"Guillotining books is unnecessary in order to acquire a good image". I don't know. I remember fondly a copier with a rounded screen at some university library years ago (University of Colorado?) where one could plunk down a bound volume and get a good copy without damaging the spine. I did foolishly buy a book--specially ordered--which turned out to have been printed from page images taken by copying on a flat-platen copier. Better than fifty percent of the pages lost anything from a letter to several letters in the "gutter".

"based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust". Some are, some aren't. Some years back my parents shipped me the set of Mark Twain I had read as a boy. An awful lot of the pages were falling apart. Perhaps our family hadn't protected them well enough from light and air--but it's hard to see how one can read a book without exposure to both.

We recycle probably 10" of newspapers--The Washington Post and The New York Times--ever week. In the days before the newspapers lost all the revenue from classified ads, it would have been twice that. So a year of a big metropolitan paper from the 1990s could amount to forty feet of newspaper. That's a fair bit to make room for. I have some sympathy for the librarians there.