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

It wasn’t incompetence that led to the library’s five-decade space crisis, as it turns out, it was ideology — it was a steadfast unwillingness to build or rent enough buildings. That’s why, during this period, so many fine old things were undeservedly destroyed. The bones of the collection were deformed in a deliberate squeeze.

In 1957, aided by a large grant from Verner Clapp’s Council on Library Resources, a document laminator named William James Barrow began a ten-year program of research into paper’s deterioration. As a first step, he assembled, from the collection of the Virginia State Library, five hundred nonfiction books printed between 1900 and 1949. Most were duplicates, all were undamaged. (“Bindings showed no wear, and leaves of some were unopened.”) Here are some of Barrow’s experimental victims, all published in the early decades of the twentieth century: John W. Foster’s Diplomatic Memoirs, Andrew Carnegie’s The Empire of Business, Seneca Egbert’s Manual of Hygiene and Sanitation, A Text-Book of True Temperance, published by the United States Brewers’ Association, Thomas Mosby’s Causes and Cures of Crime, Arthur Pound’s The Telephone Idea, The National Formulary of Unofficial Preparations, John Hearley’s Pope or Mussolini, and Mary S. Cutting’s Little Stories of Married Life.

Out of each of these five hundred books, Barrow and his assistants cut eighteen test strips, from the middles of random pages. These he tested in various ways, tearing them in half using the Elmendorf Tear Tester, folding them under tension, analyzing their fiber content. The fold test, which he performed using a custom-made machine that worked the strip of paper back and forth through ninety degrees while subjecting it to a tugging force of one kilogram, was the most helpful, he found. Paper from older books survived many fewer oscillations between the clamps of his fold tester than paper from newer books. Correlating the fold-test data with some groundless guesswork 1(Barrow believed that three days in an artificial-aging oven 2at 212 degrees Fahrenheit was equivalent to twenty-five years of real life), he came up with a set of estimates of the life expectancy of the books whose pages he had minced.

Here are Barrow’s results, 3summarized in the celebrated book called Deterioration of Book Stock, Causes and Remedies: thirty-nine percent fell in the Very Weak category, meaning they would “hardly last 25 years” and if unused “might be intact after 50 years.” Forty-nine percent were Low Strength, which would “deteriorate to the Very Weak category in 25 years. Their endurance would be less than newsprint.” Nine percent were Medium Strength A, likely to survive from twenty-five to fifty years with moderate usage; two percent were Medium Strength B and might be expected to last fifty years or more; one percent were High Strength. “If material which should be preserved indefinitely is going to pieces as rapidly as these figures indicate,” Barrow and his editors wrote, “it seems probable that most library books printed in the first half of the 20th century will be in an unusable condition in the next century.” Library administrators liked these numbers — some simply added together everything except High Strength and Medium Strength B and got a really frightening percentage: “The research carried out 4by William J. Barrow at the Virginia State Library indicated that 97 % of the non-fiction books printed between 1900 and 1939 will have deteriorated to the point of being useless by the end of the century,” wrote a Preservation Committee at Pennsylvania State. Or you could flip it around, as Yale’s librarian Rutherford Rogers did in 1985: “Barrow startled the library world 5with his research results, which suggested that only 3 percent of the papers in books published between 1900 and 1949 could be expected to last for more than fifty years.” In any case, the numbers were disturbing. “Librarians will recognize that the problem is not a new one,” Barrow concludes, “but few will fail to be astonished at its magnitude.”

But Barrow was wrong. There are today millions of usable library books dating from the first half of the twentieth century. As far as I can tell, all of the editions listed in his experiment exist now in libraries, available to readers. (Readers can’t use the specific copies that the Barrow Laboratory cut up, however.) There has been no apocalypse of paper. Perhaps Barrow sincerely believed in the estimates, perhaps not. Perhaps all those who, like Peter Sparks, 6cited Barrow believed in the estimates, perhaps not. In 1998, I read the numbers to William Wilson, the paper scientist who was measuring the natural aging of paper until someone tossed out his experiment. “A lot of these predictions were made to get people’s attention,” Wilson said. “I knew Mr. Barrow, by the way. I don’t know whether he really believed that or what. But it’s almost the end of the century, and somehow most of those books haven’t known that they were supposed to disappear.”

Verner Clapp was the first to seize on Barrow’s numbers (he had paid for them, after all); in his Future of the Research Library, he used them as justification for his preferred path. “From the investigations 7of W. J. Barrow, it is now known that few of the books printed in the first half of this century can be expected to be of much use by its end,” Clapp wrote. In the early sixties, he paid the Association of Research Libraries to hire some statisticians 8to apply Barrow’s overeager deterioration model to a random sample of books in the National Union Catalog. They did some arithmetic and came up with 1.75 billion imperiled book-pages. Now the question became, as Clapp put it, “what to do about these 1.75 billion pages, 9many — perhaps most — of which are doomed within a relatively brief foreseeable future.”

Deacidification was one possible course of action, wrote Clapp; and in the sixties the Council on Library Resources duly paid Barrow’s lab to test various early mass-deacidification treatments in Virginia. Barrow gassed books overnight with ammonia fumes, and he sprayed them with solutions of “magnesium acetate, urea, magnesium carbonate, calcium oxide (with the addition of sugar), and magnesium bicarbonate.” He tried “pickling” a book: spraying it with chemicals and wrapping it in aluminum foil. None of these methods took. In 1966, Clapp encouraged Barrow to experiment with a treatment that a British liquor chemist had developed, using cyclohexylamine carbonate, CHC. The Barrow technicians interleaved books with CHC-impregnated sheets, and put sachets full of CHC granules in manuscript boxes; but the paper changed color, and the CHC reacted with humid air to form cyclohexylamine, which had “carcinogenic potential.” So that was out.

After Barrow died in 1967, Clapp’s Council continued to fund the Barrow Lab, which forged on under the direction of Dr. Robert N. DuPuis, 10who in the fifties was director of research at Philip Morris. DuPuis wrote memos 11at Philip Morris that plaintiffs have since used as evidence of the tobacco industry’s extensive foreknowledge of the medical dangers of smoking; in 1955, he assured viewers of See It Now, Edward R. Murrow’s TV show, “If we do find any 12[components in tobacco smoke] that we consider harmful, and so far we have not, we’ll remove these from smoke and still retain the pleasure of your favorite cigarette.” In 1970, DuPuis became interested in the promise of morpholine, used in floor polish, to lift acid paper’s pH. Eventually, the Barrow Lab and George Kelly at the Library of Congress began some morpholine “vapor phase deacidification” tests, precursors to the diethyl-zinc trials. The Barrow Lab used treatment chambers made by Vacudyne, 13a company whose processing units, coincidentally, were helpful to cigarette manufacturers in their “vapor phase ammoniation” of tobacco leaves. (Ammonia raises the pH of smoke, allowing for a more powerful buzz per gram-unit of nicotine; morpholine raises the pH of paper — transiently, as it turned out.) Morpholine probably wasn’t a carcinogen — so Litton Bionetics 14determined through assays paid for by the Council on Library Resources in 1977—but it had a dead-fish smell, caused headaches and nausea, 15yellowed some paper, and sometimes changed the color of leather and pyroxylin-coated book jackets. Henry Grunder, a librarian at the Library of Virginia (formerly the Virginia State Library), wrote me that the Barrow Lab experimented with morpholine on his library’s books: “We frequently run into the tell-tale rubber stamp, with the lot number written in; and the darkening discoloration that it is said the process induced in some papers is also present. (It left that behind, although no residual alkalization.)”