Foxing problems occurring with relatively new books

I recently selected a book from my shelves and was very surprised to see that it was suffering from a bad attack of foxing along the top edge with some evidence of it spreading along the front edge of the book. The surprising thing is that this book first published in 2006 was given to me as a present some years ago and has been kept on a shelf in a well heated room where we spend much of our leisure time. Investigating further I notice that the same thing is taking place to a greater or lesser extent on a number of other books in my collection which is all rather worrying. I thought that this problem was only associated with older books. I would be interested to hear from anyone else who is suffering from the same problem and may be able to suggest some possible solutions

I've smashed most of my extensive library up and dropped it through the scanner

Had to harden myself to the dollar value being lost but stuff from around the war and before was looking really dodgy in some cases and now it can be read and researched for 500 years

I'm no expert but absolutely any contaminant can cause havoc with paper over the decades and a lot of stuff was printed on not-very-good paper to start with

Remember that big airtight room in the Vatican in the Da-Vinci code film? or was it Angels and Demons?

I wouldn't be surprised if more recent print runs use lesser quality (save-the-planet!) pulp paper

High humidity / lack of ventilation will do it. You may find it on the ceiling paint if you get the steps out and take a close up look.

Ady1 I would be hesitant to put your faith in computers. I am trying to read files from just 22 years ago! I had the foresight to keep my old computers however even these don’t work without the relevant software and in my case dongles and serial numbers!

Thinking back a few more years, documents were consigned to microfiche in various formats. Even where the readers exist trying to get replacement lamps to make them work is impossible as they are not made and use a now almost completely banned technology!

Coming from an industry where long term record keeping is important, the prefered solution is acid free paper in environment controlled storage. I've got stuff on 5.25" floppies which were state of the art in their day, but have now stuck to their sleeves and are unreadable. If you go digital you have to accept the discipline of updating to the latest format before your old version disappears.

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Almost certainly

[ it’s reminiscent of the problems with FIAT cars, when they started using heavily recycled steel ]

MichaelG.

Ady - I hope you were being metaphorical with "smashed" but I think you are being very optimistic about how long their scans will last.

They'll be lucky to be readable after 5 decades, let alone 5 centuries. Even if the files do not deteriorate, the US giants who dominate the IT trade are so blindly destructive for mere money, that they might be lucky to be readable in 5 years!

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It's a sobering thought that although obviously no man-made medium is indestructible, no-one has yet invented a record system better than ink on paper, parchment or vellum, for longevity.

Yes, you need learn to read the font and language, but Mediaeval documents on parchment or vellum are still legible. See the Magna Carta copy in Salisbury Cathedral, displayed in a special protective cabinet. Its print, or rather hand-copied text, is still perfectly clear - but it helps the reader to be fluent in Latin.

Paper can deteriorate, book-bindings more so; and some of my early-mid 20C books are quite fragile, but if kept in good conditions, only very slowly; depending a lot on its original quality and its "pre-owned" life.

Yet I was dismayed to find that some of my many photos are already decaying even though on CDs or hard-drives in decent conditions. They suffer from a curious phenomenon I first saw on 3.5" floppy-discs, in that about half the image area was replaced by a brownish-purple rectangle with a very sharp cut-off from that to intact picture.

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Think of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although only a few intact ones survived, among thousands of bits of others from the region; they date between 300 BCE and 100 CE: around 2000 years old. Most are on parchment, some on papyrus, in beautifully neat script, using carbon-black based ink and reed pens. [Source: Wikipedia].

Eeeh, we think we're right clever with storing all our documents and books in our boxes of transistors....

One of the things that paper conservators are agreed on about foxing is that there isn't a single cause.

Having said that, I regularly see foxing of the kind Greensands has shown on the heads and fore-edges of modern mass-produced books printed on chemical wood pulp paper, especially when they have been stored in slightly damp and dusty conditions.

The quality of the paper is almost certainly the biggest factor. I've restored early 16th century books that have clearly been through the wars but their rag paper is still white as snow and largely unblemished five centuries later.

The rot really set in for books when the Industrial Revolution got into full swing: paper and leather began to be produced very quickly and cheaply, and quality suffered as a result.

The upside was that the written word began to be disseminated much more widely, and so knowledge, and with it the chance of acquiring wealth, influence and political power became no longer the preserve of the privileged few.