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

Welsh himself may not have known, but surely the library’s scientific staff had reviewed the plans and signed off on them many months before the black goop began to squirt? They were the process’s inventors; they’d designed the tests; they’d seen and used the hardware; they’d been driving to the Goddard vacuum-chamber sites and fine-tuning their dream for years, longer than anyone, and they claimed that they had reduced the handling of DEZ to a matter of mere routine. If Peter Sparks and his crew didn’t have the competence to evaluate the chemical-delivery system as detailed by Northrup Services ahead of time, shouldn’t they have shown the schematics to engineers who knew how to handle large volumes of extremely dangerous gases and liquids? Offering an aerospace vendor like Northrup the job of designing the diethyl-zinc plant was like asking three heart surgeons and a urologist to design an offshore drilling platform: the probability was high that they would make mistakes.

Peter Sparks was unsinkable. He transferred the project to Deer Park, Texas; the library began paying Texas Alkyls to engineer yet another plant. Library Journal protested—“It’s Time to Dump DEZ” 45was one of their editorial headlines in the fall of 1986. The editorial’s author, Karl Nyren, suggested that, like a gambling addict, the library was unable to “abandon behavior that is manifestly unfruitful.” Nyren wrote:

Sometimes it seems that there is an epidemic of “entrapment” in government: the Sergeant York gun that, after millions spent upon it, just doesn’t work; the predilection for backing the finally discredited losers in international affairs; the loss of the

Challenger.

The DEZ process belongs right alongside these failures.

Neither Congress nor the library community had been told, said Nyren, “of the preponderance of evidence for the danger and unmanageability of DEZ.” 46

William Welsh published a rebuttal 47in a later issue of Library Journal; he said that diethyl zinc “has for many years been used as a catalyst in the production of common plastics, including polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, and polyester.” Welsh does not mention that the plastics industry, when it does use DEZ 48as a so-called Ziegler-Natta catalyst in the manufacture of polyethylene and related compounds (and it has never been commonly used), uses it in tiny amounts, in diluted form, whereas the library’s preservation factory would at full capacity consume DEZ neat and by the ton. 49Not surprisingly, there is in Welsh’s reply no breath of missiles or incendiaries. Then, to further allay fears, Welsh engages in a little semantic subterfuge: “DEZ is produced 50as a liquid, and in that form is pyrophoric, i.e., it burns spontaneously when it comes in contact with the air. When used as a deacidification agent, DEZ is vaporized into a gas in a contained vacuum environment where, as a gas, it is not pyrophoric.” Whether diethyl zinc is a liquid or a gas has nothing to do with its pyrophoricity — it burns either way. And since “pyrophoric” just means “inflames on contact with air” it is highly misleading to tell librarians that it isn’t pyrophoric in a vacuum. DEZ gas is pyrophoric in a vacuum; there just doesn’t happen to be any air around to demonstrate that fact, and the danger is that there is a world of air outside the vacuum that wants to get in. “DEZ is and always will be 51pyrophoric,” Ahti Koski wrote me.

In 1988, the newly appointed librarian of Congress, James Billington, and his senior staff — William Welsh and Peter Sparks included — greeted eminent library visitors at the brand-new $2.8 million 52Texas Alkyls deacidification plant, which could handle three hundred and fifty books at a go. Curious preservation administrators peered into the yawning vacuum chamber, and saw custom-made book carts with wire spacers, and lots of purposeful plumbing, and it all looked very scientific. “I think the safety questions 53are completely resolved,” Sparks told The Washington Post in 1988. “We now know how to use this technology and this material safely. It works very well. And we’re getting ready to scale up to a major facility that will meet our needs and also be able to treat books for other libraries.”

Trusting the Sparksian sell-job, a number of universities, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, began sending batches of books to Texas for treatment at a cost of about ten dollars a book. But although the engineering was much better this time, the process itself failed. In 1991, Robert J. Milevski, who was then the preservation librarian at Johns Hopkins, found, on examining books that he had sent to Texas, that the effects of treatment “were so startling 54that I had to wonder why these results had not been known earlier, considering especially all the DEZ research conducted by and for the Library of Congress.” Milevski wrote:

In some cases, the physical damage to some items was so great that it required commercial rebinding, or replacement. Covering material components — binding adhesives, cloth, paper, and illustration colors and inks — were all affected to one degree or another, depending upon the items selected for treatment. Book paper cockled. All paper discolored somewhat and emanated an odor.

Out of 667 books treated by Akzo Chemical (the Dutch company which had by then absorbed Texas Alkyls), forty-four percent had some sort of damage (not counting cockling, smell, and yellowing, which was pretty much universal), and twenty-four percent might need “remedial treatment.” And some books were not deacidified, either. One of the pictures that Milevski includes illustrates what he calls the “edge-burn effect”: evidently not enough of the residual moisture had been baked out of some books; when the diethyl zinc found it, the reaction was hot enough to leave scorch marks. Peter Waters was invited to Texas once when he was head of conservation at the Library of Congress (head of conservation, not preservation — Peter Sparks was head of preservation). “While Peter Sparks and the rest were having a meeting,” Waters says, “I got taken into the site and saw one of the chambers being opened. I was totally horrified with what I saw.” He saw distorted books and books burned around the edges. There was a kind of “metallic-musty” smell.

Sparks, though, was still talking about full-scale plants in Fort Detrick, and about one-hundred-million-dollar twenty-year contracts, 55and about sending tank trucks full of neat diethyl zinc across the country. And he’d boosted his figure: he told Congress that the library hoped to treat thirty thousand books a week, 56or a million and a half books a year. That way, presumably, the plant could catch up on the Library of Congress’s own arrearage of acidity and also serve the nation. Eventually, reality took hold: doubts were pointedly expressed to James Billington; Sparks left the library in 1990. “When Billington heard about some of the problems that he hadn’t been told about, after Sparks had left, he totally blew his top,” one former employee told me. “And if you know Billington, 57when he blows his top, the foundations of the library vibrate.” Sparks is now a consultant; on a webpage for Neilsen Bainbridge, a framing-supplies company, beneath a picture of Sparks standing before some statuary, he is quoted as endorsing the Alphamat 58Artcare line of framing supplies, which feature patented life-extending “MicroChamber” technology: “Laboratory observations made on these test photographs clearly show that Alphamat Artcare inhibits yellowing and fading of these color images. With Alphamat Artcare, you achieve worry-free framing every time.” The fine print says that the matboards were exposed to nitrogen dioxide (a pollutant) “in an accelerated laboratory test that simulates 77 years of aging.”