The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 53

Paat 4-South Extra, Monday, December 14, 1981 Preserving Books Can Cost Millions Landmarks I. .....33. nr Hiij I 1 1 5' r'- yymkWe in. Nnr Vw Tim NEW YORK Franklin Delano Roosevelt was mistaken when he observed that "People die, but books never die." A third to a half of the 5 million books at the New York Public Library are dying right now. Their plight is by no means unique.

Death, in the form of an acid-producing chemical process that turns paper to dust, also stalks literally hundreds of millions of books, diaries, manuscripts and letters at the Harvard library, at the Bibliotheque Nationale of France, at the Library of Congress at virtually every library in the world. The New York library, which will have spent $1.2 million this year on book conservation, is currently engaged in a fundraising effort and plans to use a significant part of the money it raises to prolong the life of its books. Other libraries, hard-pressed for funds, are also trying to find the best ways to accelerate their book preservation programs. The "deacidification" process is often expensive and time-consuming, but the technology is constantly changing and the process shows signs of becoming less expensive and faster. The problem of mortality in books is really not one of old age at least not compared with what the life expectancy of a book was once supposed to be.

The Gutenberg Bibles, one of which is in the New York Public Library, were printed in the 15th century and remain in surprisingly good condition, as do many other books of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. But these books were printed on paper derived from cotton and linen rags. The paper makers of olden times did not know it, but paper made in this way essentially has a neutral pH zero acidity and frequently also contains calcium carbonate, a buffering salt that serves to prevent or greatly reduce the creation of acid for extremely long periods of time. But there is a great deal of acid in the lives of the books that were printed in the 19th century, when wider literacy increased the demands of the printing industry to the point that it was no longer possible to use paper derived totally from rags. Publishers and printers changed their ancient ways and turned to wood, and it is now apparent that paper made this way is not standing the test of time as did paper made from rags.

Robert DeCandido, who runs the Physical Treatment Branch of the Conservation Division at the New York Public Library and whose job it is to stop books from crumbling to dust, said that modern books, especially those published since 1850 or so, literally contain the seeds of their own 'destruction at the very moment of their creation, because they are made with highly acidic wood fibers. The paper used for newspapers, many magazines and paperback books has an even shorter life expectancy than that of hardbound books. Dr. Richard D. Smith, a professional engineer and a lecturer at the University of Chicago graduate library school, recently wrote in the journal Chemtech that such paper is "notoriously impermanent unless kept cool, dry and away from oxygen and light" This ground wood paper is high in lignin, a primary structural component of wood.

Smith explained in an interview that when lignin oxidizes through contact with oxygen, the process changes the way it reflects light, discoloring the paper. And the oxidation also produces acids, which attack the fiber. DeCandido says he just received an estimate from a restorer who would use the aqueous method to deacidify some old maps, at a charge of from $6 to $10 a sheet. This price also included says that a single book deacidified in this way might cost the library several thousand dollars. But there are much less expensive methods.

There is, for instance, an approach in which each page of a book might be brushed or sprayed with an alcoholic dry cleaning solution whose neutralizing agent is chemically akin to milk of magnesia. Smith, who is president of a chemical and equipment manufacturing company called Wei T'o Associates, says he has developed a method of "mass deacidification" that would allow whole books to be neutralized and buffered, using a nonaqueous solution modified with refrigerant gas to facilitate drying. He says it will be used shortly by the Public Archives of Canada and that the cost, when applied to many books treated at once, would be about $3 to $5 per book. Robert Parliament, who is the conservation librarian at Princeton University, notes that initial costs in setting up the equipment in Smith's approach would be high, and he hopes to develop a system with lower initial expense that will deacidify books for about $10 or $12 each. There is also a gaseous technique now being developed by experts at the Library of Congress, among others, in which books are placed in a chamber that contains no moisture and exposed to diethyl zinc vapor, an acid neutral-izer.

