We have observed in previous posts that rapid deterioration occurs when books are printed on paper made from highly acidic wood pulp (a situation characteristic of most books published from roughly 1850-1990). For book collectors, this problem is particularly acute if their collection contains books published during World War II and the decade or so immediately following. As Gordon Neavill notes in a recent article:
The War Production Board, which was responsible for allocating paper supplies, was established in January 1942, a few weeks after the United States entered the war. Its purpose was to direct war production and assign priorities to the delivery of scarce materials. Paper use in the publishing industry was limited in fall 1942, when each publishing firm was allocated a paper quota based on its use of paper in 1941. Initially publishers were restricted to 90 percent of the paper they used before the war. This was not a severe hardship, especially compared with Britain, where publishers in 1942 had to get by with 37.5 percent of the paper they used in 1939.... Paper restrictions became increasingly severe as the war continued. There was an additional 10 percent cut in 1943, and a further 15 percent cut early the following year.
These paper stocks continued to be used after the war ended--in fact, almost a decade would pass before the last of these paper stocks would be exhausted by publishers.
To save paper (and money), publishers cut where they could--fewer pages, smaller pages, fewer books altogether. This, despite the fact that demand for books was soaring at the same time that the resources needed to print books were rapidly diminishing. (Among these resources were printers and binders. Since neither occupation was considered "essential," a lot of these folks wound up serving in the military, creating a shortage of skilled labor for book publishers.)
Books published during this period can usually be recognized by their thin, browned and brittle pages (none of which may be obvious from a photograph that focuses on, e.g., a book's binding). Allen & Unwin's 1942 3rd impression of Tolkien's The Hobbit, for example, was printed on wartime paper stock. So, too, was the 1944 first collected British edition of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (originally published separately; published in a collected American edition in 1943):
Lesser titles published during this period also came in for such treatment, though if such books have been well preserved it may be difficult to spot browning and brittleness without (carefully) examining the actual pages of such books:
As usual, dealing with a trusted independent bookseller can save you a lot of time, money and frustration in acquiring such fragile books. Once such books have been purchased, though, it will be up to you to preserve them for future generations....
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