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

In an article in a 1940 issue of the Journal of Documentary Reproduction, Llewellyn Raney provided an early hint of developments to come: he coyly described a dinner at the Cosmos Club in Washington, where “a couple of curious librarians 2and a Foundation scout” discussed with some microphotography experts the economics of book storage versus “miniature reproduction.” The question was whether “discarding might introduce a new economy”:

If the volumes in question could be abandoned afterward, then the bindings might be removed and the books reduced to loose sheets in case anything were gained by this course. Gain there would be, because sheets could be fed down the chute to a rotary camera glimpsing both sides at once far more rapidly than the open volume on a cradle by successive turning of the leaves.

Not only would the microfilm’s images look better — the activity would be cheaper. “So ended an intriguing night out,” wrote Raney. “The participants are of a mind to repeat it — often.”

A few years later, Fremont Rider had a revelation. He conceived of a kind of bibliographical perpetual-motion machine: a book-conversion plan that would operate at a profit. In 1953, he described it as follows:

Every research library would

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actually save money if it absolutely threw away almost all of the volumes now lying on its shelves — volumes which it has already bought, bound and cataloged, and would save money even if it had to pay out cold cash to acquire microtextual copies of them to replace them! This is the startling fact which most librarians are not yet really aware of.

Assume, Rider goes on to say, that each discarded volume would have a salvage value of two dollars. Out of that income, the library would pay for the book’s microtext replacement, house the microtext in perpetuity, and derive, besides, “an actual cash profit on the substitution.” He writes: “If there was ever a case in library technology of having one’s cake and eating it too this substitution of microtext books for salvageable bookform books would seem to be it!”

A cash profit— sounds mighty good. Miles O. Price, then the director of Columbia’s library, said in the discussion that followed this presentation that he has “long been a microtext enthusiast.” But (and this is where I got my comment to Michael Lesk about the collapse of the used-book market) he quibbled with the cost analysis: “Discarded material will have low salvage value because of the number of libraries which will be discarding.” James T. Babb 4of Yale “felt the need for the physical book to exist somewhere in the Northeast,” but he thought that the need would decrease. According to the synopsis of the discussion, only one library manager that day reacted with anything like revulsion or outrage at Rider’s plan. Charles David, head of the University of Pennsylvania’s library, found the economic analysis “exasperating” and questioned its soundness. He said that it was an “invitation to librarians to destroy books by the millions.”

And that is what it was. Fremont Rider was a giant of twentieth-century librarianship; his erratic career repays study. He had a persuasive and colorful prose style, and his poems (a number of which he published in his autobiography) have a certain sorrowful throb:

Roses, jasmine,

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Frankincense, myrrh—

Grey death dust

In the soul’s sepulchre.

(Read it slowly, Rider recommends.) At Syracuse University, he edited the Onondagan —this was back in 1905, when they still had their run of the Syracuse Daily Standard —then he went to library school in Albany, where Melvil Dewey (whose biography Rider later wrote) hired him as a secretary. But Dewey’s adjustments to the decimal system couldn’t hold Rider’s attention, and by 1907 he was in New York turning out pulp mystery stories and, very briefly, headlines for Hearst’s yellow-pennanted flagship, the New York American. For The Delineator (a magazine edited by Theodore Dreiser) he produced a series of pieces on spirit rappings, levitation, astral bodies, multiple personalities, and other phenomena that have “converted to psychism 6the greatest scientists of Europe, and are now creating widespread comment in every intelligent center of the globe.” These were collected in his first book, Are the Dead Alive? It isn’t an entirely dispassionate work: “the fact that tables and other articles of furniture do under certain conditions move, apparently of their own accord, must be admitted as established. ” (Rider was a fervent italicizer.)

Soon he was writing guidebooks to Bermuda, California, and New York; he was managing editor of Library Journal and Publishers Weekly for a while; he founded a company that did the printing work for R. R. Bowker; he started a monthly magazine called Information and one called The International Military Digest. He began to make money in Florida real estate.

Then came an apparent manic episode, followed by crisis and collapse. Rider bought a Vanderbilt estate, Idlehour, on the south shore of Long Island, and spent several hundred thousand dollars fixing it up as a self-help college and “vacation hotel-club.” Promoters sold life memberships in the club, but because (as Rider tells it) he refused to operate it as a speakeasy, nobody came, and he declared bankruptcy in 1929. But in 1932 he rose from the dead with a powerful (although pseudonymous) pamphlet called “Are Our Banks Betraying Us?” In it, possibly conscious of his own reduced financial position, he called for a moratorium on the payment of mortgages, and he said that people are “deeply and dangerously embittered.”

They are thoroughly disgusted

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and disappointed with the present “system,” not merely because their fingers have been burned, but because they realize perfectly well that, in many cases, the burning was neither just nor justified. They want a “new deal.”

The pamphlet produced, according to Rider, an “astonishing flood 8of enthusiastic approval.” He mailed a copy to Franklin Roosevelt; Roosevelt shot off a thank-you letter that ended, handwritten, “You are right! 9Keep it up!” This was two months before Roosevelt’s first use of the phrase “new deal” in his nomination speech.

In 1933, needing steady money, Rider accepted the librarianship of Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, his native city. He began a system 10of buying books in bulk and selling off the discards. Though a bankrupt himself, he did wonderful things for the library’s finances, and he wrote a “Study of Library Cost Accounting” that, in his words, “enkindled” the profession. But his great work, his extraordinary New Deal for librarians, came in 1944: The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library, handsomely self-published, as most of his books were. Rider had discovered a “mathematical fact,” 11almost a “natural law” 12of library growth, which is that over the past three centuries library collections have doubled every sixteen years. Rider devotes a page to an elongated graph plotting collection size against years — the “parabolic” trend lines zoom up to near verticality. The chart of this “veritable tidal wave 13of printed materials” would make anyone in charge of a library bolt for high ground. We confront, Rider says, far more than a library problem: “It is a problem 14—and a problem to the n th degree complex and baffling — of civilization itself.” How can we respond, when “mere palliatives are going to be utterly ineffective”?

We absolutely

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analyze our whole problem from entirely fresh viewpoints, and must endeavor to find, in one direction or another, sweepingly new solutions for it.