Conservation and Preservation — Part 3 — 7th Archives Workshop — 2002

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Conservation and Preservation Part 3 7th Archives Workshop

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Unidentified S

Date

2002-09-01

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Source: Unidentified S – Conservation and Preservation Part 3 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: unidentified-s-conservation-and-preservation-part-3-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:47:42

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Before you do, yes, absolutely. Reason being is that, depending on the solution that you use, and we'll talk about that this afternoon, it has certain solvents in it, certain drying agents and that sort of thing, so that it might reverse what… You want to go to the point where it… I chose this particular letter because this damage here is two different angles. I've done a repair in the back; it's not on the front.

If you'll see, it's in two different angles. No way in the world, without a little wrinkle in there, could you get the tissue to run there. So I put it on in three different little pieces. It makes for a much neater repair, and it's just the same thing. A lot of people say, Bob, you really don't want to mess with an iron, but I've done it for years and years and years. And like I said, you may scorch one or two pieces, so practice on not important stuff. And about the first time that you do, you'll learn.

Don't… Went off. I don't know why. No, it's like mine. Every now and then it's like setting up so far away. That's why I don't like these. Anyway, don't answer your phone while you're laying the piece down, okay? If this were hot enough, I'd go ahead and take an iron at dry, then it would cut off the little excess piece on the edge. And being as it's not working, it probably will eventually, all I'm going to do is lay a weight on that so it will take and not wrinkle.

Would you do that on camp with a very rare pamphlet? Well, sure. Not just letters. Remember that we talked about—where's that magazine that was in real delicate shape? Okay, remember that we took the staples out of this, and we may look at this this afternoon. And this has not only got page edges, but down in the middle where we're going to have to support in some manner. And that may have to be—each page will have to be supported.

And then once we got a tissue repaired, then we can go ahead and sew it up and put it back together again. Yes. Do you want that up? When you do your repairs and you leave the work on that magazine, will the pages being together create a problem, or is it okay to store a whole magazine as one unit? You don't have to store it page— No, I'm putting the magazine back together again. You put a magazine— Yeah.

I'm putting the whole magazine back together again. It'll preserve fine? Sure, sure. I don't— We're plugged in, Bob. Huh? We're plugged in. We'll need this this afternoon. I'm going to try something else. Malfunction. You will actually see when the tape kind of, the wet part, you'll see it wet. When it disappears, I will press it and hold it a little few seconds. I will lift it off. Please don't, don't, don't try to iron it dry, because the cellulose will turn black and you'll have a big mess.

So put it on there for, oh, maybe five seconds, something like that. Lift it off, look at it. If the tissue has not disappeared, no longer looks wet, you're okay. But if it still looks wet, put it back on again. It's not working. Okay. Not at all. There was one other question somewhere. I was asking on the magazine, if you go to store it again, would it be a good idea after you've done all the work, would it be a good idea to use that interleaving between the pages?

Not necessarily. You wouldn't need to. You would go ahead and preserve that magazine all the way through, not just the front, not just the back. Now, you have to be real, real careful, because remember, some of those magazines are what they call clay-based paper.

[00:04:59]

That's that shiny stuff, and you have to be real, real careful.

[00:05:03]

I've seen more people waste more whiteout on them, and they won't even adhere to it. Yeah. You have to go ahead and repair the magazine. What we do, we have Mylar foldovers. I will actually take a large sheet of Mylar and I will make a jacket for that magazine. It's made to that magazine. Yeah. Yes. There is one other type of paper repair. You all got a little one of these. Oh, yeah. Now, we don't necessarily recommend this as the best way.

What Bob did is the very best way to repair paper. Okay. Yeah, and on the back. Here we've got a piece that obviously got some definite tears to it, okay? And you want to repair this piece. What you can do is you can use this tape. Now, what's so special about this tape? It can be removed with water. There are some tapes that can be removed with alcohol, but they can be removed cleanly. You just tear off a piece of whatever size you need.

