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

There have been reforms at the Library of Congress since the late 1980s. Decision trees and definitions of “serviceable” in reference to book stock have evolved considerably, I’m told — now the library supposedly keeps almost everything. Or rather, everything that has been allowed to become part of its collections; everything processed for retention, cataloged, and shelved. For, in fact, librarians reject and discard a huge mass of books that the library is given, free, by publishers every year (as the national library, the one library to have this privilege, they should be shelving everything 17they are sent); the only items that the library is required by law to store in perpetuity, oddly enough, are unpublished but formally copyrighted manuscripts. Anything published they can discard at any time. (“I am happy to announce 18that the Copyright Discard project is going very well, and all of your efforts are most appreciated,” one recent internal memo began; the question was whether a certain class of material should go in the “regular Discard tub” or the copyright-discard tub.) And the library doesn’t necessarily keep its second copies, either; one notable duplicate they deaccessioned some years ago was one of five known copies of an interim edition of Finnegans Wake 19 from the twenties; the library bartered it for ten thousand dollars’ worth of fine press books.

A great research library must keep its duplicates, even its triplicates, for a number of reasons, the most basic ones being that books become worn with use, lost, stolen, or misshelved. 20(A recent survey 21of nineteenth-century American books at the Library of Congress found that “the number of Not on Shelf, misshelved, and missing books is alarming.”) Curious, I searched, on May 18, 2000, for phrases like “Surplus Library of Congress” and “Library of Congress Duplicate” on Bibliofind and turned up these: a rare printing of Henry Adams’s A Radical Indictment! (1872) for sale for $2,000; a very fragile Hebrew grammar by John Smith published in 1803, with early ownership signatures on front and rear pastedowns (and a Library of Congress duplicate release stamp on the verso of the title page), for sale for $295; Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (1979), with an introduction by Milos Forman, rubber-stamped as a Library of Congress duplicate and for sale for $500; two volumes called Chosen Kobunka Sokan by Sueji Umehara, with approximately one hundred plates and an LC surplus stamp, for sale for $650; an anonymous 1881 book titled Ploughed Under; the Story of an Indian Chief, written with the assistance of “Bright Eyes,” a.k.a. Susette La Flesche Tibbles, a full-blooded Omaha Indian, stamped “Library of Congress Surplus Duplicate” and spine-labeled “Reserve Storage Collection,” for sale for $450; a children’s book from 1861 by Jane Andrews called The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air, with eight illustrations (described as “a Library of Congress duplicate surplus”), for sale for $150; an 1831 edition of The Federalist, on the New Constitution, by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, with a duplicate stamp on the first flyleaf, for sale for $400; E. H. Barton’s Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever, inscribed by the author to the Smithsonian Library in October 1858, with a Library of Congress release stamp on the first flyleaf, for sale for $450; and a book called The Army of the Potomac by Major General George McClellan, published in 1863, inscribed by McClellan to “His Excellency, General Count von Moltke, Chief of Staff etc etc with the sincere respect of George McClellan, Jun/69,” with a Library of Congress duplicate stamp on the copyright page, for sale for $12,500.

The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, requires federal agencies to disclose to the public, and to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, any plans that would affect districts, sites, buildings, or “objects” that are on the National Register of Historic Sites or that meet the register’s criteria for inclusion. One of the criteria is that the building or object has “yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history.” No better description of a library collection could be had, and yet nobody as far as I know has tried to apply this law to the Library of Congress’s collection (although the library’s Jefferson building is on the National Register); no other law sets limits on what the library can or can’t do to, say, its surviving newspapers, or to its decks of books and periodicals. If the library’s management wanted to reduce their original holdings by one third over the next several years, they could do so without holding a single public hearing; and the library has not in the past felt any obligation to alert the public to what they are planning to micro-mutilate or to sell off. It is a strangely secretive place, underscrutinized by comparison with other federal bureaucracies, its maladministration undetected by virtue of its reputation as an ark of culture. The library has gone astray partly because we trusted the librarians so completely.

I asked Diane Kresh, head of the Preservation Directorate, whether there were any decisions that, with benefit of hindsight, she wished had gone differently. Any pieces of the collection that she would have liked to have seen retained that weren’t?

“As far as I’m aware, everything we’ve acquired we’ve retained, at least in my tenure here,” Kresh answered. What about serials, I asked — bound newspapers and journals and magazines? She said that the library had maintained the newspapers — they were just maintained on film. I don’t doubt Kresh’s sincere belief in the equivalence of microcopies and originals, but if a cop was told that some missing diamonds were still on display in the museum, they were just “maintained” as cubic zirconiums, the cop might arrive at a slightly different interpretation of the event. “I feel even with the newspaper example I’m comfortable with the decision,” Kresh told me. “And as for other collections, I’m not aware of any that we’ve gotten rid of.”

Kresh could so easily have said, “Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of books that we had that we should not have pulped after we filmed them. Their destruction was totally unnecessary and motivated in large part by a need for space.” And she could have added, “As a matter of fact, there is currently a dire space crunch in both the Jefferson and Madison buildings — we’ve got stuff piled on the floors, it’s a mess — and we’re getting rid of things right now that we would probably keep if we were willing to rent another warehouse to tide us over until our remote-storage facility in Fort Meade is finished.” Of course, Kresh is loyal to her employer and wouldn’t say anything like that; I shouldn’t have expected her to. But it would be true.

The chief of the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress, Irene Schubert, contributed to an electronic discussion group a few years ago. In a case where some of a periodical’s run is brittle and some is not, Schubert wrote, the library would consider tossing it all out anyway: “Space is always a problem 01it seems, so we may get some encouragement to microfilm the entire run and discard the paper copies.”

I asked, ahead of time, to interview Irene Schubert as part of an appointed visit to the Library of Congress’s Madison building one afternoon. Diane Kresh told me that Schubert was unavailable. “If you have any issues,” she said, “you can give them to me.”

Kresh did, however, take me on a complete circuit of the library’s renowned conservation lab, which I hadn’t asked to see but was of course very glad to admire nonetheless. (“I wanted to start the tour by saying that we have the premier lab in the world,” said Kresh flatly.) The full-bearded senior rare-book conservator, Thomas Albro, was working on an elegant box for a fifteenth-century edition of Ptolemy’s Geography that he had just finished restoring. He had disbound the book, which was “inoperable” as a result of a bad rebinding in the nineteenth century—“shoddy work,” he said — and he had washed the paper to remove yellowed sizing (sizing is the layer of gelatin that papermakers used to keep inks from soaking in and spreading, or “feathering”), and he had beautifully rebound this treasure in pale leather. Elsewhere, I saw very old Japanese softcover books for which a staff member was making lovely cases with bone fasteners. One conservator was worrying about what to do about some yellowed Wite-Out on one of Bill Mauldin’s original drawings. Mauldin, a political cartoonist, published some of his work in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. The Library of Congress once had a run of Stars and Stripes; it has microfilm now. Nonetheless, Mauldin’s art is getting the most exquisite restoration treatment imaginable.