"It started out as an avocation, and it became really an obsession."

Barbara Goldsmith, an author and social historian, was speaking of her 15-year crusade against acidic paper, a self-destructive menace to the written word that has caused millions of books to crumble to dust.

Ms. Goldsmith, a trustee of the New York Public Library, endowed the lab where the library preserves its wares, saving many volumes on microfilm and using scientific alchemy to slow the deterioration of a special few.

But her efforts have reached far beyond the library here.

"I think she put the issue squarely on the map," said Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library. She led "a turnaround both within the publishing community and the Federal Government," he said, "a movement away from paper that ultimately disintegrates and toward a paper that is going to be around for hundreds of years."

Hardcover trade books are now routinely printed on acid-free paper, and Federal agencies are required to use permanent paper for publications of "enduring value." But the growing movement to recycle paper could reverse the acid-free successes, since recycling some kinds of paper requires the use of acid. So Ms. Goldsmith is still at work.

She dates her obsession to 1979, when she was doing research for "Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last," her best seller about the custody struggle for Gloria Vanderbilt. "I couldn't understand why some old documents were in wonderful condition and others I couldn't even get to the Xerox machine before they turned to dust," she recalled.

The problem, she learned, was immense: millions of books and periodicals published since the 1850's -- filling more than 30 miles of shelves in the New York library alone -- were disintegrating. Their pages were made of wood pulp, a type of paper developed in the 1850's when paper made from cotton rag and linen rag became scarce. Unfortunately, lignin in wood pulp oxidizes and turns brown. A chemical added to keep ink from feathering -- alum-rosin sizing -- also discolors the paper. And the matter grows worse over time as the alum combines with sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.

American librarians were not generally aware that the paper was falling apart rapidly until the 1950's, when William J. Barrow, an archivist, sounded the alarm. By 1960, he had helped create a wood-pulp process using alkaline chemicals. But 20 years later, most mills were still making acidic paper.

"What had happened was that the American Library Association, every preservation department, all knew about this and it came up at every conference," Ms. Goldsmith said. "It was the converted preaching to the converted." When she asked one library official why no one had spread the word, she recalled, he said: " 'This is not a sexy issue. It's such a dry issue.' I said, 'No, it's not!' I was just on fire with it."

She still sounds on fire with it. Ms. Goldsmith, who has degrees from Wellesley College (1953) and Columbia University (1957), and whose works include "Johnson v. Johnson" (1987), about the contested will of the heir to the pharmaceutical fortune, once said she wrote books out of a passion to "see that our society straightens out." Her passion for the acid-free paper crusade was evident as she recounted her early efforts during an interview in her Park Avenue apartment.

"It didn't go very fast at first because I was out there sort of by myself and nobody believed it," she said.

But by 1989, she was able to gather dozens of authors and publishers at the library to declare that from now on they would use only acid-free paper, if available, "for all first printings of quality hardcover trade books in order to preserve the printed word and safeguard our cultural heritage for future generations."

Ms. Goldsmith went to Washington with writers who included Kurt Vonnegut Jr. "We were very successful in getting legislation that all Governmental printing of any quality would be done on acid-free paper," she said. "Then it was sort of like a house of cards because that gave a lot of the mills enormous incentive to convert to acid-free paper."

Another incentive was the price of wood pulp, which rose in the mid-1980's, encouraging American mills to substitute calcium carbonate -- something that had been done in Europe a decade earlier, Ms. Goldsmith said.

These days, about 75 percent of fine paper (not including newsprint) used for printing and writing in the United States is alkaline, said Ellen McCrady, the president of Abbey Publications, which issues newsletters about paper. In 1985 the figure was about 25 percent.

Ms. Goldsmith's next goal is to educate recyclers about the acid-paper problem; in May there will be a conference at the library dedicated to that issue. Ms. Goldsmith said she thought many recyclers did not understand that the acid they sometimes add in recycling pollutes.

"They think they're doing something wonderful, they're saving the forests," she said. "But it's a Catch-22, because if you're not cutting down trees but you're polluting the streams and air, you don't want to do that, either."

While the crusade continues, the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation Laboratory pursues its work deep in the library's basement, where bouldered walls reveal remnants of the reservoir that stood on the site more than a century ago.

She endowed the lab in 1988 with $1 million from a foundation that bears her name -- money inherited from her father, Joseph I. Lubin, the son of a poor immigrant family who went on to become board chairman of the Pepsi-Cola Company. Since then, the lab has received two Federal grants of $2 million each. Most of its work consists of microfilming.

"I'm not against microfilming," Ms. Goldsmith mused. "It's just that I don't want the book to become an artifact. I don't want to put my grandchild on my knee and read her 'Wind in the Willows' at some computer screen."

Photo: Barbara Goldsmith in the preservation lab at the New York Public Library with a parchment page from a Renaissance book depicting the Last Judgment. The inks have deteriorated, and the gold is tarnished. (Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times)
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