But as demand grew, papermakers started eyeing another kind of plant: trees, in all their abundance. Paper demands fiber, and recycling was cheaper and faster than relying on the raw plant materials like flax and hemp to be grown, harvested, and readied for use.
Old rags, dead peoples’ bedsheets, even canvas sails-all were collected, sorted, pulped, and turned into the material backbone for paper-making. In western Europe, from the 16th to mid-19th centuries, paper manufacturing was inherently a recycling industry. The answer to how we got here also has to do with scale-specifically, the increased demand for paper and printed materials that swept the world as printing presses became common and literacy rates rose.
And there’s about to be a physical hole in the historical record that coincides precisely with the largest creation of printed materials in human history. From the mid-19th century until now, we’ve never had more paper, more print materials floating around our world. At our existing technology’s current scanning pace, preserving the prints and photographs division alone would take about 300 years.Īs Ed Vermue, my boss at the tiny college preservation lab where I worked, put it: we cannot stop the slow destruction of our collections. In an article about the Library of Congress’ digitization efforts, Kyle Chayka reports that it would take literally decades of scanning to preserve the institution’s over 160 million object collection. The fallback is digitization-a fancy way to say mass-scanning, and the most used method of saving the content of a text, but not the book itself. Mass deacidification, where an alkaline neutralizing agent is introduced via a spray or solution applied to paper, once seemed like the golden solution but while it can be used to prevent slightly acidified paper from deteriorating, it doesn’t reverse the effects of prior damage.
Already, books have been lost, and the methods of preservation are too limited, time-consuming, and expensive to address the scale of the problem. Depending on how a book was made and how it’s been stored, embrittlement can happen in as little as 30 to 100 years. We cannot stop the slow destruction of our collections.
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