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

Rider had successfully found and cultivated their fear, fear of the demon Growth that was alive in the stacks, doubling relentlessly, a monstrous exploding pustule of cellulose. The only reason there wasn’t more actual damage done to research collections as a result of The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library is that Microcards were so obviously inadequate to the demands of the scholarly eye and mind that the hundred-percent-space-saving swap-out couldn’t proceed as its promoter envisioned.

Fremont Rider’s enduring achievement was to convince the heads of research libraries that it was somehow embarrassing to add more low-cost storage space. Any outlay, no matter how lavish (and the act of microfilming a little-used book is, and has always been, at least twenty times more costly than the act of putting it in storage), seemed preferable to the face-loss of having to rent an old building and set up ranks of shelves in it. Book-storage warehouses were, Rider told his quaking readers, “not ‘solutions’ of the growth problem, but simply ‘confessions of avoidance’ ”—which is like saying that it is a confession of avoidance to buy new shoes for your child because he or she is sure to outgrow them. They were determined foot-binders, this crew — Metcalf at Harvard, Tate at the National Archives and MIT, Wagman from Michigan, Babb from Yale, Raney and Fussler from the University of Chicago — men who were pledged, in spite of every setback, to bring the costs of mass-microfilming down to the parity point of new construction, so that their Mr. Fixit hungers, their joy in lenses and basement darkrooms and hand cranks and developing fluids, would seem to be the result of the soberest, the most parsimoniously conservative calculations.

Foremost among these determined cost-reducers was Rider’s friend and ally 1 1Verner Clapp at the Library of Congress. Rider was harmless, in a way: his ideas were deranged, but he seems to have been slow in applying them to Wesleyan’s collections. (He did, however, perform what he called a “full cropping” 2 2on some wide-margined Wesleyan books, slicing off their tops, bottoms, and fore-edges — cover-boards and all—“so as not to store forever a lot of accompanying waste paper.”) Verner Clapp, on the other hand, spent more than thirty years at the Library of Congress, serving under four different chief librarians, and the impetuously technophilic decisions he and other managers made there have done irreversible damage to what was once our library of last resort. Rider barked, Clapp bit.

Clapp’s book The Future of the Research Library (1964) begins with a respectful tribute:

As World War II drew to a close, Fremont Rider, at that time the librarian of Wesleyan University, threw a bombshell into the library world by his demonstration of the exponential growth of research library collections…. But Rider, ever a constructive critic, provided along with his prophecy of doom a gospel of salvation: the research library of the future, he foresaw, would consist of microtext.

Clapp believed in this gospel; after he left the Library of Congress to launch the Council on Library Resources, he contracted with the Microcard Corporation to create an improved, portable micro-viewer, and he funded the first scientific journal to be published exclusively in a micro-format— Wildlife Disease. 3 3 The viewer-development program was a failure, but the prototypes, notably a tripod-mounted model with a segmented, insectoid abdomen and a staring monocle of an eye, are fine examples of late-fifties futurism. In the Council’s annual report for 1959, Clapp includes a section on “The Problem of Size” 4 4that contained up-leaping growth graphs based largely on Rider’s errant statistics of fifteen years earlier. Like Rider, Clapp was a man of wide reading and humanistic polish — he studied Herodotus in the original and wanted people to know it, and he thought that C. P. Snow’s division between the two cultures was “baloney, baloney, 5 5thorough baloney”—but his attitude toward old books (except the obviously valuable items in rare-book rooms) was marked at times by a puzzling vehemence, as in this description of a visit to a small-town library:

After numerous inquiries

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we find someone who knows where the public library is, and we visit it. Dingy, dreary, dogeared and dead! Stupid people and stupid books that no one reads, that no one should read!

The persistence of this dingy paper patrimony troubled Clapp: “The world’s population 7 7is laid to rest each generation; the world’s books have a way of lingering on,” he writes. How can we “extract profit and usefulness from this inheritance of the past,” he goes on to inquire, and yet at the same time “prevent it from clogging the channels of the present”? How can libraries, in other words, maintain the self-sufficiency that is essential for scholarly exactitude, without actually putting up more shelves?

“Massive dissemination 8 8in microfacsimile”—that’s how. Microfilm is compact and clean, as fresh as only plastic can be (at least initially). Clapp’s fantasy of institutional transformation was a variation on Rider’s idea of making money by throwing books away — if you reduced the cost of creating and distributing microcopies and at the same time made them easier to use, then “the storage library would 9 9no longer hold much meaning.” Groups of cooperating libraries would, once a decade, agree upon a corpus of “lesser-used books 10 10to be retired to microtext.” The mass retirements would be sufficient to hold each collection fixed at “whatever millions of original volumes the future shows to be optimum for a research library.” Growth — exponential, geometrical, even linear — would stop altogether. The size problem would be solved. Clapp worries in passing about the researcher’s inability to stand and browse a comprehensively microfilmed collection, but he thinks, happy man, that better cataloging would somehow compensate for this difficulty.

Warren Haas, who assumed the presidency of the Council on Library Resources in the seventies, described Clapp to me as “bubbling” and “full of beans.” Deanna Marcum, the current president of the (renamed and substantially repurposed) Council on Library and Information Resources, has written that Clapp “loved gadgets, 11 11and was forever thinking about what could be invented to make library jobs more efficient or streamlined.” Clapp was looking for “solutions to the problems 12 12of libraries”; and in his search he had help from his board of directors — a group that included some extremely bright war scientists and CIA consultants.

Warren Weaver 13 13was one of the Council’s founding board members. He had been chief of the Applied Mathematics Panel during World War II, performing the ballistics computations necessary to create machines that shot down planes with the help of radar (work known as “fire control” 14 14); this war effort led Weaver to the nascent field of Operations Research (OR), which endeavored to calculate, with the help of glittering curlicues of equations superimposed on a gaunt gray skeleton of simplifying assumptions, the least costly way to transport troops, position anti-aircraft guns, or bomb cities. Weaver was also interested in the statistical mathematics of human communication and the possibility of machine translation — and from there it was only a hop and a skip to the Council on Library Resources. (It didn’t hurt, either, that Weaver was a vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, which had paid for much of the early work of newspaper microfilming at Harvard and the Library of Congress.)