If this process could be perfected it would probably prove to be much cheaper than any of the older methods. But there have been unwanted side effects: the treatment seems to leave the document more sensitive to degradation if it is exposed to ultraviolet rays, such as those that come from the sun. Moreover, diethyl zinc is not easy to work with. It catches fire easily in air and explodes in water. In all of this, the central problem faced by librarians is what to save, since clearly the technology is not yet at hand that will permit them to save everything.

DeCandido, who takes the position that he will save everything he can, is clearly not as worried about the works of the great writers as he is about the lesser ones, whose contributions may only exist in magazines and newspapers. He says he is confident that the works of Whitman, Dickens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Tolstoy and other writers of their stature are in no danger of disappearing. But the New York Public Library is filled with books and papers that may be one of a kind or near it, and DeCandido says the library cannot tolerate their destruction. Microfilm would preserve the texts, of course, but it is more cumbersome to use than a book and also is not as intrinsically pleasing. Recently, the library discovered it had two deteriorating volumes of The Brownies Book, a magazine that was published briefly for black children in the early 1920s.

It was edited by W.E.B. DuBois and contained contributions from Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, poems and stories that apparently were never published elsewhere. DeCandido says that The Brownies Book is held by only two other libraries in the United States and one of those collections is incomplete. "This entire little corner of American life, which I think is important and of interest to a lot of people, could have just disappeared," said DeCandido. Instead, it was microfilmed and deacidifidied and remains in the library, encapsulated safely in sheets of plastic.

tot Tittle Statue Originally Bound for Orange Bowl OELRAV BEACH In 1968, sculptor Don Seller of south Miami finished a 20-foot-tall statue of N.Y. Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, with the Intention of donating It to the Orange Bowl. His offer was rejected, and Seller hadn't yet decided what to do with the statue, when friend George Tlmmins, a Oelray Beach lifeguard captain, asked him to consider donating the statue to a lovely tittle high school with a great football team. The high school was Seacrest High, since renamed Atlantic High School, and the 365 seniors of the class of 1969 agreed to contribute, as a class gift, the expensss of moving and setting up the statue at the school.

Seller built the Tittle sculpture, using steel-reinforced concrete, "as a homage to Y.A. Tittle" after seeing a photograph of Tittle throwing a pass. The Tittle sculpture, which weighs about 12 tons, according to Seller, had a rough career at first. Transported from Seller's home in Miami without incident, Tittle's statue suffered serious knee Injuries when it was being Installed. As a crane lowered the sculpture from the truck onto the prepared site at the school, a cable snapped, and the statue fell 1 5 feet and keeled over, severely damaging the legs at the knees.

Students, Including class president Ronald David, and gift committee chairman Judy Garnsey, were visibly upset, and witnesses said Ms. Garnsey burst Into tears. Seller, also at the scene, felt the sculpture was ruined, and offered another one to replace It because he was leaving town and didn't have the equipment to repair the work that had taken him 18 months to create. But the day after the accident, Seacrest pincf-pal Clifford Ripley told an emotional crowd of students that the school had been deluged with offers of money and assistance, and that the statue would be repaired. "It was badly smashed," Seller recalled, "but It meant a lot to me to contribute something to the school.

So when they offered me cranes and electric arc welding equipment, I stayed and spent six weeks there (at the school) fixing it. I had to rebuild the legs from the thighs down," encapsulating the maps in plastic. He Stiff rtMt ky Trltk Ltwli Problem-Plagued Province Gains Hope Newfoundland Seeks To Parlay Oil Potential Into Wealth 4 1 Li HSruJ' miJk lite' jr The craggy province, which includes the island of Newfoundland and Labrador on the mainland, has long been Canada's needy and sometimes forgotten partner. It has an unemployment rate almost double the national average. Its scattered people are among the country's poorest.

It is laden with a jumbo-size debt. And it has a history of bungled attempts at industrial development. Perhaps most bruising for the provincial ego, it has long been the butt of Canadian jokes. But today the "pauper province" is fighting back. Its best hope hinges on the drawing up of offshore oil and gas.

