It has been recognized for many years that the application of heat to skin materials such as leather and vellum may have advantages as a means of removing mildew and fungus. Specifically, it might facilitate cleaning without recourse to solvents and abrasion. Unfortunately, if leather or vellum is homogeneously raised to a sufficiently high temperature for cleaning, irreversible changes to the material are unavoidable. However, the emergence of numerous types of pulsed lasers in the last decade has provided a precise means delivering energy to an arbitrarily thin surface layer of almost any material. Consequently, we have explored a wide variety of laser-beam parameter variations in order to investigate the effects of transient surface heating on the removal of mildew and fungus from leather and vellum materials in the Mandeville Collection at UCSD. Conditions have been identified where no more than one or two pulses are required to clean the surface without detectable damage to the leather. Several embossed and gilt leather book spines have now been completely cleaned with the laser technique. SEM analyses were employed to characterize the surfaces both before and after cleaning.