Safe Adhesives?

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Safe Adhesives?

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1Curator_Piccard
Mar 23, 2013, 6:02 pm

I'm the curator for a Speech and Debate Society and am in charge of a library which contains many rare and old books. I am looking for a safe way to stick labels in the books so that they can be identified in the future as ours in a way that will last. Is there a good adhesive that can be used and will removed safely in the future if necessary without hurting the books?

Thank you so much!

2aulsmith
Mar 23, 2013, 7:33 pm

If you need to identify them as yours for theft prevention, than you don't want something that can be removed. It's one of those trade offs, you can either identify it in a secure way and lower its monetary value or preserve its monetary value, but not have a secure way of identifying it.

If you have a secure reading room where you don't allow external materials, the general feeling is you don't need secure identity. We hand-wrote the accession numbers in pencil and added a small property stamp using archival ink on a page number that was non-obvious but always the same. (When the police recover stolen rare books, they dump them all out in a room and any institution that thinks some of the recovered material might be theirs is invited to come down and paw through them. The results are less then ideal, since usually the thief has already removed the property markings. If you always stamp a one inch stamp at the bottom of page 28 and the erasure is about that size and on the bottom of page 28 (and none of the other institutions do that and you have record of having once owned a copy and not currently being able to local it), you probably get to take it home. You'll notice that I know this because, even though we have a secure reading room, we still had some major thefts.)

If you don't have a secure reading room I say some theft proofing is better than value and you should use lots of labels and stamps with as long-lasting, un-reversible properties as possible. If you can't make it hard to steal, make it undesirable to steal. But that does result in lowering the value, so your management/board might object.

3Nicole_VanK
Modificato: Mar 23, 2013, 8:03 pm

If you can't make it hard to steal, make it undesirable to steal. But that does result in lowering the value, so your management/board might object.

The principle behind it is sound though.

P.s.: It's my only worry about using LT though. I'm okay, but still : I'm also sort of advertising to burglars what's in stock.

Of course they would still have to get past the Doberman and (if I'm home - but since I work from home that's most of the time) I happen to be much more dangerous than the Doberman ;-)

P.p.s.: I'm not too worried though. Burglars rely on fences. Money, gold, etc. - sure. Antiquarian books? Hah! Most of them don't have the contacts.

4lilithcat
Mar 24, 2013, 12:00 am

>1 Curator_Piccard: Is there a good adhesive that can be used and will removed safely in the future if necessary without hurting the books?

Wheat paste.

5MarthaJeanne
Mar 24, 2013, 2:34 am

4> Might be an invitation to bugs.

6lilithcat
Mar 24, 2013, 9:58 am

5

Well, no, because you don't use the flour from your pantry. You use this stuff. According to conservator Jack Thompson, it's the gluten in flour which attracts the bugs, and wheat starch has the gluten removed.

Wheat starch paste is standard for archival bookbinding and conservation work.

7aulsmith
Mar 24, 2013, 10:31 am

3 P.s.: It's my only worry about using LT though. I'm okay, but still : I'm also sort of advertising to burglars what's in stock.

Book thieves don't need fences now that there's ebay (wonder if that applies to other things). Of course, our last thief (internal staff member) was caught because he advertised a unique item that only we owned on e-bay and a researcher alerted us.

I keep all my location and antiquarian information in private comments because it feels safer. Though we're getting to the point if someone came and stole half our stuff, we'd likely be better off.