Although oil companies exploring in the area have yet to declare any fields commercial, world-class deposits are known to exist and further probing off eastern Canada is under way. About a dozen companies have been drilling off Newfoundland's coast the past two years and will spend an estimated $360 million (U.S. $306 million) in 1981. The keystone of the finds is Hibernia P-15, the well poked in late 1979 some 190 miles southeast of here. Wells drilled since then to determine the size of the reservoir the most recent completed a few weeks ago confirm that the structure is the largest deposit yet found off Canadian shores: an estimated 1.85 billion barrels of oil and 2 trillion cubic feet of gas about one-quarter of Canada's total reserves.

And there may be much more. Newfoundland's Petroleum Directorate estimates the entire offshore area, stretching from northern Labrador to southern Newfoundland, may contain 10 billion barrels of oil and 15 trillion cubic feet of gas bigger than Alaska's North Slope. If the submarine booty is to be drawn up, Newfoundland wants to make sure it gets its fair share. The province's fiery premier, A. By Scott Armstrong Ckrlititn Sclmca Mwiltor ST.

JOHN'S, Newfoundland For several months in the summer of 1979, the Chevron drillship Glomar Atlantic burrowed its steel probe into the subterranean rock off the fog-entombed coast of Newfoundland. The firm was engaged in one of those high-risk searches for that oily soup left behind eons ago by millions of plants and creatures in shallow waters the substance that overnight turns corporations into empires and small-fry countries into world power brokers. Despite enticing geological clues, several corporate predecessors drilling in the area had left a groundhog's patch of dry holes and millions of dollars in spent expectations. But after boring almost 2 miles through marine tongues of sandstone, shale, and limestone, the Glomar's bit wreathed its way into a pool of crude. Almost overnight it has placed Canada's isolated and poor-boy province, Newfoundland, smack in the middle of one of the world's most promising new energy frontiers.

Today this rock-ribbed province high on Canada's eastern edge is trying to parlay these potential offshore riches plus prodigious forest, hydroelectric, fishing, and mineral resources into a future of fortune. More important, its 580,000 canny and stubbornly independent people arc struggling to undo a slice of history that says Newfoundland is too remote, too harsh, and too poor to survive without being piggybacked by the federal government. If the province succeeds, this could turn out to be one of the larger Horatio Alger stories of the late 20th century. All this is heady stuff for Newfoundland. Brian Peckf ord, is determined to use any oil-derived revenues to spur other resource developments and upgrade Newfoundland's standing in the confederation.

Not surprisingly, then, the former high school teacher has been steadfast in his parrying with federal officials over who should own and control the offshore mother lode. But lean economic times at home may put the premier, sometimes dubbed the Rene Levesque of the east, in a more compromising mood in the latest round of talks. They kicked off in October and include representatives from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia as well as from Ottawa. Federal officials have said they want to end the impasse by February. To nudge things along, the parties are downplaying the thorniest issue ownership.

Newfoundland has long laid claim to anything off its shore, arguing that it never relinquished ownership rights when it joined the confederation in 1949. The Trudeau government thinks otherwise, however, and cites a Supreme Court ruling giving it control of west coast offshore resources as evidence. Yet to be resolved is how the two sides will carve up the revenues. Equally important to Newfoundland is the desire to control the pace of development. Provincial leaders don't want Newfoundland to be a welcome mat where companies can simply come in, wipe their oily boots for a time, and then leave.

Worries also abound that energy-related developments will siphon off workers from other industries and spoil the insular province's slow-paced rural lifestyle. Determined not to let Newfoundland turn into a subarctic Appalachia, the province is trying to look beyond the oil age to the time when the wells are capped. Petro bucks are mm v- rv 1 r- I 4: y. Mobil oil drilling rig is east of St. John's, Newfoundland which to build." Earlier this year government economists had pegged the province's economy to grow in real terms about 3 percent in 1981.

But high Interest rates and the fishery collapse are now prompting predictions closer to a 1 percent rise in the gross domestic product. Yet that's still well above last year's 3 7 percent dip in the GDP. to be tunneled into the fishing industry and other resource developments, but just how much money there will be to spread around will depend in part on the outcome of the energy talks. "We do not want to see oil development to the detriment of the life of our province," says Nell Windsor, Newfoundland's minister of development. "We see oil as a base on.