Those are lovely old books. Sadly, if they were printed in England in the 1850s and '60s, they are going to disintegrate. The boom in periodical literature which occurred during that period (think, "Cornhill," "All the Year Round," on and on -- there were dozens of magazines and hundreds of broadsheets and other periodicals) was due, in part, to very cheap paper. Turns out, that paper was full of acid and is now disintegrating.
I would not be a bit surprised if you were to take a photo of the *inside* of those books, you'd see yellowing pages with tiny holes in them. I know -- I've lost several 19th-century novels to the hungry acid of that paper. (And it's probably why fine paper now tells the buyer if it's "archival quality.")
Those are lovely old books. Sadly, if they were printed in England in the 1850s and '60s, they are going to disintegrate. The boom in periodical literature which occurred during that period (think, "Cornhill," "All the Year Round," on and on -- there were dozens of magazines and hundreds of broadsheets and other periodicals) was due, in part, to very cheap paper. Turns out, that paper was full of acid and is now disintegrating.
ReplyDeleteI would not be a bit surprised if you were to take a photo of the *inside* of those books, you'd see yellowing pages with tiny holes in them. I know -- I've lost several 19th-century novels to the hungry acid of that paper. (And it's probably why fine paper now tells the buyer if it's "archival quality.")