It's very flimsy stuff. Backside. Backside. Yes. He watches me like a hawk. That tear is now repaired, and you can barely see it. And this works pretty good. I've got a family Bible that Bob take a look at that's in very bad shape. It's about a hundred years old, and it's got hundreds of tears in the paper. And I've been going through with this exact same stuff, repairing it because it's so cost-effective and time-consuming to do the paper repair that the Bible is this thick already.

It ended up being this thick by the time I got done if we put more paper in it. So I've been using the tape, and this will work for you, and it will work in some of your simple repairs. So take this stuff home with you. Give it a try. It's a pH neutral tape. It won't, it will not harm. And it's in the catalog. It's in the catalog. Read what's in the catalog. Eventually, all tape products, no matter how good they are, are going to turn.

But this stuff is probably good for 50 years before it would… There's some around here. Oh, we got a ton. We got a ton of it. For those of you that didn't get any, please, I'll be glad that… We got a ton of it. Okay. Remember that… Yes. Yes. The very best way is to use the paper, but some of that tissue is expensive and may be hard to come by. I have a hard time finding the Japanese tissue up where I live.

You can order it through most of the catalogs. I can find mulberry, but the mulberry that I find is the off-white color, and sometimes it kind of clashes if you have a white paper. The one who has the best tissues, we don't have a catalog back there, and that's called University Products. Yeah. I just don't have one of the catalogs with me. If I did, I could give you a 1-800 number. It's in Massachusetts. Do you happen to have one in your archives? Do you happen to have a University Products catalog with you?

Well, unfortunately, they have a large selection of Japanese tissue. Not that the others don't, but that has the largest. And Kitikata, Sakishu, and the two mulberries will really get you through almost anything under the sun, the two mulberries being the bleached and unbleached. And they'll get you through pretty much any given situation. You don't need a whole case of it now. Yeah. I would be willing to bet that you could find that University on the internet.

Probably. It's called University Products, and it's up in Massachusetts. You can call them on their 800 number, and their catalog is— their new catalog will be out next month. Yes. We've got about ten minutes till lunch. Questions? How many have actually gotten into the tissue repair?

[00:10:04]

How many have gotten into the cleaning of documents? Now we're all going to run home and do this as soon as we get there, right? Yes. Totally reversible. Anything, remember the slide presentation, anything that we do to a document, we do not do unless it's reversible. Put a little bit of cellulose back on it, and it'll come right off. Then you just take and wipe it with a brush off the— or wipe down the methyl cellulose. Or conceivably, you could take a feathering brush, a little distilled water, and put it over the back of the tissue, and it'll pull right off.

Then just wipe it down. All the repair that I do to first edition, first printing books, and I just use that only as an example because we're all aware of them, and the significance of them is totally reversible. No, not that we know of. Not that we know of. It's been used long enough. What his question was is how long has methyl cellulose been used, and will it turn yellow like types of tape, residue from tape?

So far, we have not found any indication of it, and it's been in use for a long time. Methyl cellulose is, in its crudest form, is ground-up paper. It's basically, it's made from the cellulose of trees, and so it works as a perfect medium with paper products. I think this would be a good time, unless y'all have any questions, to go ahead and break, and that'll give us a little bit of extra time for lunch.

To learn is what needs to be deacidified. What actually does it mean to have something that has acid in it? The way we determine that is by doing what's called a pH test. The pH scale tells you about how acid or how base a piece of paper or an object is. And as far as paper goes, can I borrow one of your copies? Something from this morning, just one copy. I just need a clean paper. This particular copy here was made not too long ago.

It's on new paper. Paper, of course, is thousands of years old, and it was made by all sorts of different materials. Paper that's pre-1860s was made out of rag. You heard the term rag picker? Well, those were people that went around and got rags, and those. That process was they separated the cotton. Most rags at that time, cloth was made out of cotton at that time, and so they would separate the cotton fibers and beat it out and make paper out of that.

