On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 08:19:38 -0600, John F. Eldredge
yodeled:

(snip)
I worked for a couple of years as a library assistant while I was an
undergraduate. We never had anything animate put down the book drop,
to my knowledge, but we did have a few books ruined when someone
poured a Coke down the book drop. The worst mess we ever had was
when the Metro Transit Authority sent in a library book that had been
found on a city bus. Someone had spilled a chocolate milkshake onto
the book, and it had then sat in the bus long enough for the milk to
go thoroughly sour. It stunk so bad that we couldn't even stand to
have it in the trashcan in the workroom. I had to take it to a trash
container outside the library building.

Ahhhh.

But when you work in an archive, sometimes stuff is like that, and you
have to keep it. It depends. Sometimes stuff is 500 years old
(although paper that old is usually very good paper, and doesn't decay
like mass-produced high-acid paper, which stinks as it decays).
But if the stinky milkshake was spilled by say, one of the Founding
Fathers, on a copy of The Federalist Papers--- or one of the printers
of Shakespeare's First Folio-- you'd be stuck with the sour milk
stink. It would become known to scholars as the Milkshake Copy.

And then there are all the molds and mildews that get into the stuff.
:P
T. (who had to send a bunch of Toscanini's scores to be fumigated )





Theresa
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Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal
claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
(Aldous Huxley)