Peabody collection salvaged

A chain of about 20 workers from a book-salvaging company and Johns Hopkins Libraries moved boxes holding more than 8,500 antique books down a makeshift assembly line, lugging the book-crammed boxes out of four heated trucks and up six levels of stairs to their shelves in the George Peabody Library.

The books, which were damaged last summer by a water that leaked from a burst pipe, returned to the library in good condition thanks to a professional freeze-drying process.

"We were able to salvage all of them," said Sonja Jordan, director of preservation to the Sheridan Libraries. "You couldn't tell that there was any damage."

Document Preprocessors, the company that used a patented process to freeze the books and safely remove the water, drove the books last week from upstate New York to the George Peabody Library.

Unloading the more than 8,500 books took them only three days with the help of their system of book withdrawal.

"They were able to take them off in order," Jordan said.

In August, as the books were removed for treatment, workers labeled each box with the floor level, the row number and the bookshelf.

They kept the same order throughout the entire restoration process, even in their facility, she said.

This meant that workers didn't have to re-shelve books one-by-one.

But without an elevator in the George Peabody Library, the books had to be carried up five or six levels of stairs, said Quintin Schwartz, general manager of Document Preprocessors.

"We had 22 people, a human chain from the truck up to the library," he said. "Then, there was another group of people pushing the carts to the stairwells."

Library officials were thrilled to watch their shelves reload again.

"I thought of it as a homecoming when they came back," said Cynthia Requardt, curator of special collections, laughing.

Only six months ago, Requardt worried that some shelves would remain empty after water leaked from an air conditioning unit drain pipe and damaged the collection. As soon as the damage was detected early Aug. 4, Jordan called professional freeze-dryers in an effort to salvage the books.

"My first reaction was to size up the scope of the damage," said Jordan. "You just put aside your emotions."

The library was kept at a cold 60 degrees until trucks, equipped with freezers, arrived to take the books up to Middlesex, New York, where they would undergo freeze-drying by the company Document Preprocessors.

The books were saved by "the quick work of the library staff," said Requardt.

Using a patented freeze-drying process, Document Preprocessors removed the moisture from the pages, treated the leather bindings to prevent warping, and maintained pressure throughout the process to prevent lasting marks of water damage.

One concern, tide marks, didn't happen, said Jordan. When a book dries, a stain called a "tide mark" shows the area damaged by water, but Document Preprocessors used freezing and pressure to avoid this.

Water damage can also cause books to fall apart like wet newspapers.

"The adhesive that holds the book together can reconstitute and loosen the pages," said Jordan. "But that didn't happen either."

For Document Preprocessors, the Peabody library was a simple project.

"This is a baby job," Schwartz said. "The LA Library had 140,000 boxes."

While small in number, Schwartz said the appraised value of the collection is enormous.

"These are priceless books," he said. "You have millions of dollars worth of value there."

Most of the books are from the 18th and 19th centuries, but some them date as far back as the 16th century. The collection began in 1860 with the goal to make a "scholar's library." It includes works of Cervantes and Dante.

The collection has returned just in time for the George Peabody Library's reopening in May. It has been closed since 2002 for renovations.

"It's a slice of time, the kind of collection one couldn't recreate now," Requardt said. "We've had librarians from big institutions come and say nobody could put this library together today."