That is very, very good paper. After that, they started using a wood process where they would use trees to make the paper, and they started to refine it as they went along up to about 1895, 1897, somewhere in there. They started doing what was called the lignin paper process. And what that is is the lignin fibers in the paper were bonded together chemically with certain solvents, and one of the solvents that they found that worked really good was sulfuric acid. Now, at that time, the weak sulfuric acid that they used, they didn't think anything was going to happen with it.

They had no way of knowing, but it made a great product. It made a great paper. And some of your papers from the turn of the century are perfectly good papers. But if you notice any of those books from that time, the papers are brown today because the paper itself has acidified. And I touched on that earlier this morning because the paper has started to liberate the sulfur dioxide gases, which causes the paper to turn chemically.

When you see acidification, it's a chemical process that occurs. And so what we need to do is we need to determine whether the paper has turned acidic or not. And by doing that, we use what's called a pH test. And you can do it in various ways. Where's the bottle of distilled water? The easiest way is to use what's called a pH pen. You can get those through any of the archival houses, Gaylord, Light Impressions.

What it does is it makes a mark. It makes a mark. In this case, it makes a yellow mark if the

[00:15:03]

pH is below 7, and it makes a purple mark if it's above 7.5. Now, neutral pH is between 7 and 7.5. That's where you want paper to be, not base, not acid. If it's acidic, you need to deacidify or take the acid out of the paper. In this case, for this paper here, it makes a purple mark. Okay, that shows that this paper has a base chemical to it. It is, on the pH range, it is in the basic scale, which means this is good. This paper is inert, and it is not showing signs of acidification.

Thank you. Now, this paper here, this is from 1960. From about 1965, environmentally they decided that the sulfuric acid was bad and that they would stop using that, which is what they have done in more or less degrees throughout the world. So paper today does not use that sulfuric acid for the bleaching or the lignin binding process. Now, I use the back of this particular document. It's precious. It's an original document.

These pens leave a permanent mark. It'll never go away. But I like using them because it tells me if my deacidification process works. Now, I have no way of knowing whether this document is acid or base. So on the back, I make a line. Now put the strip on it. There we go. Now we need to put a weight on that. What have we got here? Top. Yeah. All I'm doing is weighting the darn thing down because it takes probably a couple of minutes. Just leave it. Yeah. So once you've determined whether your piece is acid or base, then you need to know whether you need to do a deacidification.

And we talked about a couple of products that are out there on the market. One of them is called Wheto. Now, if any of you went to Seattle, you would have—the inventor of this product actually came and talked with us. And he talked about some of the problems that they'd had with it, but also some of the advantages of using Wheto. Now, Wheto comes in three different types of strength. One of them is—I think, what's this one?

This one is a number 10. This is the one that I recommend you use, is a number 10. Wheto is good because in its liquid form, like

[00:20:00]

in a dipping process, it will absorb better. It also will penetrate much, much more into your document than some of the other ones. The disadvantage of using Wheto is that it can lift off the inks. As an example, in our archives, we were using Wheto to dip— Solutions to deacetify. And I had some typewritten paper that might have even been a carbon, I'm not sure, on onion skin. And we dipped it in, and we watched all the letters just go into the solution.

And I was left with a blank piece of paper. Yes. So, what you can do is whatever you're using—of course it's not going to work for me, so I hate Wite-Out. The only problem, the only disadvantage that Wite-Out has is that it tends to clog the spray valves. So what you do is you take and use a—let's see here. It should be—okay, this shows that it is, on the scale, is a five, which shows that it is acidic.

You can take and just simply rub it over your piece to test it, to see if it's going to rub off your material. I recommend you do that on—especially if you're using the Wite-Out. If you're using this other product called Bookkeeper, it has less chance of dissolving the inks. It doesn't penetrate as good as the Wite-Out does, but it has less chance of dissolving. This is approved by the Library of Congress, by the way.

