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

Kelly and Williams retired from the library — Kelly went back to consult for his old company, FMC (which had bought Westvaco), and Williams took a job working on artillery propellants for Armtec, a defense contractor in California. Ideally, that would have been the end of diethyl-zinc deacidification forever. But the process found a new and ardent friend in Peter Sparks, the aptly named head of the library’s Preservation Directorate, who arrived in 1981.

Sparks took up the organometallic cause, began feeding quoteworthy quarter-truths to the press, and succeeded in extracting millions more in deacidificational funding from Congress. He and the librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, liked big, round numbers; Sparks told a writer for the Associated Press that a diethyl-zinc treatment would add “400 to 600 years” 08to the life of a book. He showed off a guillotined copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus to reporters and claimed that seventy-seven thousand books a year go brittle at the Library of Congress. (The Library of Congress had fun with Carlyle, microfilming eight separate old editions of Sartor Resartus, three editions of his Life of Schiller, Lecky’s edition of his French Revolution, and a shelfload more.) The New York Times believed Sparks in 1984 (why shouldn’t they?): “The pages of at least five million volumes 09now crumble at the touch of a finger, simply because daily exposure to the elements has turned them brittle. Every year 77,000 more volumes are affected.” Sparks was “a very good marketing person,” Chandru Shahani told me. “He was, I think, too good a salesperson, so he sold this with a lot of promises when the process wasn’t ready. He hadn’t really anticipated the problems.” Daniel Boorstin authoritatively backed up Sparks’s salesmanship, too: the same New York Times article quoted Boorstin as saying that the diethyl-zinc process was “one of the most important steps toward the preservation of knowledge around the world…. It would be hard to overstate its significance.”

As for safety, not to worry, the “handling of diethyl zinc 10by trained operators has been reduced to a routine matter,” according to the library’s Information Bulletin. Daniel Boorstin wrote a letter to Congress assuring them that there were “no known safety risks 11to personnel or books with the Library of Congress’ process.”

Once funding was secured, an idle vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, conveniently located in suburban Washington, D.C., became the center of testing operations. In 1982, the library (through NASA) hired Northrup Services to draw up plans and operating procedures. Several Northrup engineers went down to Texas Alkyls for an eyebrow-raising diethyl-zinc briefing. One of the engineers began to feel that the Library of Congress had not been forthcoming in its description of the hazards of the process. “Basically what you had was a huge combustion chamber,” the engineer told me. “It became patently clear to me that we were heading for trouble, because we were modifying a system that was not designed for chemical processes.” NASA’s vacuum chambers were built to simulate conditions in outer space, after all, and the engineers at Northrup Services were thermal-vacuum scientists, with no experience in the design of prototype chemical plants.

Northrup needed the work, according to the engineer; they therefore played down some of the difficulties and hazards in their pro forma presentations to NASA. “What we were told to say to [NASA’s] safety committee versus what was really going on were a little divergent,” the engineer says. And there were too many managers. The project was paid for by the Library of Congress, constructed in NASA’s buildings, employing Northrup: nobody was really in charge, and nobody really knew what they were doing. The detailed chemistry of diethyl zinc’s reactions with most of the hundreds of filler substances in old paper were undocumented. The library had never published detailed descriptions, in peer-reviewed journals, of the evolving permutations of their invasive treatment and its often discouraging experimental results. The Library of Congress planned to do something radical and irreversible to millions of its books, and yet, rather than inviting outside comment and help, they were behaving like weapons procurers 12at the Department of Defense.

The first NASA run, in November 1982, was the most ambitious one — after months of preparation, the testers loaded five thousand ex-library books into the chamber, the number they planned to treat each time when they were at full production volume. The process wasn’t particularly kind to the books, as it took almost two weeks and involved extremes of heat and cold. First, they heated the books to 113 degrees 13Fahrenheit for a few days in order to drive off most of their moisture; next, they pulled a vacuum, slowly, which caused the temperature to drop. When they were sure the air was gone, they began fogging the chamber with the necessary two to three hundred pounds of their chemical. As the reactions progressed, the chamber grew first warm, then quite hot, although it was supposedly kept “well below” 212 degrees. (It wouldn’t be at all good if the temperature rose above 250 degrees because diethyl zinc begins to decompose above that point; at pot-roast temperatures, the decomposition becomes “self-sustaining and uncontrollable,” 14and, depending on conditions and quantities, you could have a thermal explosion.)

Four thousand of the books were discards, a thousand were from the library’s shelves. For six days, in this iron lung, they underwent their hot chemotherapy. Then the technicians created another vacuum, and the temperature dropped again — but slowly: it would be bad if the books froze, because the DEZ vapor might condense on them and remain to cause trouble upon repressurization. In an effort to prolong these books’ lives, the scientists were subjecting them to conditions that mimicked a rigorous accelerated-aging experiment, minus the air — no wonder the paper sometimes tested weaker immediately after treatment.

The five-thousand-book run was not a success. (The results were “mixed,” 15according to Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment.) Analysis determined that a cloud of ethane gas had taken up position at the top of the chamber, while a cloud of heavier diethyl zinc pooled at the bottom; because the vapor was in a vacuum, there was little convectional mixing. Thus many of the stacked books 16got no deacidificational benefit, while some got too much. There were “tide marks,” darkened paper, and distasteful odors. (“Cause of odor a mystery 17since known chemistry cannot explain it,” noted the still-baffled scientists years later.) Also the library couldn’t possibly meet its stated goal of deacidifying a million books a year if each five-thousand-book run had a cycle time of two weeks — things had to move along much quicker than that. Hoping to work out the problems, the scientists made a number of much smaller tests in another NASA vacuum chamber, and then, in the spring of 1985, with funds running low and many uncertainties dangling, the library decided to abandon the prototype plant altogether and build still another, smaller pilot facility, in a different NASA building, with a rectilinear chamber this time instead of a round one, so that the DEZ gas wouldn’t idle in the waste space, and with faster pumps, so that the gas cloud would swirl turbulently around the books, reacting with all of them. There was an air of desperate haste at this stage — a NASA electrician later reported that in November 1985, “a Library of Congress representative 18tried to talk [name whited out] into running DEZ into the chamber when there were system leaks and no procedures.” The electrician stopped them by “explaining the consequences of those size leaks, but did not feel he should have been the one to do this.”