The Smell of Decaying Literature

TSU librarians’ search for funding battles the clock as 67,000 rare and foreign books sit rotting in the library basement

When Mzia Razmadze was appointed Acting Director of the Grigol Tsereteli Scientific Library at Tbilisi State University, she discovered that the first two floors of the library were occupied by a robust forest of paper-eating fungus. In and of itself, this might not be such a tragedy, however the fungus happened to be feasting upon TSU’s 67,000-volume collection of rare and foreign books. As the library’s Acting Director, Razmadze has inherited a number of problems that are symptomatic of the higher education system overall – ailing infrastructure, chronic under-funding, obsolete methodologies—as well as problems that might be more in-line with those of a museum curator such as the restoration and preservation of objects of cultural and historical value. “We have a unique collection from the 15th and 16th centuries,” Razmadze says. “There are no other collections like this, either in Georgia or in other libraries.”



In 1987, the Grigol Tsereteli Scientific library was moved from its cramped quarters in Vake out to the “new campus” and into a 32,000 square meter concrete building.

Unfortunately the ceiling of the new building leaked from day one, and the bottom floors especially suffered from perpetual dampness which emanated from the floors, walls, and ceilings.

This was an excellent climate for fungus, but a terrible one for books. It was into these floors that the singularly fragile rare book collection was moved in 1987, and for the past 20 years water continued to seep in from all sides. Razmadze says that when she took on the position of Acting Director and went down to inspect the collection, she discovered that none of the books had ever been unpacked from their move to the library in 1987.

Shhhhhh! No Breathing!

On a recent visit, Razmadze offers a tour of the book collection. The floor of the basement level of the library is under several centimeters of dust and grit. The ceiling is low, and to get to the rare and foreign books we cross a room that is bisected by a sequence of massive vents that run the length of the building. The air is damp and clammy.

A doorway opens into a room where one is immediately flattened by an overpowering smell of mildew: book funk -the smell of decaying literature. The room is wide, deep, and filled with closely spaced metal shelves. The shelves are packed with books, many of which are bound together with twine. The entire collection is covered in a sickly yellow-white carpet of fungus.

The spectacle is quite literally breathtaking. The air burns my throat. Razmadze pulls the collar of her sweater over her nose and warns me not to get any of the book-eating fungus on my jacket. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what the books even are under the fungal growth, and beyond that, much of the fragile leather bindings and their attendant markings have been digested.

Surveying the rather depressing spectacle of composting manuscripts, Razmadze says that she thinks that since the moisture was ambient, not direct, the hearts of the books are likely to be in better shape than their bindings. “I am an optimist by nature,” she says. “I cannot be passive about this.”

The Spoils of War Have Spoiled

Since discovering the fungus farm, Razmadze has been trying to eradicate it. After determining that the fungus was non-pathological - for people, anyway - Razmadze set about divining whether the collection would be worth the time and money it would take to repair. She sent lists of the foreign French and German titles – which she suspects were taken from German libraries during the occupation of Germany after World War II, as many were acquired through the USSR in the early 1950s - to the French and German embassies, requesting expertise and assistance in identifying their worth. The German Embassy replied to her overtures, and Razmadze was joined in the TSU basement by Olaf Hamann, a specialist from the Berlin State Library. Using the electronic catalogue of the German library system, Hamann was able to confirm that the volumes in question were missing from those libraries’ collections. Moreover, Hamann and Razmadze were able to confirm that the damaged books were worth recovering. “Each of them was quite expensive,” says Razmadze. “Each one was quite rare.”

Since then, Razmadze and other library workers have been gradually bringing the books from the basement level up to drier floors. They have been wiping the fungus off with alcohol and water, and drying them by hand. Many of the books are extremely delicate, and cannot be exposed to sunlight. Though they have managed to bring up many books, the scale of the project is sufficiently daunting so as to render their efforts meaningless if substantial financial assistance is not brought to bear on the problem. What is not clear is where that assistance might come from.

Funding: The Never Ending Quest

Razmadze has appealed to university, state, private, and foreign sources for funds to take on the problems of the library. While solutions to many of the library’s problems are well-represented in the Ministry of Education’s agenda for education reform (such as infrastructure renovation, new title acquisition, and modernization of the catalogue system and methodologies), the problems unique to the older items now in critical need of restoration have not yet been addressed.

The Ministry of Education provides financial support to university libraries for the restoration of basic infrastructure - heating and sewer systems - as well as for library modernization - new computers, books, and methodologies. “We are investing tens of millions of laris annually to help them to refurbish their facilities,” says Education Minister Kakha (Alexandre) Lomaia. Libraries can also seek direct investment from the state by applying to the Georgian National Science Foundation’s (NSF) University Library Program.

As soon as she heard about the NSF grants last November, Razmadze applied for one (“If a grant exists, I will apply for it,” she jokes), and the TSU Library received an NSF grant of 100,000 GEL. But, Razmadze says, the fund is for much-needed new titles and for the development of electronic resources – it cannot be used to work on the damaged books. And while education reform has been good to the library in many respects, it poses some challenges as well. In the last year of administrative reforms, the number of professors at TSU was reduced from 5,000 to roughly 800, and staff cuts have affected the library as well. At one time, 500 workers managed the library. Over the years this dwindled to 132, and library workers have recently been informed that the target “reformed” staff size is 30.

The Ministry of Education and Science is responsible for libraries at higher education institutions. It is not clear whether a situation such as that at the rare and foreign book collection—where the imperiled works are of both educational and cultural value - whether the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Culture, Monuments and Sports might be the proper body to appeal to for assistance.

There are precedents for cooperation between the Ministry of Culture (whose mission more precisely would seem to jibe with this problem) and the Ministry of Education. The two are cooperating, for example, in developing the National Museum as a modern ‘teaching museum,’ and the Ministry of Culture co-finances higher education institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts. Potential cooperation on restoring cultural artifacts in university collections has not yet been explored, says Education Minister Lomaia. “Frankly, no one has applied to us with such an issue.”

In addition to seeking more support from TSU and from the Georgian government, Razmadze continues to seek funding from other sources. She has submitted an application for the United States Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation in order to repair, scan and properly archive a portion of the collection. U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Officer Rowena Cross-Najafi refrained from commenting on the pending application, but noted that the Ambassador’s Fund often acts as a stopgap, and that given the severe infrastructural woes at the library the collection likely requires a more massive and final intervention. “Ultimately, this needs to be a government job,” says Cross-Najafi. Definitive intervention will take time, she adds, “but those books don’t have time. They need to be focused on today.”

First published in Georgia Today, 4 May 2007.