And that's—this is one of the reasons I use it. I get great, great results with it. It is more expensive than Wite-Out. We buy it by the gallon. It costs about $325 a gallon. Okay, but you can, in a gallon, you can probably do 150, maybe 200 documents, maybe more, depending on how you use it, how judicious you are about dripping it off. This particular can is $38, I believe, and it'll do approximately 35 8.5 by 11 sheets.

I'm going to use the bookkeeper on this, this one here. No. Well, yes, you can. I take that back. Yes, you can. Yes. I've never come across that. I don't know. No, the question is, can you ever have too much base in a document? Yes, you can, I would assume, but I have never come across that, because it's the nature of paper products to go acid as opposed to base. Now, what these products do, both of these products do what Bob mentioned earlier is called a buffer. Bookkeeper leaves a 3.5% buffer of base in it, and WeTold leaves anywhere from 3 to 6% buffer of the active ingredient, usually calcium chloride, magnesium chloride.

And what that does is that bonds to the—if you looked under a microscope, you'd see these actual crystals bonding to the paper. They're very, very tiny, but by bonding to the paper, it causes it so the acid doesn't reintroduce itself. And that's kind of important because if I was to put this next—once I deacidify this and put this next to a paper that hasn't been deacidified, the acids would tend to migrate. They'll go from one paper to the next.

That's why we always want to either encapsulate it or put a piece of tissue paper in between so that the acid won't go onto the piece. You notice I'm wearing gloves. First, first rule. Once this thing has been deacidified, don't ever touch it with your fingers. Your fingers have natural oils and grease and acid in the perspiration in your fingers. You'll reintroduce it. Yes, Bob. I have the impression, looking at the two that we showed, you needed much better ventilation.

Yes, you want to use both of these with ventilation. And for today's purpose, we're not going to, because I'm not going to be doing that much. For those of you in the front, you'll get a real good… Some foam core and a fan will make a wonderful, very inexpensive… I use what's called a spray booth, a little foam core spray booth that confines things to it. And I'm very careful about overspray.

[00:25:03]

Now, today I can't do that because you wouldn't be able to see what I'm doing. So I'm just going to spray directly onto the piece. What do you mean by overspray? Can you put too much on? No, it goes all over except for the document. Yeah. Oh, okay. If you put too much of that on and make your newspaper items like coffee books? Yeah, you could, especially if you're spraying a big book and you don't cover the prior pages.

Yeah. I have to move a piece of blotter paper as I go along to keep the covers from turning chalky white. Now, I always shake this up. I always shake up the gallons of Bookkeeper that I use, because what this is is it's mostly a propellant and a medium with the small amount of solids, which is what the buffering agent is. And you want to keep that in suspension, so I always keep this moving. Keep it, keep it the stuff in suspension so that it comes on in an even coat. And when we're doing it in a tray, I always rock the trays every so often to keep the active buffering agent moving in there.

So what we do is we just… Now in my booth, I use like little pins that hold it down so it doesn't fly all over with the propellant. Makes it real difficult to do this without that. You want to really saturate it pretty good, but it dries in about 15 seconds, 15 or 20 seconds. What were you using underneath that when you were doing those sides? It's just a piece of cardboard. I'm just using a piece for sake of something else that I don't have today. Again, go back to the blotter paper if you got it.

Yeah. We could use blotter paper, but then we'd have to throw that piece of blotter paper away. How many people are mechanically inclined? Can do serious. This is important. Do y'all remember the old water coolers before air conditioning? Do you know what drove the air conditioning, or the unit? And that's an impeller wheel. Okay, they're throwing them out right and left. You can take one of those impeller wheels, hook it to a motor, build a little booth that you can stand upright, and that's how most of my spraying is done.

And you can plug that in, drop the document on, and within seconds it's dry. Just keep right on going. It's Bob's high tech. We make it your own. We spray and put it on a table or on some screens. You know, we recommend using some, like screens that come off your screen, screen doors, that kind of thing, because you can get air ventilation on both sides. Now this piece is now deacidified, okay? That's all it takes to deacidify a piece of paper.

