Maybe crisis is a bit strong, but it feels like a pretty distressing thing to me. So the situation is months ago we moved into a new apartment that turned out to have bed bugs from the former occupant. We had to put a bunch of our shit out on the balcony in plastic tubs to make room for the place to be sprayed. My books were put out there, and being lazy assholes, we left them out there for a week or two. When they were brought in I specifically asked the dumb asshole I married if any of the containers had let water in. He assured me they hadn't, so I left the books alone for quite a while. Months. Turns out one of the boxes DID get water in, and now 25 books, some of them irreplaceable, have grown copious amounts of very nasty looking mold. I'll take a picture if y'all want but it's pretty fucking gross. I threw away one of the more useless and double gross books outright, but I want to salvage some of these if I can. This would be quite a few hundreds of dollars worth of destroyed books. I am really really really upset. Is there a way to save some of the books that have less damage? Is the mold dangerous? How do I kill this shit without ruining the books? Can I have a goddamn hug please, this sucks.
first of all, im so sorry that happened. that sounds awful D:: and now i am quite glad i paid attention when i visited the restauration lab during my internship at berlin state library, because they told us what they do with moldy books. i need to dig out my notes, but from what i remember, the mold cant actually enter the paper, it's purely superficial, and it can't actually survive on paper. so what you gotta do is dry them, and scrape/brush the mold off. i doubt you have one of those chemistry lab fume hoods, so you want to do this outside with a breathing mask and probably something to cover your eyes, just to be on the safe side, but you should be able to save the books.
I volunteered at an archive for a bit, and one of the things they used on leather bindings was actually a military-grade leather treatment for boots. If you've got any leather in there, I can try and find out the name.
I read that freezing the books can kill the mold on damp books, so I put them in an actual watertight container this time and outside again. After that shit's dead and I get some gloves and whatnot from the store I'll try and brush it off. Am I looking at a tooth brush kind of deal here or does it matter? A lot of them are going to be too water damaged to salvage. They were text books from my undergrad and books I got in Japan for studying. Genki I Genki II JLPT Placement Test Level 2 Study Books x6 Japanese-English Dictionary The Elements of Moral Philosophy The Scientific Background of Modern Philosophy Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Discourse on Metaphysics The General Councils Religions in the History of Christian Theology Christian History in Plain Language The Story of Christianity An Introduction to Jesus and the Gospels Spheres of Justice Documents for the Study of the Gospels God and the New Physics Justice as Fairness An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding Some of these are cheap, some of them I don't need anymore, but some of them were expensive, or hard to get (the JLPT study books), or had a lot of memories attached. RIP books. ;__; I mean, like I said, it's mostly stuff I had to read in undergrad but books getting destroyed is sad in any instance!
They used brushes similar to painting brushes at the restauration lab I think, but the books they were working with there also were at leats a century old if not older and accordingly fragile. So, a toothbrush for rough work and something finer to get the rest off?
