How do bookstores prevent book pages from turning yellow?
In: 96
There are two things that directly promote the deterioration of pages. The first is UV light, and the second is the climate. In addition, already deteriorating books can cause other books near them to deteriorate.
For UV light, the solution is two parts. The first part is to eliminate UV from natural light. This can be done by just blocking natural light, or by using special windows that filter UV light. The second part is to use artificial lighting that does not emit UV. This is much easier these days with LED lights.
The climate controls are mostly for controlling the humidity. This means installing a full climate control system that is monitoring the whole building, and not just using a single central thermostat and assuming the whole building is the same.
Then there’s managing the different books that you expect to deteriorate differently. The mass-printed cheap books are going to deteriorate faster than others, so you want to store them separately from your more expensive books so that they don’t promote deterioration in your good books before you can remove them.
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