you must, then use a flexible, acid-free white glue to assure your place in Paradiso.
An extra-special place in Inferno is reserved for the users of a ghastly product called "Liquid Leather" which, I am told, has to be chipped with sharp metal tools from any book on which it is found.
Sloppy and/or neurotic personal habits will also land you in Inferno: Writing in books (unless you are the author) or stamping your name over and over and over and over and over again (including on the page edges); eating over a book and leaving the residual within its pages; folding the edges of pages as a book marker; and putting coffee cups on book covers will all buy you a trip over to the Stygian realm.
Now, I love librarians; as a group they safeguard our world's knowledge, are concerned with the greater good, and are largely underpaid. They are heroic, as we have seen in Iraq. Most of them are glorified in Paradiso.
However, a small number (usually those concerned with library book sales) have managed to find their way into the depths of Inferno. After safeguarding books for years, these individuals feel some personal need to just about destroy any books that are about to leave their care. They rip out endpapers, stamp "Discard" over and over again, leave rubber cement residue inside the rear board (where the pocket once was), and gouge the endpapers using the sharpest possible pencil with the new price. These practices, combined with the usual library habits of pasting or heavily taping dust jackets to the boards, stamping each and every plate with the library stamp, and adding other library identification reduce a book to barely "reading copy only" and most likely with a fast track to the dump.
And where are the bookbinders and booksellers? Well, most of us are in Purgatorio, fixing all these problems. Not to worry though. We'll move up into Paradiso eventually, even though it might take thirteen thousand years.
Renée Magriel Roberts can be reached at renee@roses-books.com.
