Nicholson Baker: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

“I do,” she said. “I’ve seen bound newspapers that have become so embrittled that they can’t be used. They are still intact — things aren’t falling on the floor. But you can’t open them, and you can’t turn the page.”

So the library got rid of the newspapers because of their condition, not because of space requirements? Or was it some combination?

“Oh, no, it wouldn’t be the space,” said Kresh. “It’s the inherent vice of deteriorating paper, and particularly newsprint.”

But it was the space, unquestionably. The Library of Congress once owned the Chicago Tribune, The Detroit News, the New York Forward, and The New York Times in rag-paper library editions 43—printed, in other words, on stock that is significantly stronger than practically all book paper of the twentieth century. The library banished these titles anyway. Charles La Hood, the library’s chief of photoduplication in the seventies, wrote: “Microfilming came at a propitious time, 44as the Library of Congress was experiencing an acute space problem in its newspaper collection.”

When I pointed out to Kresh that ex-Library of Congress newspapers find avid buyers every day, and thus could not be nearly as decrepit as she was implying, Kresh admitted that “there is, obviously, ultimately a storage issue.”

Why, one wants querulously to ask, is our national library so often in the throes of a space crisis? (In 1997, the library’s Working Group on Reference and Research described “a crisis of space, 45in particular in general collections stacks.”) A year of a daily paper would fill fifty-two volumes and occupy less than half the Barbie aisle in a Toys “R” Us. Compared with the sort of human artifacts that the Smithsonian Institution must store (locomotives, dynamos, space capsules), or those that the National Trust for Historic Preservation is entrusted to protect (office buildings, battlefields, neighborhoods), newspapers and books are marvelously compact. Lack of money isn’t the problem. The library has spent huge sums on microfilming, and its preservation budget is more than eleven million dollars a year — enough to buy, build, and outfit a warehouse the size of a Home Depot, which would hold a century of newsprint. Are the library’s senior managers really so grotesquely inept that they can’t plan for the inevitable growth of the single most important hoard of human knowledge in the country? Why is it so difficult for this great research institution to do what any steadily growing concern — a successful pet-food discounter, say, or a distributor of auto parts, or a museum of sculpture — manages to do year after year, without fuss? Why can’t our great libraries have the will to find room to accommodate what we so desperately want them to keep?

I asked James Billington, 46the current librarian of Congress, what he thought about making room for original papers. Billington, a Russian historian who was, in the fifties, a CIA analyst under Allen Dulles, has raised large quantities of private money to pay for the library’s American Memory digitization project. “The embrittlement process is not just a question of degrading — these things disintegrate,” Billington said. “There’s always a trade-off. The happiness and satisfaction of seeing the whole thing in the original is a short-lived privilege for today’s audience. It’s likely to be, in the real world, at the expense of the variety and richness of what future generations will be able to see in the microfilm version.”

Inherent vice indeed. Everything goes wrong in time — the germane question is whether the Library of Congress, and the many institutions that followed its example, got rid of things that were, at the time of their jettisoning, both usable and valuable. I bought, on eBay, a 1908 volume of the Panama City Star and Herald (published in English during the building of the Panama Canal); it has the Library of Congress’s oval stamp on the spine. From a dealer, I bought a volume of the New York Post for April 1943, also spine-stamped by the Library of Congress. From another dealer, I bought three issues of the Richmond, Virginia, Daily Dispatch 1 from 1879, printed on very strong paper made of straw and rag, each bearing a tiny yellow Library of Congress address label. The issue for Tuesday, June 10, 1879, has this in its editorial columns: “We are pressed for room just now. Do not imagine that your article has been thrown into the waste-basket, (though it may have been.) Some communications keep well. We have several such on hand. We hope to be able to publish them soon.” All these objects are in excellent fettle; they can be opened and page-turned with impunity.

I also have a volume of the New York World-Telegram from February 1934. This one has no ownership markings on it, but its marbled boards and triangular cloth corners and spinal typeface resemble those shown in a photo in a 1966 picture book called The Library of Congress. In the photo, a man wearing what looks to be a butcher’s apron 2is cutting apart a newspaper volume at a worktable; behind him is an electric guillotine. The caption reads: “Because single sheets are reproduced more quickly and accurately than bound pages, this bindery employee is taking apart newspaper volumes that are to be photographed as part of the Library’s program to preserve most of its newspaper files on microfilm.”

Timothy Hughes, who sold me the volume of the World-Telegram (for $125) couldn’t say for sure where he got it. “It possibly came from the Library of Congress — I buy from a variety of sources and even my sources get them from various people — [the items] often get passed down to 3 or 4 dealers before they end up in my hands, so who knows where they originally came from.” According to Winifred Gregory’s pre-war compendium, American Newspapers 1821–1936, there were six libraries that, as of 1936, owned up-to-date bound runs of the World-Telegram, which was the leading liberal New York City paper of the time. (The Herald Tribune was by reputation conservative; the Times was moderate.) These libraries were: the New York Public Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, the Union City (N.J.) Public Library, the Ohio Historical Society, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. All have since ditched their World-Telegram s. The Library of Congress’s catalog card for the World-Telegram says NO LONGER IN LC and ALL ON FILM.

Could this volume be described as crumbling? Its pages have yellowed, especially at the outer margins, where light and air have penetrated, but they are whole and sound — no bits and pieces fall out when you carry it around, and it survived the rigors of UPS GroundTrac shipping without mishap. You can open this magnificent public diary without harming it; you can turn its pages without trouble; you can peruse it with a moment’s pleasure or a day’s fascination. Joseph Mitchell, 3who was already freelancing at The New Yorker, writes about the arrival of Emma Goldman in the United States after her years of exile. “The anarchist 4wore a snakeskin print dress and a Paisley shawl,” he writes — and the photo confirms it. A. J. Liebling, another World-Telegram writer, gets a color quote from a cabbie while covering a violent taxi strike: “I come first. The customer comes second, and I don’t care if you miss your train, mister.” Heywood Broun prints a letter he got from Robert Benchley. Gretta Palmer, on the woman’s page, says that the speakeasy ended the male-only bar, but that segregation is returning: “Don’t the men like us any more now that their judgement is unclouded by the gasoline in the old-fashioned gin?” In a sports section, a huge cartoon has Robert Moses, the new parks commissioner, hitting a hole in one, because he has promised to spruce up the city’s golf courses. And on February 22 there is a nice anonymous lead — maybe by Liebling again? — on page one: “Miss Florence La Bau, an alumna of Goucher College and Columbia University, a young woman of wealth and social position in Ridgewood, N.J., was doing a fourth mate’s job on the freighter Wichita when the ship plodded into port today with a cargo of human hair from China, tea from Formosa, silk from Japan, sugar from the Philippines and two strange bears from the mystery land of Tibet.” Reading a paper like this is not the only way to understand the lost past life of a city, but no other way will enclose you so completely within one time-stratum’s universe of miscellaneous possibility. Nothing makes an amateur historian of you with more dispatch.