BibliophileBullpen

Dear Bibliobull:

Do you have a product that would remove or diminish rust stains on paper from metal paperclips? Would one of your erasers help? If so, which one?

Rusty Clipper

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Dear Clippy:

Depends on what type of paper…how thick, what kind of finish etc…

Generally rust doesn’t seep as far as ink, so you can get away with a little light surface abrasion. Any of my Inkredibles will work, the white/coarse one is more abrasive and the black one less so. If it is a large dark stain you may want to start with the coarse grade for a smidgen then move to the finer grains after the worst is gone.

If it is highly calendared like onion skin, only the lightest touch will do the trick. If it is bristol finish card stock you can put more torque behind it, but then the rust will not have gone too deep.

There are also different finishes of book paper…very open pored paper responds easily but late 19th c. very smooth surface is more delicate (it depends on how much cloth is in the paper) something with a cardstock back and a printed paper surface is much more delicate as the printed paper is thin and you can’t apply the coarse inkredible for more than a few swipes before you have to switch to fine.

Dear Bibliobull:

I’m normally a book collector, but recently succumbed to a temptation and purchased the first comic appearance of Donald Duck. This is a huge book for a comic (9 1/2 X 12 3/4), and has a fair amount of surface grime, made more obvious by a prior attempt by a prior owner to remove a pencil signature. The cover is on pulp-ish, non-glossy paper. What would you use for gentle surface cleaning? A document cleaning pad?

Duck and Cover

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Dear Ducky:

Since it has an ink printed surface you are correct in avoiding anything abrasive. Your choices are:
Absorene which is like a clean grease free silly putty, which also crumbles and allows you to roll the bits around collecting up surface dirt.

Document cleaning pads which will scatted tiny eraser granules over the surface for you to gently rub in.

Or ground up erasers of varying kinds: art gum or white vinyl. If you want to experiment you can use a cheese or nutmeg grater (avoid pink rubber erasers will just dry out when ground up.)

All of these perform the same function ADHESION, getting the dirt to adhere to the granule surface so you can blow it off; Absorene is just the ’stickiest’. You can repeat this as often as you like as long as you don’t apply too much pressure to the grains and actually ’scrub’ against the inks.

Dear Bibliobull -

I special ordered a title for customer from Amazon, new as stated and not cheap. It arrived with a library pocket neatly placed inside cover no other markings. Thankfully the customer was happy to get the book and didn’t care about the library pocket. But I am wondering why would the publisher put one in?

High pocket

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Dear Pockets -

Some copies of books are preprocessed for libraries. When the library orders it from a jobber it would come with all the cards and pockets already for circulatio, saving the library lots of time and getting the book into circulation quicker.. These days usually non trade editions – the kind that aren’t cheap…but there was a time when it was much more regularly done. You didn’t say the title, but i get the feeling this is a book that will be primarily sold to libraries perhaps they didn’t have any pocketless copies left? or pulled one by accident without the cards inside I’d say it may have been a leftover from the processing service. I am not even certain that they still send the actual CARDS with preprocessed books, perhaps it is new old stock.

Biblio Bull-