Slow fire
Appearance
A slow fire is a term used in library and information science to describe paper embrittlement resulting from acid decay. The term is taken from the title of Terry Sanders' 1987 film Slow Fires: On the preservation of the human record.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Book_suffering_from_slow_fire.jpg/220px-Book_suffering_from_slow_fire.jpg)
Solutions to this problem include the use of acid-free paper stocks, reformatting brittle books by microfilming, photocopying or digitization, and a variety of deacidification techniques.