Help on high

A TRIO OF MARCHING LADDERS greeted me this morning. Gregorio Garcia and Felix Miguel are wrapping up work on a system of catch pans, pipes and drains that will, I am assured, keep the leaks away from Special Collections.

This is such good news I celebrated with an extra cup of coffee. There are at least four sources of H2O above me - bathrooms, rain gutters, air ducts and HVAC pipes - and all four have dripped, dribbled or poured down water in the past three years.

Meanwhile, there are a couple dozen newly rebound or repaired books ready for reshelving. Having spent thousands of dollars on them, I've hesitated to put them back. Gregorio tells me I don't have to worry. Well, let's say I don't have to worry as much. This is still the low point of a four-story building!

Red Cars and bookstores

I have a dim childhood memory of riding the Red Car with my mother. We boarded in San Pedro, I in a frilly dress and she in hat and gloves, to go shopping Downtown at the big department stores on 7th Street. I'm guessing it was about 1956, not long before the opening of the Harbor Freeway.

There's a second dim memory from around the same time, of gliding up the new freeway in my dad's used Mercury, on our way to visit my grandmother in Hollywood. The Four-Level Interchange was so beautifully landscaped that I remember thinking it must have been some kind of temple.

The received wisdom in Los Angeles is that the Pacific Electric Railway and its Red Cars were a marvelous public transit system that would be here today, were it not for greedy automakers, oil barons, tire manufacturers and their tame politicians in the 1950s. Insidious blight in the form of cars, freeways and gas stations put an end to enlightened mass transit from which we're still suffering.

What brought all this to mind the other day was the closing of the big Borders in Sherman Oaks, just a few months after the demise of Barnes & Noble in my Valley neighborhood. Unbelievably, there are no longer any mainstream bookstores in mine or the nearby zip codes. Corporate mismanagement, greedy landowners and savvy technology companies get the blame this time for replacing real books with Kindles and Nooks and iPads.

People aren't being forced into newer, better, cooler ways to read books. They're doing it willingly, in big numbers, just the way people flocked to cars and freeways in the 1950s. For two generations, Mount students could hop a shuttle to Westwood and the nearest Red Car stop. But when you can drive, why would you put up with the discomfort and noise of the railway or inconvenience of a shuttle schedule? And who thought about pollution?

I love books. I'm surrounded by them in the Mount library. I also love my iPad. Say, weren't bookstores great? But I wonder... were free wireless and a coffee bar next door a such a hot idea? It seems the same as handing out coupons for free tires and gasoline to people boarding the Red Car.

More water from on high

WHAT WOULD THE ARCHIVIST DO without plastic? When I heard the steady drip, drip, drip on the ceiling tiles the other day, all I had to do was unfurl some of the plastic stashed in a convenient corner, the same stuff that covered the shelves and cabinets for three months earlier this year.

This is my fourth leak at the Mount since I started in 2008. The Coe Library has very special hydrophysics, in which all water from above ends up in this room.

This is not unexpected, but predictable doesn't mean it's not a serious problem. The public restroom next to the President's Conference Room two floors up has a toilet prone to overflowing. So prone, evidently, that few people bother to report it. It merrily gushes forth for an hour or so before the water reaches me.

I have hopes it'll be fixed -- mostly because there's a big electrical transformer between it and the Archives. If water can be stopped from reaching there, I'll be 'ome and dry, as the English say.

Then there's the temperature. I log the daily high and low along with relative humidity -- both crucial to not cooking the rare books too quickly. (The higher the temperature, the faster the chemical reaction.) Picture my surprise when I returned from vacation recently to see that in one week the local environment had soared to an unbelievable 126 degrees.

On the other end, 65 was much more like it. But that 6% humidity! Pity the poor leather bindings on these old fellows.

These problems are part of the quotidian challenges for archives. A little extreme, perhaps, but all in a day's work. However, the real problem is accepting material for the archives and knowing we may not be able to keep it safe.

The Chalon Library

Dickens volumes in the Chalon stacks.

CHALON IN THE SUMMER is down to the few regulars, including the librarians and year-round staff. One of my favorite regulars is Paul Martin, who has been on the Porch near the College Archives doing some writing.

Paul has a wonderful blog, The Teacher's View, in which he ruminates on books, reading, literature, and the life of the mind. In the world of digital noise, he's virtually a throwback; his blog reminds me of my favorite senior honors seminars when I was a Lit. major in the last century.

I was delighted to find his post last month titled "Joy," about the very library I work in. Here's an excerpt that I hope will inspire others to read the whole:

The first floor is my destination. The stacks. Far side, a long narrow room of tables, shelves of art books, and windows with a view of the Pacific Ocean only a few miles away. This is where I belong, my home. Outside the window, a twisted pine stands sentinel. I am the monk at my wooden table dedicated to a life of study and reflection, staring out the window at the world. Here I can think, reconsider, revise. Here, there are no cell phones or computers. Here, paper and leather binding rule the world.

The photo is one I took in those same stacks. Thank you, Paul, for exactly capturing this wonderful place, and reminding me of why this job is such a gift. May I never take it for granted.

Speaking of monks, I'm off to St. Andrew's Abbey in Valyermo for a few days. Those Benedictines, the guys who saved civilization, know a thing or two about how paper and leather binding rule the world.

How bad was that mold?

