How to Clean and Disinfect Your Books
Cleaning your books and bookshelves is something you don’t have to do that often, but when you do get to it, it’s nice to know what materials and techniques to use.
If you suspect your books are harboring germs, there are some additional approaches to disinfecting them outlined below.
Before we start, there are just a few things you should know about books overall:
As a general rule, books and moisture don’t mix. So please be careful with liquid cleaning products and the amount of water used. Your books can end up worse off than when you started if you are not careful.
If you have any collectible books, they should be approached differently from other books. Rare books, antique books, and first editions can be fragile. It’s best to test your cleaning abilities on newer / less valuable books first.
Disinfecting Your Books
If you are concerned about germs on books from hands (or perhaps little ones putting them in their mouth), there are two things you can do:
Wipe the books with rubbing alcohol - 70% Isopropyl Rubbing Alcohol is what I recommend. My rule of thumb: If it’s GLOSSY then you can wipe it with alcohol to clean the surface. This includes most board books and their pages. Most children’s books and some other books have glossy covers that can be wiped down. Most book jackets are glossy and can be wiped down as well. (Note that our Juniper Books jackets should not be wiped with alcohol, see regular tips below). Rubbing alcohol can be used on your glossy jackets to generally brighten them up!
The other technique that will kill all germs is freezing your books. It won’t hurt the books and most germs will die off in hours, leaving them in the freezer for 48 hours will certainly wipe them out. This method will also annihilate more persistent critters and things like mold and mildew. When I use this technique, I put the books in plastic bags or wrap in plastic wrap, then put them in the freezer.
Routine Cleaning
For general maintenance of your books and bookshelves, the process is even easier. I recommend using a damp microfiber or other cleaning cloth (or even an old-tshirt) and just a little bit of water. You can use the cloth on just about any surface or type of books. When I’m cleaning bookshelves or just taking the dust off the top edge of books, I also like to use a Swiffer cloth.
When there is a lot of dust behind books (as there often is) I like to take all the books off the shelf so I can really do a good cleaning. Do this one shelf at a time so as not to overwhelm yourself. However, if you are reorganizing or styling your bookshelves at the same time as you are cleaning, you could take everything off (more tips on the styling process are on the blog).
Usually a good cleaning will last a year or more, however dusting your shelves and the top edges of books can be done more frequently.
Other Cleaning Techniques
An artgum / white eraser is infinitely useful for general and precision cleaning. The Pentel eraser is my favorite. You can use it to erase pencil marks in the books (e.g., used book dealers’ pencil pricing notes). You can use it to clean up ink or other smudges on the outside of the page edges. You can also use it to rub away adhesive from price stickers on the jackets, or just clean and freshen up the spines of the jackets.
Difficult sticker residue may require more aggressive techniques. One of my preferred techniques is frying the adhesive with a hair dryer and scraping it off with a palette knife. If you do this, be patient and take away a little bit of the sticker and / or adhesive at a time. Sometimes it can also work to use rubber cement and have sticky attract sticky, this can take a while and doesn’t always work depending on the underlying material, plus it can do some damage as it requires a lot of agitation.
Antique Leather books require specialized techniques so I’ll write about how to care for those in another post.