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Deterioration of Soviet Paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Melville J. Ruggles
Melville J. Ruggles*
Affiliation:
Council on Library Resources, Inc.
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Extract

The physical book of this century has been described as “a degenerate weakling, bent on self destruction.” In this world of “Lweaklings” Soviet publications are especially prone to self destruction, and it is a matter of serious concern to those librarians and scholars who work with the decaying books, periodicals and newspapers which record the facts, figures and ideas of Russian and Soviet civilization.

In 1957 William J. Barrow, a Richmond, Virginia, expert on paper, began a study of the deterioration of American book papers with funds granted by the Council on Library Resources, Inc., of Washington, D. C. He found that “most library books printed in the first half of the twentieth century will be in an unusable condition in the next century.” The materials upon which this verdict was based were 500 non-fiction books printed and published in the United States between 1900 and 1949.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1960 , pp. 101 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1960

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References

1 Church, Randolph, “Perish the Paper, Perish the Book, Perish the Thought: An Inquiry,” Publishers’ Weekly, Vol. 172, No. 10 (Sept. 2, 1957), p. 54 Google Scholar.

2 Barrow, W. J. and Reavis Sproull, C., “Permanence in Book Papers,” Science, April 24, 1959, pp. 1075–84Google Scholar.

3 Barrow reports that recent tests on various American newspapers show that they can be folded (by an M.I.T. Folding Endurance Tester, i/2 kig. tension) only ten to forty-eight times before breaking and will have a tear resistance of eleven to fourteen grams (from top to botton of the sheet) before tearing. By contrast, Barrow states that a paper should be able to stand at least 250 folds to be considered of medium strength. Resistance to tear should be at least approximately fifty grams. Barrow has not constructed precise measurements for the rate or predicted rate of deterioration of papers with high ground wood content, because only 2% of his sample of American made books contain any ground wood, and only one item contained as much as 80%. He states, however, that it is a well known fact that such papers deteriorate at a very rapid rate.Google Scholar

4 “Artificial Aging” is accomplished by heating the paper for seventy-two hours at 100°C. ± 2° which simulates approximately twenty-five years of aging under normal conditions. The physical tests were made according to the standards established by the Technical Association of Pulp and Paper Industries.Google Scholar

5 On September 14, 1934, anil February 25, 1936, the highest organs of the Soviet government promulgated regulations on the preservation of library collections and archives. As a result, the scientific research laboratory of the Division of Preservation and Restoration of Books of the Lenin Library launched a research program for the purpose of finding the causes of deterioration of books and seeking new methods for preserving them. Their findings have been published in a series of three collections of scientific articles. The latest, and apparently the only one available in Washington, D. C, is: U.S.S.R. Gosudarstvennaja ordena Lenina Biblioteka SSSR im. Lenina, V.I.. Otdel Gigieny i Restavracii Knigi. Sbornik materialov po sokhrannosti knizhnykh fondov. Vypusk 3 (Moscow, 1958). See also: same author, Sokhrannost’ knizhnykh fondov; posobie dlja oblastnykh, gorodskikh i krupnykh rajonnykh bibliotek (2d ed.; Moscow, 1957)Google Scholar.