Want a little spaghetti with your Don Quixote?
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[Click the colored square at the top of the screen for the video.]
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For more information, please contact Special Collections Librarian, Katherine Owens, using the contact information in the footer of this page.
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The following books included in this digital exhibit are shown in this video:
The Purple Parasol
Revolution d'Angleterre
Love in Idleness
History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment
And in our Beautiful Books digital exhibit:
The Purple Parasol
Revolution d'Angleterre
The Rush Bush, etc.
For information about water damage, please watch this related video: Have you ever dropped a book in the ocean?
For information about insects and books, please watch this related video: Are you being a bookworm again?
For information about gloves, please watch this related video: Can I touch that?
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[music softly playing through entire video]
Hello, this is Juliann Ramos, Special Collections Intern and I am here today with Miss Owens. Today we are going to show you the dangers of eating around books.
We all do this, eat while reading a book whether for school or for pleasure. There’s nothing quite like sitting down with a good book, your favorite beverage, and a tasty snack. We do it at home, in the local coffee shop or tea house, around campus, and of course, in the Library. In our last video we addressed the issues of water spills, but what if you are eating and some liquid spills or splatters?
Water will normally dry clear and eventually turn brown, while broth, tomato sauce, coffee, or tea will be immediately brown or red in color. Greasy foods will have an almost translucent look at first and brown after drying. Sometimes food splatters will leave not just a grease mark behind, but a particle of food as well. We are going to discuss the issue of food stains or particles and insects in another video in this series.
Unsightly stains or remnants of someone’s meal are not the only ways a book can be damaged by food. For many decades rare book librarians and archivists talked about the importance of wearing gloves when handling older materials in order to protect objects from the oils in your hands. We are going to discuss gloves in another video in this series, but the natural oils on our hands are less a problem for paper materials than dirty fingers. Obviously sensible people know not to first play in a mud puddle and then read a book without first washing their hands, but what about when you are eating finger foods and reading a book? You do not stop to wash your hands, turn the page and resume both eating and reading.
There is no term in the rare book terminology books for this phenomenon so when cataloging books with this kind of damage, Miss Owens invented her own descriptive term, black finger smudges. Sometimes the fingerprint is a partial finger, but there are instances in the books in Special Collections where an entire finger or in rare cases, all five fingers have been imprinted on the page or pages.
Now that you’ve seen examples of the damage food leaves behind in books, let’s walk around the Library and see if we can find anyone eating and reading at the same time, a situation we see all the time, and yet one of the easiest preventable types of damage.
[keys jangling]
Juliann Ramos: Excuse me do you know not to be eating and drinking around your books?
Lilly Hayward: Why, books and food are two of my favorite things?
Juliann Ramos: Well, food particles can actually cause a lot of damage to your books. I have an example here if you'd like to see it?
Lilly Hayward: Yay, I guess! Yay!
Juliann Ramos: So I've marked down a couple of . . . of places where I think . . . it'll really open your mind.
Lilly Hayward: Ok . . . Oh!
Juliann Ramos: So when you eat over your books it can cause these stains and these discolorations that over time . . .
Lilly Hayward: Oh-ohhhhh!
Juliann Ramos: can actually lead
Lilly Hayward: Goodness.
Juliann Ramos: to page deterioration.
Lilly Hayward: Gosh. . . Ok, so I can’t eat around books, but what about drinking things like, water?
Juliann Ramos: Actually, if you look at the cover here, ah, water damage actually caused this cover to ripple.
Lilly Hayward: Oh no.
Juliann Ramos: So I would refrain from having open containers like that one right there when reading a book, but you can have closed containers.
Lilly Hayward: Ok, ok, that's fine.
Juliann Ramos: Yay.
Lilly Hayward: I guess it’s all worth it in the end; preserve the books.
Juliann Ramos: Yay, yay.
Lilly Hayward & Juliann Ramos: (giggle)