Reading thin paper books tip

Perhaps this is well known and I was just ignorant. Some Library of America books can be difficult to read because you can see the text from the back side as well as the next page mixing with your text. What I do is place a thin black plastic card behind the page I am reading and that makes it so much better. I used a black plastic cover from an old journal. Anyway, stow this away in your mind if you have some tissue paper thin page books to read.

I've found that my LOA books (about 30) do not "bleed through" despite the very thin paper. I know that LOA have used different printers and different paper stock over the years, and so I'm curious: have you found this with many LOA editions, or certain volumes? I wonder if this is a characteristic of a certain era in terms of publishing.

Of course it may simply be that different eyes are distracted by different things, and I don't notice this particular aspect of LOA books.

If I look carefully, I can sometimes observe some bleeding through, but not enough to notice before this thread. :-)

I’ve also read the thread regarding the challenge of getting paper that is thin but properly opaque. I think it is a trade off and some volumes suffer more than others. If I were to guess, I’d say the more recently printed volumes are more likely to have the issue. Lighting conditions can help, but a simple black page behind the page still helps a lot.

Maybe it’s worth complaining to David of LOA or customer service. They will only change if they get enough complaint. Quiet worrying that they might have changed to a cheaper or thinner paper for their books.