PANNONHALMA, Hungary (AP) — Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history.
The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary’s oldest centers of learning and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Restoration workers are removing about 100,000 handbound books from their shelves and carefully placing them in crates, the start of a disinfection process that aims to kill the tiny beetles burrowed into them.
This reminds me of a friend of mine in New York City who had a bedbug infestation that got into a rare book collection. He ended up sealing up and bagging the books up for two years in order to suffocate them all to death.
The procedure here, it seems, is to store them in an inert environment, namely nitrogen, so a very similar process.
I was just thinking, why wouldn’t they bag them up or seal them in some way? A wooden crate still seems ineffective but also I’m not a book keeper.
Crates are just the first step:
To kill the beetles, the crates of books are being placed into tall, hermetically sealed plastic sacks from which all oxygen is removed. After six weeks in the pure nitrogen environment, the abbey hopes all the beetles will be destroyed.
