About the AuthorPreserving Library Materials: A Manual. By Susan G. Swartzburg. Second edition. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 503 p. ISBN 0–810–82855–3. $59.50.
In the last two decades, librarians and archivists have become increasingly aware of the need to care for their collections: to shield them from harmful levels of temperature and humidity and light; to protect them from thieves and pests; and to do something about acidic paper. Susan Swartzburg has been involved in preservation for a number of years, and has written several books on the topic. Her latest book has some useful features, although the author’s style does not make for easy reading, because she tends to pack her sentences with references to persons, organizations, and publications.
This is not a how–to–do–it book. One will not learn how to encapsulate, or make phase boxes, or repair paper or bindings. Furthermore, Swartzburg deliberately refrains from describing the work of conservators, and she rightly advises librarians not to attempt most in–house repairs.
The first three chapters are devoted to the importance of preservation; to urging librarians to conduct a “preservation survey,” to see how well their collections are being cared for, and find out where remedial action is called for; and to general remarks on good housekeeping and the proper handling and shelving of materials.
In the ensuing chapters, Swartzburg discusses (briefly) the care of materials such as these: archival records; art prints; magnetic recordings (audio– and videotapes); maps; microforms; motion pictures; newspapers; paintings (!); photocopies; photographic materials (only 17 pages on a large and complicated topic); and sound recordings (such as cylinders and disks).
In a chapter of 15 pages, the author attempts to cover temperature, humidity, light, and the proper exhibition of materials. In another brief chapter, she discusses disaster planning and recovery, and security against theft and vandalism. The chapter on paper includes a very brief history of paper–making, tells what’s wrong with much modern paper, and suggests ways in which librarians can try to cope with acidic paper. A chapter on the “Enemies of Books” gives brief descriptions of insects, rodents, and mold; the damage they can do; and how they can be controlled. Bookbinding is covered in a cursory way, as a 14–page chapter attempts to sketch the history of bookbinding, describe the various types of bindings in use today, and make recommendations on how to handle various types of volumes.
Throughout the book, Swartzburg’s treatment of the historical background of various materials or techniques is sketchy in the extreme, e.g., the “History of Book Production” (less than two pages); bookbinding (3–1/2 pages, with no illustrations of historical bindings!); paper–making (four pages); and, photography (less than three pages, with fleeting mention of such processes as daguerreotypes, tintypes, and ambrotypes). In a section on prints, she tries to explain the various processes (engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, and the like) in less than a single page!
The book’s illustrations are a disaster. There are 10 of them, but there is no list of illustrations, so the reader will have no idea what or where they are, without thumbing through the entire book. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, because most of the illustrations are of little or no value. One of the photographs is unaccountably repeated, merely eight pages after its first appearance. Another has an inaccurate caption. (A thermohygrograph is identified as a simple hygrometer.) A sketch purporting to show the structure of a book is practically worthless, as are shots of the inside of a commercial bindery and of a technician restoring a large work of art.
So much for the 13 chapters of the text, which occupy almost exactly half of the book. The Glossary, Appendices, Bibliography, and Index take up the latter half. The 58–page Glossary is useful, offering succinct definitions of hundreds of such terms as “Foxing,” “Laid Paper,” and “Relative Humidity.” There are two Appendices. The first one (33 pages) lists organizations such as the Institute of Paper Conservation and the Leather Conservation Centre. For each, the same sort of information is given which one would find in the Encyclopedia of Associations: address, purpose, and publications. The second one (eight pages) lists 36 serials thought to be useful. Some are obvious titles (Restaurator) and some are less obvious (Visual Resources and International Journal of Documentation). All of the journals are wholly or partly in English, and three–fourths of them are published in the United States. For each, the address and starting date and frequency are given, and there is a brief annotation — sometimes only a sentence in length, and sometimes consisting of only a few words.
The Bibliography at the end of the book covers 145 pages. The citations, which are annotated briefly, are arranged in 13 sections, to match the 13 chapters of text. Most of the citations are from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and all of them seem to be in English. (There are also Suggested Readings at the end of each chapter. The items listed there are all repeated, without annotations, in the final Bibliography. This duplication is a waste of space.) Most chapters also have endnotes referring to sources from (primarily) the last two decades.
The book’s Index, although only nine pages in length, seems to be adequate. Some of the entries could, however, have been subdivided, with benefit to the reader. For instance, there are 17 page references to “Temperature” and 18 to “Humidity,” but these references consist merely of clots of undifferentiated page numbers. (This is as though, in a biography of John Milton, there would be an index entry for “Milton, John,” followed by page numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and so on, with no clue as to which aspect of the subject was treated on each page.) At the same time, there are single page references to such surprising topics as Aristotle, Aristophanes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Linnaeus, the Magna Charta, Pliny, T’sai Lun (the alleged inventor of paper), and Wynken de Worde (a printer of the 1400s). It’s not that these items should not be indexed; it’s that no one interested in the philosophy of, say, Aristotle vould dream of looking for information in a book on preserving library materials. The effort spent on recording such fleeting and unexpected references might have been better spent in giving a rational arrangement to such entries as “Temperature” and “Humidity.”
Scarecrow Press also publishes a shorter, paper–bound version of this work, which does not include the Appendices or the Bibliography. Inasmuch as these (and the Glossary) are the most useful parts of the book, no librarian or archivist should buy the abridged version.
Today there are hundreds of publications available on preservation. This book does not teach you how to do anything, and it contains no detailed information on techniques or materials or historical development. Nonetheless, the special features in the latter half of the book make it a worthwhile purchase for any library — wherever located — just starting to build a collection on the subject.
Theodore Spahn is Professor Emeritus, Rosary College School of Library and Information Science. He has master’s degrees in history (Northwestern University) and library science (Rosary College), and a doctorate in library science from the University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty at Rosary College — where he has taught book arts and book conservation — Dr. Spahn had been Librarian in the geology library at Northwestern University, then Assistant Professor and Chief Bibliographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His publications include From Radical Left to Extreme Right (4 vols.; 1970–1986) and reviews in various journals.
© 1995 Theodore Spahn.
Citation
Spahn, Theodore, “Review of Preserving Library Materials: A Manual, by Susan G. Swartzburg (Second edition),” Third World Libraries, Volume 5, Number 2 (Spring 1995).