Fungi Love Damp Books
A number of articles found on the web recently (actually they are all basically the same one) have told of a fairly serious case of book damage done by fungus in Luxembourg. Sometime in 2009, the conditions in the basement of the National Library of Luxembourg became quite humid, and before anyone knew it, a large number of books in “overflow” storage had been colonized by fungi.
Old and Valuable Books Need to be Stored Properly to Prevent Fungal Decay (umjanedoan)
The original source of the story seems to be 30,000 books attacked by fungus in the National Library:
The National Library has been bursting at the seems for a long time and books had been temporarily stocked in the basement but humidity rose unexpectedly and damaged over 30,000 books.
Most of the posts I have seen are all the same and seem to pretty much use the text from this article verbatim. Interestingly, the website of The National Library of Luxembourg doesn’t have anything to say about it.
If you are interested in preventing damage to books by fungi in your library you might want to check out A New Approach to Treating Fungus in Small Libraries.
Many common molds such as species of Acremonium, Alternaria, Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Fusarium, and Penicillium can grow on paper products.
If all else fails, contaminated documents can be blasted with gamma radiation to kill the fungi while leaving the paper intact. Harvard Magazine published an article on preventing loss of books from fungal attack early last year. Another article is Emergency Salvage of Moldy Books and Paper.
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