So I'm just going to put it in the filly folder for right now so that it's not touching anything else. Now Bob wants me to deacidify some other things, but I'm going to do this one here for Charles, also a bookkeeper. We don't have any today. All we've got is the spray. Yes, we'll talk about it. We'll talk about it, but it's very easy to describe it. So basically I could do that to these papers that have acid in it? You could.

Thirty-eight dollars. Versus probably to buy the chemical, the two ounces of chemicals that you'd need and the bottle of soda, you're talking maybe three bucks. Could you use a spray bottle with that? What we do, what we have in our archives is we do one of two ways. We either do a spray, and Gaylord, I know, offers a little pump bottle. It's similar to what he's got here. This, this is the Rolls Royce of deacidification sprayers, okay? This is, I mean, this is really nice.

Can I have this? Take this home with me? If you buy the buy extra nozzles, the clog. When I'm using, I can spray massive amounts of documents with one of these. You really can. You can do it with liquid, but they plug. And they clog, and we have to soak them with— Vinegar and hot water. We've got a couple of things that you can buy. You can buy something like this, which probably cost Bob an awful lot of money.

Didn't cost me a cent. Ah. We've got these ones that they're made by the Bookkeeper Company. They're just a little bottle that's got a little spray thing on it and a little hand pump that you just pump. It's plastic. And it went through about 75 docs, 75 to 100 documents before it broke. Yes. Yes. They're selling a lot of those kind of sprayers in the garden center.

[00:30:00]

No, stay away from that stuff. You can. I use one. It clogs, and, you know, you use it for 25 or 50 or 60 documents, and then you go buy another one. You know. But we also use a very fancy air compressor that blows up a can, fills the air in the can. You've got one of those down there. And with removable nozzles, and we just pump it up with air, with the blow it up with air, and then we, you know, fill up our bookkeeper and pump it up with air, and then we can spray for 25 or so documents, and then you have to fill the air up again.

But whatever way you do it, it doesn't really matter. Now, one of the best ways to do this is to either use—where's your hake brush? Use a—this is what's called a hake brush. H-A-K-E, hake. It's Japanese. I think it's a Japanese name. It's just a wide brush. You could buy a brand new wide paintbrush if you really wanted to use it, okay? Buy a good quality one, though. Don't buy one that's, you know—this is a good quality brush.

Buy a quality brush, and then you just dip it in your solution and you can brush it on. Or you can get a tray, and you can actually take—and this is what we do for when we're doing a lot of documents—we just simply dip it in, hold it up until it drips off, lay it on the rack, grab the next one, dip it. Lay it down. Yeah. How long does it— Yeah, until it's gone. A gallon? A gallon we can probably go through, depending on the size of the document, depending on how hot and humid the room is, because of evaporation, probably about 200, 300 documents, something like that. But, you know, so you say that's about a dollar a document.

Can you do one side, dry it, and then turn it over and do the other side if you're worried about it falling apart when you— You could. You could if you want, but you're not really— unless you really dip it and you soak it and you leave it in for a long time and then you apply a lot of pressure to it, you're not really going to hurt it that much. That document that he's got in his hand, all you need is one side.

Yeah, but I do spray both sides, though. I use a— I use a latex or nitrile, either/or, just because it's a liquid. I'm using a polyester glove. I prefer the polyester gloves as opposed to the cotton. The cotton tends to pick up the sweat and transfer. Bye-bye, Bob. Will paper and paper repairs survive soaking or spraying? Not normally. You can. I like doing them afterwards myself. If you've got a piece that's, like, torn all the way across, yes, repair it first by all means, and then carefully do your dipping or your spraying.

If you've got a torn piece, I would spray first. Or, you know, I mean, I would— if it's torn all the way across, I'd use spray as opposed to dipping it, okay? Other air dries. These are dry already. This one here's dry already because the type of propellant that it uses, it has a drying agent in it. I think it's methanol or something, I'm not even sure. When you dip it, the bookkeeper tends to dry faster than the Wite-Out.

