Whipper-snapper. Snapper of whips? Therefore, is Indiana Jones a whipper-snapper?

That's horrible!

Yup. I love it and hate it at the same time.

That's the smell of books dying an acidy death.

And so they are! Alas that they are so;

To die, even as they to perfection grow.

joins Sunil in the traumatised corner, and tries to ignore the tiny rustling screams of dying books.

Acid in the paper is what causes old books to have such fragile pages. When books were more treasures and less mass-produced, they were printed on higher quality rag paper. It's the acids from wood pulp that is the problem. Really early books were printed on vellum (sheepskin) and parchment (which is rag, I think), which lasts forever and is why we still have things like the Gutenberg Bible and near-original Chaucers.

Edit

the tiny rustling screams of dying books

What a macabre image. When I walk into a library or bookstore and smell that wonderful, sad odor, I want to grab all the books and promise them I'll save them.

I didn't smell that at the Huntington Library. Of course, those folks know how to preserve a book.

100% cotton or hemp can easily be made acid free. (Acid free hemp paper should last millenia )

Newsprint has a high acid content, although it's lower now than it was. That's why old newspaper clippings crumble to pieces. Pulp magazines and paperbacks are particularly prone to falling apart in your hands. There are some easily available pH neutralizing products now, if you have older paper you want to keep. Acid also eats away at artwork on paper, which is why you want acid-free mats and backing. Regular cardboard has enough of an acid content to ruin paper things stored in it, so my stored art is in acid-free boxes or plastic.

If you wish to be further traumatized, the Kodak Company claims that it never intended color photography to be permanent. All your grandparents' pictures are fading into faint brownish blobs.

For further trauma, those backups you made to CD are not permanent either. Commercial CD's are embossed, which is why they last a long time. CDs (and I think DVDs) you make on a typical home or office computer are burned and therefore not permanent.

I was just telling the owner of the newly opened used bookshop in my neghborhood that his store doesn't yet have that old bookshop smell.

The Graveyard Book just won the Newbery.

thank you p-C!

and Congratulations to Neil -- he may not be one of us, but he feels like one of us