AUBG DAILY Fall 2019 OWL THE NEWS Vol. 1, Issue 1 Panitza Library: Hundreds of Books Damaged By Yoan Bondakov & Milka Stoycheva is the driest place on earth,One could say the library but not the Panitza Library. A recent flood damaged hundreds of books and periodicals, and raised questions about how secure the valuable inventory deposited there is. On Sep. 24, a major flooding hit the Panitza library. Water coming off a broken pipe in the men’s bathroom flooded the ground floor and basement. Some sections of the library were covered in ankle-deep water. “I opened the door of the ground floor and stepped into a lake,” librarian Gergana Atanasova said. “I left my bag on the desk and immediately ran to the basement. The real disaster was there. I saw a waterfall coming from the ceiling.” Salvaged Books by Steliyana Yordanova for AUBG Daily The basement houses most of the library's collections, many out-of-print books, multivolume sets, periodicals and second editions. The water poured directly over the university’s archive, and the books in the compact shelves were the most damaged. Altogether, 523 books and 26 volumes (321 issues) of archived periodicals were completely destroyed. The estimated cost of all ruined publications is $7,409.90. “Just as a comparison, we normally purchase about 600 to 650 books per year. So you can imagine that this equals nearly a one-year purchase for our library. This is an enormous loss for us," Library Director Nikolina Ivanova-Bell said. Among the lost publications were books donated by Dimi Panitza, the patron of the library. Some of them were special presents for Dimi and Ivon Panitza and were autographed by their authors.
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