In this flick Johnny Depp plays a researcher of valuable books, yet he has seems to have a terrible smoking habit and in one scene is even seen blowing cigarette smoke over the pages of one of the Quixote volumes, IIRC.
I have seen people wearing white gloves as they are turning pages, so WTH? Did Roman Polanski not hire some curator of ancient tomes to spot this, or what am I missing here?
Another scene shows him lighting up in a bookstore in which he is based. Did I catch a major blunder or is there an explanation?
That’s nothing … in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf is shown as casually smoking a pipe in the Minas Tirith archives with papers strewn all about. And there are torches on the walls with open flames. The whole place is a tinderbox, I tells ya!
I can’t imagine smoke is good for any kind of book, but oddly the older the book the more hardy the book is likely to be. Medieval vellum is extraordinarily tough, and the high quality rag paper that followed still aged quite well. When you come to the early 20th century and the mass-produced book, though, you get low-quality acidic paper that turns brown and brittle within a matter of years. You really need to keep those smokers away from books made in the 1940s.
j66, that makes sense in light of the fact that a little later in the film he visits a bookstore run buy a of couple older guys, and after Depp and one of them lights up, the camera shows us a close-up of a dangerously long cigarette ash hovering over the Satanic collaboration Depp is trying to authenticate.
