In a heavily guarded building in Cranberry, a battle is being waged around the clock to save the world's super heroes.

	Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Preservation Technologies worker Barbara Plocki catalogs, weighs and affixes a bar code label as she checks in books to be treated. Click photo for larger image.

The enemy? The relentless forces of time and nature.

The weapon of choice to ensure our heroes' survival? An antacid.

The site of the war is Preservation Technologies, a company that has developed a revolutionary process to save paper, including comic books.

The process earned the firm a five-year contract from the Library of Congress to save about 100,000 comic books, including Superman and Spider-Man, as well as not-so-super characters such as Richie Rich.

"Comic books are a challenging type of material," said Mark Sweeney, chief of the preservation reformatting division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which houses the largest comic book collection in the United States.

Because comics are printed on highly acidic wood pulp paper, similar to newspapers, even the utmost of care won't arrest their eventual decay, he said, and other preservation methods don't work well for comics.

"Microfilm is still pretty much black and white, and color is such an important part of the comic book," Sweeney said. Digital technology might be used to create a color reproduction, he said, but that wouldn't preserve the book itself. "We want to preserve the comic book as an artifact. ... Now we have the opportunity to arrest the decay and keep the item as it was originally published and intended to be used."

Preservation Technologies uses a gentle, nontoxic process to apply microscopic particles of magnesium oxide -- the same ingredients found in over-the-counter antacids -- to neutralize the acid in paper.

"Our chemist predicts that the treatment will make the average book last between 300 and 800 years," said Ken Harris, preservation projects director for the Library of Congress. Untreated, books degrade and become brittle in 50 to 100 years, he said, "but we can avoid that now."

Preservation Technologies has been using the process, called Bookkeeper, since 1995 to preserve books for the Library of Congress and has treated more than a million volumes for the nation's library. But it wasn't until two years ago that comic books were included in the effort.

The Library of Congress preservationists spent more than 20 years unsuccessfully searching for a method that would safely neutralize the acid in paper before they learned that Richard Spatz, a former division head for Pittsburgh-based Koppers Co., held the patent for a promising mass deacidification process. They approached him in 1990.

Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Books awaiting preservation treatment at Preservation Technologies in Cranberry are fastened to carriers headed for the treatment tanks. Click photo for larger image.

"Dick Spatz's group in Koppers was involved in wood preservation," said Jim Burd, president and chief operating officer for Preservation Technologies. "That business wasn't really growing, so they thought maybe they knew about preserving paper. They set up a project and came up with a patent that was issued in 1985."

After Spatz retired from Koppers, he opened shop in Cranberry in 1992 with partner Randy Russell, also a former Koppers executive.

"At the time, the process used Freon, and [Spatz and Russell] realized that if they couldn't get rid of that, they couldn't go forward," Burd said, referring to the governmental restrictions placed on Freon because of environmental concerns. "So they hired two chemists who replaced the Freon with perflourocarbons, or PFCs, and tested the new chemistry with the Library of Congress during the summer of 1993."

Helping with the testing was a team of librarians and conservators from Pittsburgh universities, who cut 50 books in half so that half could be treated to test the process and evaluate the chemistry of the technology.

After publishing a report in 1994, the Library of Congress awarded Preservation Technologies a two-year test contract in 1995 to treat 72,000 books and later expanded it to include 90,000. Second and third contracts ensued, and the company is currently starting the fifth year of a five-year, $17 million contract to treat 1 million books, including comic books, and 5 million loose documents.

"That's 5,000 books a week that we're shipping back and forth [from the Library of Congress], and we're running 24/7," said Burd, adding that the current plan is to treat 300,000 books a year for the next 30 years until 6 million of the library's 18 million books are preserved for posterity.

Comic books entered the picture in 2002, when the Library of Congress began searching for a better way to house and preserve its comics, which were stacked in boxes in cramped conditions.

Because of the high color content and cheaply made pages of comic books, Bookkeeper had to be tested to make sure it would work on comics. It did. Now, institutions and libraries around the country, including Michigan State University, which has the second largest comic book collection in the country, have hired Preservation Technologies.

The company employs 60, 15 of whom are working at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to preserve documents that can't be transported. The company's facility on Thompson Park Drive in Cranberry is heavily guarded with cameras and security guards because of the value of the items it is preserving.

The breakthrough preservation process has led to the company's growth. It acquired a treatment facility in Holland in 1998, and last month it began operating in Gatineau, Quebec.

"The [Canadian] plant uses our latest technology, and we have a contract to treat books and documents for the National Library and Archives of Canada in Ottawa as well as the National Library of Quebec in Montreal," Burd said.

"One reason this process is catching on throughout the world and is so popular with the Library of Congress is because it's so cost-effective," Harris said. He estimated that books can be deacidified for about $16 each, including shipping. "If we reformatted the same book, it would cost between $85 to $120 to microfilm and about $300 to $1,900 to digitize," he said.

Since 1999, individuals have been able to buy Archival Mist, a spray developed by Preservation Technologies, to preserve items such as newspaper clippings and scrapbooks.

Jennifer Ellefson, who teaches classes at the Scrapbook Workshop in Cranberry, praised the product. "A lot of people starting out want to preserve newspaper clippings or ticket stubs because many of those aren't printed on acid-free paper. It's an affordable way to preserve your memories."

The University of Pittsburgh has hired the company to preserve local treasures such as the 19th and early 20th century editions of the music of Stephen Foster, a Pittsburgh native.

"It's every composition of [Foster's] and every known variant of every edition," said Deane Root, curator of Pitt's Center for American Music. "It's a wonderful record for historians who want to understand publishing history."

Although some of the artifacts have already been reduced to dust by acidification, Root is thrilled that Foster's written words will be preserved.

"We've always had the feeling of helplessness when we knew about acid, but we didn't have an effective way to treat such a large collection," said Root, noting that loose papers without binding present a unique set of challenges. "We can't restore the things that are badly damaged, but we should not lose any more of the collection because of acidification."

In addition to preserving comic books, Preservation Technologies has helped develop a better way to store them. In conjunction with Library of Congress conservators, Bob Strauss, vice president of marketing for the company, developed a see-through sleeve that protects the comic books from unnecessary handling.

"The comic books come to us in older boxes with a minimal-level cataloging record," Strauss said. "Here, they're put into an archival folder that's like an envelope with a clear front and a bar code on the back, so they're getting deacidified and rehoused at the same time." The treated comics are catalogued and returned to the Library of Congress in locked containers.

"It was a holistic approach to what we can do in order to get the collection in much better shape," Sweeney said.