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

Then it came time to relocate all those brittle books to high-density, low-cost housing. (In a later era, some stack areas in the Library of Congress’s Jefferson building were reportedly known as “the slums.” 7) The library hired Frazer G. Poole 8as preservation officer; Poole had a degree in aerological engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy (aerology, in Navy parlance, is the study of flying weather; the usage dates back to dirigibles) and eight years of experience directing the Library Technology Project of the American Library Association, where, at Clapp’s suggestion 9and with Clapp’s money, Poole developed performance standards for commercial bookbinding — which may be the reason that the Library of Congress did so much indiscriminate rebinding 10in those days. In 1968, Poole created a Preservation Office, whence blossomed the Preservation Microfilming Office (PMO), which filmed ninety-three million pages (three hundred thousand non-newspaper volumes 11) betweeen 1968 and 1984. In the eighties, the PMO had a staff of nineteen; they were transfiguring two hundred thousand guillotined pages per week. All of this material was pronounced “embrittled to the extent 12that it was no longer serviceable.” We’ll never know what “no longer serviceable” means, because the vast majority of those books are gone. One of the PMO’s managers explained the eventual disposition of these three hundred thousand items:

The volumes are cut,

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filmed by the Photoduplication Services, and the negative and positive copies are edited. All volumes, except those unique titles to be retained after filming, are sent to the Exchange and Gift Division. If the material is not claimed by interested institutions, it is pulped.

We are, wrote Deputy Librarian of Congress William Welsh in 1985, “running our cameras against the clock 14in the race to save as much as possible.”

How many institutions, as a practical matter, are going to claim books that have been cut out of their bindings? Individual citizens might want mutilated books, but they weren’t allowed to have them, according to Joanna Biggar, 15who wrote a 1984 article for The Washington Post Magazine, “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books to Save Them?” The article, by identifying a few of those three hundred thousand volumes referred to by the head of the PMO, makes clear what did and what didn’t qualify as a “unique title” in the Library’s thinking in that era.

Biggar describes an illustrated 1909 book, Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun: A Record of Pioneer Exploration and Mountaineering in the Punjab Himalaya, by an explorer named Fanny Workman. The Library of Congress guillotined and filmed it in 1975; when a researcher who had recently used the book requested the disbound remains, she was told that the library wasn’t allowed to transfer books to individuals. The Preservation Microfilming Office wouldn’t let her take even the map. Fanny Workman’s book, with its ninety-some illustrations, went to a Baltimore pulpery. Last time I checked on Bibliofind, on April 20, 2000, there were two copies of Fanny Workman’s Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun for sale. One, “slightly rubbed and worn” and recased with new endpapers, was going for $2,200; the other, “slightly spotted” but crisp, for $2,400.

Assuming, conservatively, that the books the Library of Congress got rid of have a replacement value of forty dollars apiece (some would be worth less, some a great deal more), and assuming (generously) that the library kept ten percent of the originals after filming them, the Preservation Microfilming Office threw out more than ten million dollars’ worth of public property between 1968 and 1984.

Spring-balanced book cradles, which hold bound books open evenly under a camera without cracking their spines, have been around since the thirties. Gutter shadow isn’t as dark and deep in books as it is in newspaper volumes, because books aren’t as thick, and their margins are usually wider. Very few of those three hundred thousand volumes would have had to be terminated in order to be “preserved,” except that the PMO’s mandate was to condense efficiently, per Verner Clapp’s cost-estimating subcontractors. A 1987 Library of Congress Discussion Document titled “Preservation Selection Decisions,” written by Ricky Erway, then of the Planning Office, includes a list of pros and cons to “keeping the material in its original format.” One of the cons is “no space savings.” If you keep the original but microfilm it in order to reduce the risk of damage to it, Erway points out, you actually provide “negative space savings.” (Meaning that you must store the boxes of microfilm, too.) Erway also writes: “To save space, it is beneficial to transfer to a new format those materials which can then be discarded or can at least be stored offsite.” The “primary solution” for brittle books, according to Erway’s paper, was “Discard original.”

In turning over this document — and it took me more than four months to extract it from the library, after I saw it mentioned in a UNESCO report on methods of library preservation — the head of the library’s Office Systems Services and Records Office wanted me to know (1) that the Library of Congress is not bound by the Freedom of Information Act, 16(2) that the report “was never shared broadly within the Library,” and (3) that its recommendations “never became Library policy.” Oh, and another thing: “The report you are requesting is not of record at the Library of Congress.” Ricky Erway herself now works at the Research Libraries Group; when I called her, she was kind enough to fax a copy of “Preservation Selection Decisions” to her former employer so that they could send it to me, since they seemed to be unable to locate it on their own. The document is, Erway says, “an artifact of its time”; when she looked it over recently, though, she thought, “Well, this seems pretty rational to me.”

A year after Erway submitted her report, the new librarian of Congress, James Billington, dropped in on the library’s Cataloging-in-Publication division, where he said a friendly hello to a publishers’ liaison named Victoria Boucher. Boucher and Billington chatted for a moment, and then she brought up what was on her mind: the library was destroying books and calling it preservation. Knowing Billington’s interests, she mentioned the loss of pre-Revolutionary Russian works in good condition. Billington seemed, as Boucher recalled afterward, “annoyed and embarrassed.” She asked him if he’d yet been into the stacks (where books had slips in them marking them for microfilming), and he said he hadn’t. When Billington left, the head of the department snapped at Boucher, “I’m glad he has you to tell him how to run a library!”

Boucher also went to the library’s European Division and protested the sacrificial microfilming; she was told that she was “preaching to the choir.” Eventually she had a talk with the head of the Preservation Microfilming Office at the time, Bohdan Yasinsky. Yasinsky reassured her, saying that people from Rare Books see the books before they are destroyed and have a chance to save them. “Quite a few people feel the way you do,” Yasinsky told Boucher. “I am known as ‘the butcher of books.’ ” The Library of Congress wasn’t really a lending library, he said, so it didn’t matter whether books remained in portable form. Boucher asked him if there had been any complaints from members of Congress (who can take books out); he said that there hadn’t been. He fixed her with a basilisk gaze, according to Boucher, and said, “They know it won’t do them any good anyway.” When I telephoned Yasinsky (who is now a Ukranian specialist at the library), he promptly confirmed the butcher-of-books epithet. There were those, he said, who were “very skeptical” when he told them that he had to cut a book in order to film it. Yasinsky attributed their unhappiness to “nostalgia.”