Apres Le Deluge

The recent storms didn’t settle for collapsing homes, flooded roads and mudslides. They had a literary agenda: Soaking books. Says Davis Dutton, owner of Dutton’s in North Hollywood, Burbank and downtown: “That’s the bane of any bookseller’s existence--leaky roofs,skylights and backed-up gutters.”

Hunter’s Books in Pasadena emptied as many as five full wastebaskets of stockroom rainwater daily. The scholarly Huntington Library placed pails strategically throughout its reading roomsand near rare-book stacks. Damage, for the most part, was light. George Houle, owner of Houle Rare Books and Autographs in Hollywood, scurried on top of his roof soon after the storm arrived. “It could have been a serious problem,” he said, “but when it first started raining, I bought some of that quick-patch stuff and patched every hole I could find.”

For both sellers and owners, waterlogged books are often a total loss. Many store owners either don’t carry flood insurance or have high deductibles. And water damage mandates immediate--and sometimes expensive--remedies.

If your books get wet, there are only two things to do, book preservationists say. If it’s a rare volume, chuck the ice cream and throw the book in the freezer, immediately. Damp books left alone will grow mold and mildew after three days, and unless you have no sense of smell, can’t be approached after that. Frozen books should then be shipped in dry ice to a professional book restorer where they are desiccated in vacuum chambers. Bindings often emerge undamaged. The Los Angeles Central Library restored some 700,000 volumes this way after its 1986 fire. It used Document Reprocessors, a company in San Francisco and New York (call 800-4-DRYING).

Less expensive (but more tedious) is air-drying, a technique recommended by Christopher Coleman, UCLA’s preservation librarian. First, drain books by propping them upright. Second, weave paper towels every 25 pages or so, and leave the books open in a warm, dry room. Volumes with glossy paper need towels every page. Change the towels and their position frequently. To prevent mildew, Coleman mists books lightly with Lysol. “People might throw their hands up in horror over this part,” he says, “but it works for me.”