Damnit, I just drenched a softcover book, and it’s one I really want to keep in as good a condition as humanly possible. How in the heck do I salvage this thing?
An hour and a half later, and all I can offer is negative advice.
DO NOT attempt to dry the book in a microwave. I tried this once with a paperback, and it burst into flames.
If the book is saturated with water, do not try to peel it open. Lay a sheet of plastic down on a table (or use a table with a water- proof surface) and lay a few sheets of blotting paper down. If you don’t have blotting paper, you could use basket style coffee filters flattened out. Lay the book on its side and arrange a fan to blow room-temperature air gently over the book. Check and change the blotting paper frequently. When the book has dried enough so that the pages and cover can be gently separated, stand the book up on end (spine vertical) with the pages fanned out and now arrange a fan to blow gently heated air on the book. If it will not stand up by itself, you can make a support from styrofoam blocks or plastic coated wire. As soon as possible insert drying sheets - unprinted paper towel should work - starting from the back of the book put an interleaving sheet between about every 25th page. Don’t put these all the way into the fold, leave at least a 1/2 inch margin. Change these frequently, especially in the first few hours, but don’t put the fresh sheets in the same place as the ones you are taking out. You should also have the fan running, gently blowing room temperature. When the interleaving papers cease to become damp, remove the papers and fan the pages out again with the fan still blowing gently, until all the pages feel completely dry.
Your real enemy is mold… if it starts to develop and this book is really important to you, probably the best thing to do it to wrap the book in plastic, throw it in your freezer and then contact your local archives or museaum and ask to speak to a conservator about what to do next.
Gook luck!
(I Am Not A Conservator But My Wife Is)
If by any chance you don’t have a museaum near where you live, you could also try a museum.
And that was supposed to be Good Luck (Good Grief!)
It’s probably too late for this techinique, but I recall what some library did when they had some rare editions that got wet from a sprinker activating after a minor fire, was that they froze them immediately and then used some kind of freeze drying machine that extracted the water by sublimating it directly to vapor which minimized damage to the pages that would have been caused by air drying a wet page. I don’t know how you could do this without access to specialized freeze drying equipment.
moes lotion gave excellent advice. This page from the Library of Congress on emergency drying procedures says much the same thing.
moes lotion, I’m a conservator, too! What does your wife work with? (I work in a small museum, so I work with all types of artifacts, cleaning them, doing the paperwork, and preparing them for storage.)
Howdy Lissa… my wife works on oil paintings and decorative frames. She is now in private practice. I took my advice from a disaster preparedness manual that she wrote for the art gallery of a small Canadian university where she worked after graduating from the Queen’s University Art Conservation program.
moes lotion, in a way, I envy your wife. I wish I was a specialist in something. Right now, I’m a Jill-of-all-trades-master-of-none. I clean everything that comes into our museum, and artifacts we unearth from the storage vaults.
When it comes to paintings, the only cleaning I do to them is to go over them with a small, dry, soft paintbrush, flicking off bits of dust. On other artifacts, it sometimes requires chemicals and a lot of elbow grease. (I’ve been cleaning a set of brass lamps for six months now.)
Mostly, though, it’s conservative cleaning and packing them away in archival materials. I do no restoration work-- we’ve only had a small number of items restored; mainly we try to keep things in the condition in which they were given to us, but clean and properly store them to ensure preservation.
But being in a small museum gives me the opprotunity to do things I’d never be able to do in a larger more “professional” museum like the Smithsonian. They would never let a lowly docent clean artifacts or design and install exhibits. I’ve had wonderful opprotunities to examine the objects most people only see behind glass.
The best thing about work like your wife and I do is that we’re preserving the past and present for future generations. Our work will mean something a hundred years from now. Few people can say that.