Going through my photos for yesterday's post, I came across this one -- clearly the most disgusting book of all. Seldom in book mold do we get to see such rich texture, such vibrant hues. The pic doesn't really do justice to the black stuff, which looked like silk velvet and was probably an eighth of an inch thick. The white mold was more lacy while the greenish variety looked like old-fashioned penicillin. By the way, the Mount brought in experts to test it, and it was declared safe and nontoxic... which was good, considering how much of it we were dealing with (eventually, after this picture was taken, with rubber gloves).

Giving up mold for Lent

IT'S ASH WEDNESDAY, a day or two shy of three months since the Big Leak. We're celebrating by moving an undamaged table and chairs into the Spearman Room. There is a lot more to do before we can close the book, so to speak, on the Disaster of '10, but at least I can say we're done with mold.

Green mold, black mold, white mold, and other interesting colors emanating from mold. I didn't know that the pastel hues we noticed on damaged endpapers -- pink, yellow, lavender and a delicate celandon -- were actually mold souvenirs, "excrement," in the pungent diagnosis of an expert.

Day after day, page after page, my volunteer Mary Marshall and I plied our little spore-trapping vacuum cleaner and had the satisfaction of watching thick layers of dried mold being sucked away. In the process we also cleaned up the dirt and debris of centuries, in some cases: Half the pages of Volume XI of the works St. Augustine (1689) were coated with fine, white sand, as if a seminarian had taken the big folio to the beach for some summer reading.

The colorful mold stains remain as reminders of what happens when an old building leaks. But these are merely the latest ones. Among our rare books are many ancient stains that tell the stories of other buildings, other leaks. I pity those poor librarians who didn't have HEPA vacuum cleaners.

Science lab

LOS ANGELES' EPIC RAINS and consequent flood in the Archives were two months ago this week. Being tied up with one thing and another (like a presidential search committee), I'm finally getting the chance to get a good look at the damage.

Total number of books affected: about 50. Total volume of archives affected: about 4 linear feet. Total losses: about half a dozen old Bibles and a box of folders.

All in all, not too bad. Chatting with my friends in the profession, it's not all that unusual to hear about entire rooms that have developed mold. Many of our books just need a good once-over with a special spore-trapping vacuum cleaner and they can go back on the shelves. Others will require more extensive (and expensive) treatment, but this is the College's patrimony (better, matrimony) and worth every dime.

The science experiment aspect of it is pretty interesting, too. All that literature about the proverbial "cool, dry place" is correct: Once you venture out of the 68 degrees, 40% humidity ranges you're asking for a blooming garden of moldy trouble.

I knew we were in for it back on Dec. 29 when my little hygrometer recorded 99% relative humidity and a maximum temperature of 78 degrees. This lovely specimen, above, is on Vol. X of the works of St. Augustine, ca. 1685. Mold goes dormant stays that way for a long time. This stuff may be the lineal descendant of mold that was introduced centuries ago.

The triage continues. I'm deciding now which books are headed for the trash bin (the ones that can be replaced for less than $40), which get to go home soon, and which will get patched up in a book hospital somewhere. Along the way I've discovered a couple of certified treasures. All of it is part of the Mount's long heritage and worth preserving for future generations of students. Except for St. Augustine's mold, of course. That's really gotta go.

Triage

BACK IN MY NEWSPAPER DAYS, the word triage applied to too much news, too many possibilities, too few resources and thus some painful decision making. What we "went after" had mostly to do with who was working that particular night and how much newsprint we had to work with.

I thought about that well-worn battlefield term this week as I returned to a freezing Coe Library and the part of the 1st Floor given over to storing the damp victims of the Dec. 20 flood. Which will survive, and which will end up in the Dumpster?

The French World War I doctors who coined the term knew from agonizing decision making. Sorting through wet, ruined and occasionally moldy books, and deciding how to spend meager restoration resources, is mostly art -- and if there's science involved we'll need to call someone more expert than I.

One of the resource we don't have is time. The students are back in a few days, and one of their favorite study areas, the Porch, is currently doing duty as a glum little book and paper hospital, although it's at least a bright and sunny one.

I'm starting with the easy triage, the wet unprocessed folders of would-be archives. For a Lone Arranger, their marginal value isn't equal to the effort of drying them out and putting them in fresh, expensive, acid-free folders. Not compared to everything else that needs to be evaluated. Into the Dumpster they go.

I cheerfully admit that sorting through the backfiles from a discontinued 1980s project delays the inevitable, difficult confrontation with the rare books. We'll let the patients dry out for a few more days and see if they don't improve a little on their own.

Water magnets

I GOT A LOOK at the damage in the College Archives from the flood of Dec. 20, and all I can say is, it sure could have been worse. Almost miraculously, our complete run of Harper's Magazine through the Civil War (1861-65) seems to be okay. And, Deo gratias, our most valuable Bibles are safely out of harm's way on exhibit at Santa Clara University.

Still, it's a mess. Here's a photo of a less valuable 19th Century Bible that looks to be a total loss. It's moldy and not worth the expense of restoration. There are several other books in similar condition and facing a similar fate.

Some of the archival records awaiting processing got soaked and are still in their cardboard boxes. I'm hoping they're not moldy as well. Yecch -- won't that be fun! What a way to start the New Year. Well, happy 2011 anyway. Truth be told, many of our rare books show signs of water damage from centuries ago. You can't fight physics.