In trying to draw some useful lessons from the water-leakage incident at ISU (described elsewhere in this issue by Karen Kearns), I have come up with one important piece of advice: In every disaster plan there should be this sentence:  “The Library will make every effort to ensure that only books that are in print will be damaged.”

 Perhaps you have now guessed that my role in the Oboler Library disaster at Idaho State University was to oversee the process whereby replacements would be found for the materials that had been ruined.  More specifically, my job was to prepare the insurance claim.

 My only experience with insurance claims has been in the context of auto accidents, and the process has always been pretty simple and straightforward: you find out how much a few firms will charge to fix the damage and pass that information on to the insurance company, who decides what it will pay for the repairs.  You are pretty much a bystander in the process.  But to be a bystander in the case of a library accident like ours, you would have to hire a qualified book appraiser, and I was assured that this would be an expensive proposition.  So my library chose to make the claim itself.  I soon realized that I was going to be far from a bystander.

 Facing me on the shelves were about a hundred volumes of formerly wet books, now dry but bearing the marks of their unfortunate experience.  They were what remained of the 200 volumes that had sustained some level of damage in the initial accident.  All these remaining volumes had been treated by Randy Silverman and his staff at the Marriott Library’s preservation facility at the University of Utah.  They had been “stabilized,” to use the technical term, meaning that they had been carefully air-dried and various measures had been taken to minimize damage such as page wrinkling and warping.  No effort had been undertaken to “restore” the volumes, for it had been explained to us by Mr. Silverman that the cost of restoration -- an elaborate and time-intensive process which involves dis-binding and cleaning individual pages – could cost up to $1000 per volume.  On the assumption that most of these books could be replaced for no more than a few hundred dollars each, we assumed that the university’s insurance provider would be receptive to paying for some combination of replacement and repair, rather than restoration.

 But what exactly the insurance company would find acceptable, remained a matter of mystery, at least to me.  In principle, my task was simple: identify a fair replacement cost, or, if possible, repair cost, for each item.  But, of course, all of these books were part of the Rare Book Collection.  Amazon.com was not very likely to be an option for determining replacement cost.  The kind of books I was dealing with could be roughly described as follows: most were published in the mid to late nineteenth century, a few in the eighteenth (the earliest publication date was 1705), and several in the twentieth century.  A substantial number were U.S. Government publications.  There were several large sets, including the British Encyclopedia (1819) and the Dickens-edited magazines Household Words and All the Year Round.   Just how rare they were is hard to say.   Probably most were pretty rare in southeast Idaho; some would perhaps be difficult to locate in the Intermountain West; but very few could not have been found in multiple libraries nationwide.

 Confronting these books, then, I had a fairly definite idea of what I had to do and I was armed with printouts of their catalog records, a thick sheaf of price quotes from online used book dealers (laboriously compiled by the editor of this special issue, Kristi Austin), and a yellow pad on which I’d drawn a tentative reporting schema.  From then on it was a matter of taking each book from the shelf, examining it closely, comparing it to descriptions of advertised copies of the same book, and recording my observations and conclusions.   A few sample entries can be seen by following this link.

 Assessing damage presents a number of problems.  One must try to distinguish damage caused by the accident in question from damage done prior to the incident.  Some of the books I was dealing with had had hard lives before they took this latest bath.  Fortunately, the effects of recent exposure to water, such as tide lines (the dark lines left at the boundary between the damp and dry portions of the page), the wrinkling of coated papers, and the warping of boards, are fairly easy to discern. 

 Yet when it comes to deciding whether a book is a legitimate candidate for replacement, there are imponderables.   Is a tide line running across10 pages, no more than an eighth of an inch from the lower margins, and never crossing a line of print, sufficient justification for requesting replacement?  To ask the more general question: how important is what book sellers call “condition” when one is assessing the value of a book in a library?  For collectors, and hence book sellers, the condition of a book is a major factor in determining value.  But for a non-profit, publicly-funded institution of learning, is that the standard that should be applied?  Are the books in my rare book collection worth no more, or less, than their market value?  What about a book bearing the scrawled signature of a legendary ISU professor on its endpaper; doesn’t that increase the book’s value to us, while decreasing its value in the market?  And how real, after all, is the market value of a book that you never intend to sell?  The answer to at least the last question had by now become apparent to me: market value is real when you have to buy a replacement.

 Nonetheless, the whole question of the value of the book as a physical object remains puzzling. Some would argue that if the book’s text is still legible the exact state of the paper and ink embodying it is of little significance.  On the other hand, there are those who would maintain that any decrement in the physical condition of a book measurably reduces not just its market value, but its real value. They would urge us to imagine, for example, that that 1705 copy of Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy had once lain in the hands of an eighteenth-century gentleman as he amused himself in a London coffeehouse, and that now, with dark water stains on every page, and thus bearing much less resemblance to what it once was, it has a sadly diminished capacity to bring us into imaginative contact with that gentleman and his times.  Personally, I side with the latter faction, but then I’m a book collector and hardly an unbiased judge.

 In any case, such philosophical musings were of little real assistance.  More practical worries demanded my attention.  Would the insurer understand that even though the water had damaged only two volumes of a five volume set, we would have to buy an entire set from a dealer?  Would it understand that the descriptive remarks of the booksellers were often meager and hard to interpret, and that even when they were fairly enlightening, few books advertised for sale matched the damaged volumes exactly?  Looming over the whole enterprise was the discouraging prospect that by the time the library received some sort of settlement, the good matches would already have been sold.  In fact, it seemed altogether likely that the entire labor of searching for replacement copies would have to be done again. 

 In the end, after two weeks work, I assembled a document of 125 pages, putting together a description of the accident, my evaluation sheets, price quotes, estimates of binding, acquisition and cataloging costs, and the bill from the University of Utah for preservation work, and put it all on the desk of an assistant in the Risk Management office.  About two months later, I was told that the claim had been processed and that we would receive the $9,781.50 that we had requested -- minus, of course, our deductible.

 Now, over a year later, the process of repair and replacement is still far from completed.  As I had expected, all of the replacement copies that I had located have disappeared from the bookseller’ lists and new and difficult decisions have to be made on a title-by-title basis.  The insurance company seems to have no interest in receiving any account of our expenditures; they don’t even care what we do with the books that we replace.  And all that flexibility just makes the decision-making more difficult. 

 In retrospect, though, the worst part of the whole experience hasn’t been the time and bother and frustration. Our little accident was hardly a tragedy on the scale of the destruction of the library at Alexandria, but insignificant though it was, it brought with it the peculiar sadness that results from witnessing the irreversible erosion of the past.