Hygenic libraries (again)

 I've written before about Hygenic Libraries.

Today's cataloguing exercise up at the Athenaeum brought to light another hygenic library label

this time from a library in St Kilda.

Again, there's no real information on what the procedure used was, but a little digging suggests that the books were either wiped down with formaldehyde solution, or, for a slightly more sophisticated treatment (and one less risky to the library staff) fumigated by being placed in a  chamber with formaldehyde vapour, perhaps like this 1930's example of a fumigation cabinet

Libraries and archives centres still carry out periodic fumigation to control silverfish and and the like - for example, when I worked at ANU, I had an office on the top floor of the Menzies library, and every Christmas shutdown they warned us that the building was closed as they were fumigating the books...

In the 1920s and 1930s, in the wake of the flu pandemic, and other local epidemics, such as the polio outbreak in Melbourne in the late 1920s, there were serious concerns that diseases might be spread by library books, and as I've written elsewhere, public libraries were still sterilising books as late as the 1960s if the borrower had come down with a notifiable infectious disease,

The advent of antibiotics, widespread vaccination and generally better public health meant  that by the late 1960s,  books in public libraries were no longer normally sterilised between loans, although during the recent Covid pandemic libraries that kept lending books did sometimes use UV sterilisation boxes.

Formalin is a pretty powerful sterilisation agent and was used extensively in hospitals and is still sometimes used in laboratory situations, but is not usually used on museum specimens. to sterilse them or get rid of insect infestation.