Making sure the indoor air quality is clean for old items
My family owns a business that pretty much everyone has never even considered.
They browse museums and mosques and watch the historical artifacts presented to them on a silver platter, then without the job we do, you would be staring at withered, crinkled and dust-ridden pages of some of the most sacred texts in history. We are artifact preservers and it has become a passion of mine. I even teach a course on this to museum staff. The first thing to know about preserving books is that you need a temperature-controlled environment. The a/c won’t blow cold air from a vent directly onto the text books. Cool air can cause the pages to become fragile and stiff! Additionally, the furnace cannot blow direct heat to the books, but hot air can cause the pages to become wilted and soft too hastily. The temperature should be at a steady seventy-six degrees. This temperature should remain the same and the books are in that space. It is highly encouraged that the a/c feeding your temperature-controlled room has a built-in media whole home purifier that will cool the room and clean your air simultaneously. Particles in polluted air rest on top of the books and seep into the pages, discoloring them over time. A sterile environment with clean air is required for lifelong books. I’d advise asking your heating and air conditioning tech if they have had experience installing a media whole-home air purifier into the plan because you want to get this right the first time. Historical books can discolor fast if the air is not purified immediately. While it can be a tedious process, preserving books is fulfilling in the most unexpected ways. It gives us the opportunity to preserve our history, our ancestors and life as we know it.