The following article appeared in the Manchester Guardian. The complete
text of the paper criticizing the use of white gloves in rare book and
manuscript settings may be found at:
White gloves are acceptably worn by all sorts: snooker referees, Marcel
Marceau wannabes, trombone players in military bands, masons and - more
disturbingly - Michael Jackson impersonators. But one group is up in arms
about having to wear white gloves: the normally mild-mannered librarians of
America.
Gloves are worn in an estimated 50 major US research libraries, and Randy
Silverman, a librarian at the University of Utah with 26 years' experience
in book conservation, has launched a quiet campaign to "stop the white
glove". Even his own library makes him wear them.
While most of us might expect to have to wear gloves to read 14th-century
illuminated manuscripts, Silverman says it is damaging. He and a colleague,
Dr Cathy Baker, have published a rather esoteric paper, Misperceptions about
White Gloves, in which they call for the wearing of white gloves to be
replaced with a policy of people simply washing their hands. "Awkward
mobility. Loss of feeling. Impaired sensations. These are not descriptions
of a trip to the dentist, but rather a visit to the reading rooms of many
special collections where the experience of handling valuable rare books and
documents is synonymous with donning white cotton gloves," reads the paper.
Silverman, via email, says the white-glove issue bemuses him, and that
change will only come about with the "retirement of a certain type of rare-
book librarian".
But it also seems the problem is not confined to the US - he was recently at
Trinity College, Dublin, to examine the bindings on a number of early Irish
manuscripts and had to wear gloves.
At the British Library, they are unburdened by the glove problem. Sarah Jane
Jenner, preservation coordinator, says white gloves have never been worn at
the library and is unsure where the idea came from. (In Silverman and
Baker's paper, they suggest the practice spread to rare-book and archive
reading rooms about 20 years ago and was probably born from curators being
sucked in by archive-supply salespersons' putting on gloves as standard
practice.)
To prove how ridiculous white gloves are when reading a book, Jenner (who
calls turning down the corner of a page as a bookmark "evil") sits me down
with white gloves and a collection of junk books, including Paul's Epistles,
a 19th-century tome that is falling to bits.
Gloved, it is practically impossible to turn the pages properly, and I
clumsily reach for large chunks at a time. Parts of brittle Paul's Epistles
crumble; my hand slides all over the page. Gloveless, however, I can
effortlessly turn the pages.
"You can see the blanket wearing of gloves doesn't actually protect the
item, and in fact can cause more damage," observes Jenner, who is fighting
library battles on a different front, including how to preserve the likes of
Nuts and Hello! magazine, with their plasticised covers, for readers 20
years down the track.