Wite-Out takes, and sometimes we have to—I've got like a couple of people that'll help me with this. I'll do the dipping and then laying it down. Actually, I've got one guy that goes through and does all of the paper prep work. He takes the staples out, takes the paper clips out. He notes that it's three documents, so we've got a notation that we need to, at the end, those three have to go back together, you know, with a plastic paper clip on it. And then I'll do the dipping, and then I'll set it over on the table, and then another guy will come by behind me, and as soon as the top's dry, he'll flip it over so that it gets the bottom, depending on the air circulation and that sort of thing. It just goes through the process, and then I have a man at the end that will take and put the document into one of the folders. And what we do is on the outside of our folders, we've got little stickers that say, Deacidified documents must use gloves, and it's been highlighted in like pink or yellow or whatever, you know, so it's like, stop,

[00:35:05]

you know, so it shows anyone that from now on that goes into the file that these documents inside this particular folder, you have to use a pair of gloves. Have to. Now, like I said, 85 percent of our documents are copies. Now, as a general rule, we normally use gloves all the time. But sometimes we'll walk back there and we'll grab, look for a particular document, like maybe assembly minutes from '95 or something like that, and we won't use a pair of gloves to pull those out. But anything that goes into one of these files, you absolutely have to use a pair of gloves, because you don't want to reintroduce the acid to it.

Just by touching it like that is going to reintroduce the acid to it, and then you've wasted all your time and all your money in doing that. Okay. Now what I'm going to do now is Bob wants me to do this book here. Bob, do we have a place where I can—can we lay those out over there when we're done? And we're running out of room over here. By the way, do you remember the documents we soaked or humidified?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a beautiful part of it. You don't have to force anything. Be the ready to go ahead and do some work. Bob, you want to put some gloves on? I can hand these to you. Is there any problem with transferring the gloves with the handling, like deacidified documents and deacidifying and picking up another? No. No, unless your gloves are soaked through with perspiration. That's why I prefer to use these nylon polyester gloves as opposed to the cotton.

Cotton sometimes, especially if you're in a hot room, your hands will sweat. And once again, like I always use a latex glove, which precludes that. I'm going from the inside out. This is the interior. Here's the next pitch. Like I say, this goes pretty fast. Now, if I was doing this particular document here, I probably would dip it. Okay, there's number three. Number four. For those of you in the front row, you may be starting to smell this stuff.

Yeah, I guess. Unless you're into that, in which case you need to talk to your sponsor immediately. You know, these guys are sharper than we thought. This is the next one. Did we tell you that we butchered half your stuff, Charles? They will come when you put pamphlets and stuff together with some of the pages upside down. Oh, no. Sometimes they come that way. Right. Most Americans are normal, so I would put a cover on first and text something.

Having got one of the new fourth edition books with the covers upside down. Those are collector's items, by the way. You got two or three of them. I don't know. The one in your left hand. Speaking of mix-ups, how many of you out there have a second edition Big Book that says it's the third edition of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous? The past archivist from GSO told me, he says, Why don't you just put those ones away in a drawer somewhere? Because they got past their quality control way back, and they're

[00:40:05]

very embarrassed about them. But we have one in our— and I brought that up to Frank Mauser, and he just told me to go put that away in a drawer. He was kind of embarrassed about it. See, but even GSO makes mistakes. Well, it was the, I think it's a third printing, second edition, third printing. Yeah. What about the fourth? Have you seen the ones with the copper foil, the gold foil? On the fourth? On the fourth printing? On the fourth, no, I haven't. No, I haven't. We got some from our central office. Okay, we've now deacidified.

Any questions about deacidification? Yes. If you were just, if you were doing a book that's bound and not something you take apart like that, like a big book, you would just open the page and you open it and spray like crazy? The only problem about— Yeah. —spraying it back is it's unnecessary. Yeah. That's why I like to stick to white toe, because you have graduated versus the bookkeeper. You have graduated depth.

