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

It wasn’t that James Billington was against spending lots of money on machinery — he likes doing that. It’s just that he was more interested in mass digitization than mass deacidification. The Library of Congress’s collections were, as he told the Senate in 1994, part of the nation’s “ ‘strategic information reserve 59’ that will provide the intellectual cargo on the information superhighways.” The library, he said, “hopes to contribute to the electronic future by being an exemplary catalyst for the library community more broadly in building the National Information Infrastructure.” He told the Information Industry Association that the Library of Congress was “substituting technology for paper” 60in its digitization of “key American collections.” He wanted to “get the champagne out of the bottle.” Putting old books in gas chambers was not his thing.

Even so, diethyl zinc clung to life. Something about it appealed to the scientists — its unnaturalness, perhaps, its counterintuitiveness, its racy propulsiveness, its danger. Between 1992 and 1994, Chandru Shahani (who worked at India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center 61before he emigrated) commissioned twelve more test runs in Deer Park, Texas. By the last run, he and his coworkers felt they had beaten the stench problem: a panel of conservator-sniffers determined that “95.2 percent of the books have acceptable odors”—meaning that if you diethyl-zincked a million books a year, forty-eight thousand of them would smell bad. Better, but not great. “The tragedy is,” Shahani told me, with genuine regret, “we perfected the process just as the rug was being pulled from under the process.”

Shahani remains scornful of Northrup and NASA. In a 1994 write-up of the last twelve test runs, he and Kenneth Harris refer to the “pathetically poor engineering 62practice and design” at the NASA pilot plant. When I talked to Shahani in 1998 (seated across from Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple of the Public Affairs Office), he said: “I had been here long enough to see how bumbling those people were, the contractors who were contracting those tests. I don’t know if that’s how DoD contractors are or what, I don’t know. I mean, I’m saying this on tape. But I hope they aren’t like this one.” Shahani briefly detailed their lack of qualifications and explained the chemist’s responsibility to maintain mass balance in reactive processes, a responsibility not met at the NASA installation. Then he went on: “And these people were so bad. In the first place, every run that they did — I was there for five or six runs before this thing happened — every run they would do, some gauge or another would not be working. Nothing was ever a hundred percent functional. They would still go on with it.”

And then something went wrong. “Instead of pumping out from the chamber, they were pumping in,” Shahani said. “And then they sent water in there. I mean, how could you do that? I just cannot imagine that. And then NASA made it worse. They took them off. I mean, those guys at least would have been able to pump the thing out. When there was the fire, NASA said, ‘Go, you’re out of here.’ They wouldn’t let them pump it out, even. So then the diethyl zinc sat there for months — weeks, maybe, or days, I don’t remember now. But enough so that the diethyl began to react with the plumbing. It will find any moisture anywhere, the slightest amount of moisture — and all materials contain some moisture. So they had all kinds of problems, and then we lost track at that point, because we were not in the picture.”

Here Helen Dalrymple finally bestirred herself. “If we’re going to get on to anything else,” she said, with forced gaiety, “we do need to move on, because Mr. Baker needs to leave at two-thirty.”

Okay, we’ll move on — enough about diethyl zinc. Now, in a modest ongoing program, the Library of Congress pays a small company in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, to strap minor works of American poetry onto steel-finned agitators, seal them in drums that fill up with a costly inert liquid called perfluoroalkane, which is made milky by the presence of quadrillions (approximately) of very tiny magnesium-oxide particles, in which liquid the books rise and fall, turning first one way, then the other, their pages waving like pale seaweeds, until some of the magnesium-oxide particles, small as they are, tumble into declivities in the surface of the paper, where they are allegedly held in place by static electricity. After twenty minutes, a vacuum pump sucks out the carrier liquid, and the books, unstrapped and stacked on metal tables, look and feel almost as they did beforehand, except, in some cases, for a slight powdery texture to the paper.

Dr. Shahani contributed some refinements to this procedure, but it was developed by several alumni of Koppers Chemicals, principally a smiley, self-effacing man named Richard Spatz, who knew a lot about pressure-treating wood and applied that knowledge to wood-pulp paper. Spatz was dipping books in his garage for years, and air-drying them in the game room, before the world began to pay attention. The Bookkeeper system, as it is known, is inherently safer for organic life-forms than diethyl zinc, and it is apparently benign for books, too, but of course nobody can be certain of its benignancy for a hundred years or more. If you test the paper after its Bookkeeper bath, it shows a higher (less acidic) pH, which is good, but whether magnesium oxide’s neutralizing powers will endure in the book as it is repeatedly breathed on, paged through, and photocopied, and even whether the substance, assuming it does stick where it was put, is ultimately of any significant value to the health of the paper, is unknowable now as well. Perhaps those few minutes spent splayed in a vacuum will shorten a book’s life more than the alkaline deposits will prolong it. Acidity discourages paper-eating bugs; over hundreds of years, that may be very helpful. Some conservators believe that all mass deacidification is a mistake: given the near infinitude of recipes for paper, new and old, and the impossibly complex reactions that ensue over time, the alkaline buffer may do bad things to fibers, and to inks and dyes and bindings, that we cannot foresee.

If Bookkeeper is harmless, and it may possibly be, the good thing about it is that it allows preservation administrators (who seem to have a hard time simply leaving things alone) to feel that they’re taking the initiative and doing something powerful and talismanic, that requires pipes and gauges and special vocabularies, for their chosen volumes. For once you dunk or spritz or gas a group of books, they immediately become charmed objects, items on which your preservation dollars have been spent, and as such are less likely to find themselves carted off to the discard area (called “Gifts and Exchanges” at the Library of Congress) the next year. Deacidification buys time for them in that managerial sense, at least.

But then the books that you haven’t dunked or spritzed or gassed may begin to seem suspect. At the Library of Congress, deacidified books are now identified with a white dot on the spine, like Dr. Seuss’s Star-Bellies. Two subclasses of material thus arise: the chemically purified, and the mortally diseased. Those that haven’t earned their white dots may in time become easier to sacrifice to a reformatting project — they’ve been passed over once, after all, and their untreated acidity makes them (if you accept the prevailing view) an imminent danger to themselves on the shelf. If in fifty years 63the chemical purification turns out to be itself harmful in some unexpected way, the polarity will simply reverse: those books that underwent the therapy will become the newly diseased, the white dot will signal distress, the distress will pull in fresh grant money, and new treatments will come into play to undo the damage of well-meaning earlier maltreatments. Waste may be the only constant.