Black silver

Barbara Appelbaum <aandh [at] pop__mindspring__com> writes

>I have recently been working on disaster recovery for the object
>collection of an archives that had a smoke infiltration in a
>storeroom.  All of the silver objects (probably all 20th century)
>including  things from Japan, India, Israel, Chile, and the U.S. are
>stone-cold black.  And the black layers are almost entirely immune
>to regular silver polish, even after I clean them with detergent to
>get any greasy smoke off. ...

Randy Silverman encountered smoke damaged books at a county records
office. He worked with a company that uses dry ice blasting. Randy
wrote an excellent article in Archival Products News, Volume 15, No.
3 2008   archival.com   about his experience. He explained the
process of cleaning the soot from book covers. Perhaps dry ice would
work in your situation.

Bill Minter
William Minter Bookbinding and Conservation, Inc.
4364 Woodbury Pike
Woodbury, PA  16695
814-793-4020
Fax: 814-793-4045


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 22:37
                 Distributed: Friday, December 19, 2008
                       Message Id: cdl-22-37-004
                                  ***