Library valentine about tape

sonofahurricane:

npr:

conservethis:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

If you put tape on your books,

I’ll never EVER love you.

As a book-lover I support this valentine. -Mabinty

can someone explain to me why we hate tape on books? Like book tape (when my mom could spare it) has saved a couple of my best-loved picture books that were out of print, not to mention how good it is for libraries that can’t afford to constantly replace pictures books that kids tear apart…

1) It can be incredibly hard to remove. Conservators HATE tape, because removing it requires solvents and hours upon hours of delicate, tedious work. You’d be surprised what sorts of Important Things have gotten tape applied to them, which has caused irreversible damage.

2) What you do with your own personal books is your business (I freely admit that I dog-ear my cheap paperback novels!) but THINK TWICE about putting tape on anything that has sentimental value or might be something you’d want to pass down to a family member years from now. Conservation is not cheap, and since tape removal takes so long in most cases, you or your descendants are going to end up paying quite a bit of money to have that tape removed from your favorite childhood book.

3) Tape causes damage to paper, to cloth, to leather….you name it, the adhesive can stain and even cause the paper to become translucent! Or the adhesive can ooze out from the sides of the carrier (the plastic part) and damage anything shelved next to that book.

4) Tape is a relatively new invention, and pressure sensitive tape is really a 20th century commodity, so unless you’ve worked in a library or handled a lot of older books that have been taped, you may not have seen the kind of havoc that 50+ year old tape can wreck on a binding.

5) Tape was used with gusto by some university/academic libraries (which is the kind of library I work at, not a public library), and as a result, much of my work deals with addressing the damage this caused to the bindings of countless books. Many of these bindings are publisher’s bindings or leather bindings, which have a lot of research and artifactual value, which has been damaged by the presence of tape.

6) Post-It Notes are also bad for books. Please don’t use Post-It notes in library books, and remember to remove them from your own books after you are done using them.

7) THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ARCHIVAL TAPE.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ARCHIVAL TAPE THAT IS SAFE TO USE ON HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS OR ANYTHING IMPORTANT TO YOU.

Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something. It’s snake oil. Just because the adhesive is ostensibly “acid free” doesn’t mean that all the other problems of tape disappear – such as the adhesive cross-linking over time and becoming difficult to remove, or the edge of the tape creating a “breaking point” which can cause the pages to tear more easily at the tape’s edges, especially on old or brittle paper.