12,000 books soaked in burst
Staff at France’s national library rushed to dry out the books after an incident claimed to be due to underfunding
FLOODING from burst pipes at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which soaked some 12,000 books, has however not caused “irreparable damage to our heritage”, the library says.
The Paris library – France’s largest – says more than half of the books will go back into the stores after drying by the end of this week.
Culture Minister Aurélie Filipetti visited to see restoration efforts yesterday, and said she was “impressed by the work of the teams and all of these books laid out drying under ventilators”.
The minister said some would have to be replaced, but they were not rare ones. The library said most of the books concerned dated from 1850 or more.
The state will foot the restoration bill. The network of pipes responsible would be completely changed this year, the minister said.
The burst happened last Sunday and affected books from the Art and Literature department.
The FSU union said that the incident was the result of “decreases in the budgets allocated to maintenance”, while the CGT-BNF denounced “continual drops in ministerial subsidies”.
However, the Culture Ministry said “there has been no reduction in state aid to the BNF”.
The BNF is situated across seven sites, of which the largest is the François Mitterrand site in the 13e arrondissement, where the incident happened.
It is a public institution and one of the world’s largest libraries, with some 14 million books and periodicals. Parts of its collections were inherited from the royal libraries of France and date to the Middle Ages.
Photo: LPLT/Wikimedia Commons
