Mr. GilaB’s great-grandfather was an eminent rabbi in the early twentieth century; he passed away in 1928, six years after moving to America. About a year ago, my in-laws came for a visit, bearing a bunch of cardboard boxes, which they deposited in the corner of our guest room. Apparently, these are a portion of the great-grandfather’s library of Jewish texts (Talmuds, etc.), which they are passing on to my husband. (We don’t even have anywhere to put these, and asked them not to bring the rest of the boxes, which are currently sitting in the in-laws’ basement, until we figure out how to properly store them.) This is a very big deal for Mr. GilaB, as he thinks of his great-grandfather as a role model and takes a lot of pride in his family history, but we’ve never properly dealt with the books because the great-grandfather’s bookcase is supposed to come with them, but it’s been quasi-lost in a storage facility somewhere. (I don’t actually want the bookcase, which doesn’t match any of our stuff. I think it’s great that we have the books, but feel no attachment to the furniture.) The books have remained untouched in cardboard boxes in the corner of the guest room.
Anyway, last night, Mr. GilaB casually mentioned that some of the books date to the 1700’s, although his grandfather had them all rebound in (he thinks) the 1960’s. I had thought they all dated to the early twentieth century, since I knew that the great-grandfather and his family had hastily fled some sort of Eastern European political upheaval (maybe WWI?), and I figured that he must have certainly lost his library at that point. (There’s a family story of how all of his early, unpublished writings and notes were lost because somebody stole the bag in a crush at the train station - imagine shlepping boxes of books in that situation!) I would guess that the older books were originally printed in Lithuania and Poland; I don’t know anything about the re-binding.
I know that one is supposed to treat old and fragile printed material very carefully, and that certain materials can off-gas damaging chemicals. Acid-free paper rings a bell, too. I haven’t even seen the books, which are sealed in boxes, although I just peeked into two partially opened boxes and see that everything in them is wrapped in several layers of white paper. How should we go about properly storing these, especially if we want to have them in our home? Do we get some sort of special bookcase? Is it possible that the materials from the re-binding 40 years ago is actually harming them? I realize that we shouldn’t touch the pages if possible, and should probably keep them out of direct sunlight. Our living room (where we would want to put them) tends not to get particularly hot or humid, but it is a New York apartment, and we don’t have total temperature control.