Unfreezing

Restoring the books that were burnt in the Central Library fire was an arduous process spanning more than six years. The process began with freezing the books for two years, followed by meticulous steps of thawing, drying, fumigating, sorting, cleaning, repairing, and rebinding. Initially, 20,000 books were placed in a rig that was secured by bungee cords inside a forty-foot-wide chamber to dry them. The temperature within the chamber was 100 degrees, and the books were left in there for five days. Then, the air pressure was dropped to equal the pressure found at 140,000 feet above the earth. The temperature and air pressure kept changing, and eventually, when the first batch of books came out, six hundred gallons of water was extracted from them. After a batch of books had been dried, it was shipped to the chief conservator who told her staff to run each book through a checklist. Despite significant damage, the efforts of book conservators and NASA scientists alike led to the successful recovery of 600,000 out of the 700,000 damaged books, demonstrating a remarkable achievement.