21 Sep
1998
21 Sep
'98
6:41 p.m.
On Sat, 19 Sep 1998 sethm(a)loomcom.com wrote:
Ack! Something else to worry about!
Lucky me. I
went home with a box of old DEC paperbacks today. A nice
assortment of PDP-8, PDP-11 and VAX titles. I don't do DEC (I remember
cherishing the honor of powering-down our development VAXen for the last
time), but the books are small, so I plan to get them all signed by Gordon
Bell at VCF next weekend and stash them away for 100 years or so.
They won't last more than 20 years, sorry :) Seriously, all the DEC processor and programming
paperbacks I've come
accross are printed on highly acidic paper, almost newsprint quality.
I actually have a couple of DEC paperbacks (lucky me) and both are indeed
in bad shape. The paper is very yellow.
They can be de-acidified, if it's not too late.
Check by gently
folding back a small corner of one of the pages, then folding it back
the other way; if it snaps off, the book is too far gone to be saved.
If it stays attached, there's hope.
I can't get to my "Introduction to Programming" book from the PDP-8
handbook series right now (which is in really sad shape paperwise), but
I've just checked my "decsystem10 mathematical languages handbook", and it
still passes the test. It smells funny, though, and I don't think the
smell is cigarette smoke.
(And on the cigarette smoke front, I'm happy to report that my Amiga
Hardware Reference Manual and RKM: Exec manual no longer send out a
suffocating stench of tobacco when I flip the pages! I guess it must have
been humid this summer.)
I also have other historical documents that are in similar condition to
the DEC books (most notably volumes 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7 of Ernesto Che
Guevara's "Escritos y discursos" which I still haven't read because I
don't speak Spanish). As a result, I would be very interested in hearing
if anyone has success in deacidifying books.
Check out Doug Jones's excellent page about
bookbinding and preserving
old paperbacks at http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/book/index.html
This page itself deals with photocopying and binding mainly, but there are
some excellent links from this page which deal with deacidification. I
like the look of Paprican's Dry Deacidification Method... it looks like
something I might be able to manage on my own if I can locate the
materials. I'll have to look at some of the other processes as well.
-Seth
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/