Yes. So I use white toe number ten. I've learned from experience that it permeates all of the Big Books and the Twelve and Twelves and most of the Oxford Group material with one side. So what I do is I cover the front two pages, then I move them off to the side. I've got a piece of blotter paper or something to protect it, and I do the next two, and I keep going. Are you never opening those books again?

See, it's expensive to do a book. It's really expensive to do a whole book. And the point is, once you're done with those books and you've deacidified your entire book, you're going to have to use gloves the rest of its life to read it, to use it. You have to weigh those kind of options. We haven't deacidified any of our books. We haven't even deacidified our first edition first printing, because every time we show it for a display, we'd have to put gloves on to open it up and touch it.

Some people do. Don't get me wrong. Some people go to that expense and go to that trouble because they want it to stay pristine for the rest of its life. Yes, you can. But you also have to remember, you have to take special— Care, once you've done it. Yes. When you deacidify, it is not going to change the color that it is today. No. Getting further. There's no way. Once this has changed color, there's nothing in the world other than going back to the morgue and seeing if maybe they've got a new copy of it. That's the only way.

You'll never change it back once it's acidified. You'll never change the damage that's occurred. I talked to you about that first edition, first printing with the tape that was on it. There's no way. I even tried the chemical that Bob talked about. We couldn't get the staining out. It permanently burned into the paper. We're going to show you the next step, which is encapsulation, okay? Any other questions about deacidification?

Yes, sir. You're saying that you cannot deacidify something twice. Sure. You can deacidify it as many times as you want. Yes. But I mean, I'm just saying that if it happened that you had a… Say I took my gloves off now and I touched this, so I'd just go back and do it again. But you've wasted your time, your effort, and your money. Okay. Now, Bookkeeper does offer a program that will deacidify your books.

They take a book and it's— any of these with halfway decent spines— and it's turned around. I can't do— I won't do it with this book, but they take it and it fits inside of a round chamber, and then the whole book is dunked into the solution. And it's about $125 for a small book like this. For a big book, it's much more. But the book at that point is then deacidified. Yes. I'm curious, is the overspray, I mean, unless if you don't soak it, is there still deacidification spray?

It's like the overspray. You see all the overspray that I got here? This is all waste. So if you were going to spray like 30 documents in a… You are going to spray like 30 documents in a chamber. You could actually take a book and lay out four or five or six pages and put the overspray. No, because you're not going to get as good a coverage.

[00:45:01]

You're not going to know whether that overspray hit this part or this part or this part. So it's always, you're always going to, unless you do a dipping process or using the brush, with a spray, it goes everywhere. That's why I use a small spray booth that I do things in that confines that spray so that I know it's not going to go way out over here. It's going to be staying in a small area. And I use just some foam core that I glued together with a little 45-degree angle piece that I stick it on.

Works real good. It confines the smell and the sprays and everything else, and it was real cheap. Okay. On to encapsulation, Bob. We got an old … and I had to do was just their name shift. And you can collage the issue. We can do this one of two ways. There's two sheets. That's what I've been working on up here. It had tears. It needed to be repaired. We only have a certain sizing Mylar or polyester, so I had to trim just a tad off of it.

I noticed it's popped very, very long. So I went ahead and checked with the owner of it, and he said, Yeah, go ahead and take just a little bit off. That's right. We'll do it. Get the scalpel and gold paper, if I didn't use the normal pair of scissors or an X-Acto knife, it would have torn the paper. So you got a choice tonight. We can encapsulate it by using what they call a glue stick to bring a little bit of solution on there and adhere something. And encapsulating it back to back, or we can encapsulate it two different sheets. It all depends on how you want to have it.

Let's do it. You could. Because you can buy these glue sticks that are acid-free, neutral pH, and photo-safe. And we use those for tacking down small things like in our displays. Yes. I'm not that clear. What we're trying to make is a decision on whether or not it's … side by side.