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

But in 1964, Clapp’s feelings about mass deacidification and other prolongations of incarnate bookness were only mildly enthusiastic anyway. Even if deacidification could be made to work, he wrote, he expected it to be “comparatively expensive”; 16and he mentions “storage at reduced temperatures” only in passing. Those were fine techniques to fiddle around with, but microfilm was for pragmatists: “The sensible solution 17to look to is, again, a solution based upon replacement of originals by high-reduction microfacsimile.”

Notice the rhetorical fine-tuning. In 1961, Clapp was attempting to demonstrate that microfilm was good for libraries purely on economic grounds, because it was cheaper than the safekeeping of originals. Now, several years later, perhaps chastened by some of the less-than-fruitful hardware-development outlays the Council had made, he was saying that even if microfilming always remains more expensive than safekeeping, it is the best answer to a different problem — the problem of catastrophic deterioration — an answer that, he points out, has the side benefit of reducing “storage, binding, and other maintenance costs” 18as well. Microphotography is, he notes, “already the standard method 19for preserving newspapers”—why not books as well? Microfilm and attendant book-riddance is always the solution, but the primary problem it solves is beginning to shift. The idea of destroying to preserve is gaining ground.

Late in life, Clapp wrote a long, multi-part essay 20for Scholarly Publishing about W. J. Barrow and the quest for permanent paper. It is required reading in some library schools, and for good reason: it is engagingly written and full of interesting sidelights about the development of papermaking. Clapp portrays his friend Barrow (whom he had known and advised since 1948 21) as a hero—“an essentially solitary worker 22lacking formal training” who single-handedly identifies the true causes of paper’s demise ( not wood pulp, not polluted air, not gaslights, but alum-rosin sizing), and who invents an alternative acid-free recipe (or possibly adapts it without attribution from a formula developed by the S. D. Warren 23Company) that changes publishing forever.

Clapp’s essay has helped move along reforms in the paper industry, and for that we should be grateful. But Barrow was not the pioneering self-taught visionary that Clapp made him out to be; one book conservator, Thomas Conroy, writes that Barrow

treated his sources crudely,

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refusing to correct theory in the light of observation, and (a greater personal defect, but a smaller scientific one) giving inadequate credit to his predecessors. Much of Barrow’s appeal to librarians was that he proposed simple solutions to extremely complex and unfashionable problems. When serious attention was again given to preservation, starting in the late 1960s, Barrow’s writings were taken as given, and used directly as foundations for further work; his articulations were not challenged or confirmed.

Sally Roggia, in a recent dissertation, writes that Barrow was an “aggressive promoter” 25who in the fifties and sixties began to be “widely, if incorrectly, credited 26with original scientific research and findings that were essentially confirmations of work that had been known for decades, and not new discoveries.” Roggia says that librarians and archivists must “stop holding onto myths 27especially when, as in Barrow’s case, the myth contradicts reason and common sense.”

Clapp’s authority, his steady money, and his careful shaping of the truth created the Barrow myth. “I have spent many hundreds of hours 28—yes many hundreds” editing Barrow’s writing, Clapp informed Barrow’s son after his death; “I do not mean to denigrate your Father’s achievement in any way when I say that in the programs of research which he conducted with assistance from this Council we were a full, if a junior partner.” So when Clapp talks about Barrow’s amazing discovery of the “catastrophic decline” 29in fold endurance and the “disastrous condition of paper 30in the second half of the nineteenth century”; when he titles a historical section “The Road to Avernus” 31(i.e., hell) and describes papermaker’s alum as “the librarian/archivist’s worst enemy,” 32we should pause for a moment, and recall that Clapp was a man besotted with microtext, who had spent lots of Ford Foundation money in attempts to perfect micro-machines and image-storers that would allow research libraries to unload their shelved and cataloged book inventory, and that in his role as chief assistant librarian of the Library of Congress he presided over the undoing of its peerless newspaper stock, a willed act that has undermined American historiography far more seriously than anything that alum-tormented newsprint could possibly have done to itself. Clapp, with Barrow’s laboratorial help, demonized old paper; he did so partly in order to compel improvements in new paper, and partly to make a convincingly urgent case for filmed replacements.

Clapp says that W. J. Barrow “knew more about old papers 1than anyone else alive.” If so, it was a taxidermist’s knowledge. Barrow spent his life coating old papers with melted plastic — not an activity that one normally associates with paper connoisseurship. He quit college 2in the twenties to work in his cousin’s company, the Barrow Corporation, which made work clothes. He managed clothes factories until 1931, when the company collapsed; a year later he set up shop as a conservator at the Virginia State Library. There, experimenting on the library’s collections, he gradually refined the now infamous Barrow method of document lamination.

You take a fragile manuscript, or the disbound leaf of a book or newspaper, you layer it between two sheets of plastic, with some tissue included for strength and some chemicals to counteract acidity, and heat this sandwich up. Then you run it through a pair of rollers at great pressure until the plastic fuses permanently to the paper. It’s similar to what happens to new drivers’ licenses at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but instead of wallet IDs, Barrow was operating on eighteenth-century historical documents. The method became very popular; unlike traditional techniques of paper conservation, the procedure was quick and cheap and could be performed by anyone. “The Barrow laminating process,” 3wrote Clapp, “thus perfected by 1942, has withstood the test of time and has become the standard method.”

But time’s test run had not ended. No conservation lab uses lamination now; and one website for newspaper collectors advises: “Don’t laminate any item in your collection. Lamination irrevocably destroys any value!” The plastic that Barrow used was cellulose acetate, the same substance that microfilm 4of that era was made of. In 1933, around the time Recordak’s Charles Z. Case began selling microfilm to libraries, a salesman from the Celluloid Corporation pitched a new product, Protectoid, 5to the National Archives. People at the archives began laminating documents between flat plates, in a 750-ton hydraulic press. Barrow couldn’t afford the flat-plate machine and used rollers instead. (Perhaps he’d had some experience with the making of celluloid collars from his factory work.) But acetate laminations, like acetate microfilms, aren’t stable at ambient temperatures and humidities. They go brittle. The reason that Barrow knew 7so much about deacidification, in fact, is that he’d had to figure out how to counteract the paper-attacking acetic acid that was awakened in the hot plastic as it squeezed through the rollers. (His method was hotter and squeezed harder than the National Archives’s flat-plate method.) Some laminated papers turned yellow or brown; some vintages of acetate contained particular plasticizers that weakened the paper they protected; and as the Barrow Lab sold its patented lamination machines to enthusiasts around the country, and the fame of the method spread from Virginia to other state archives — and to the New York Public Library 8and the Library of Congress 9—bad things began happening. “We have found 10that some materials are permanently damaged by lamination,” wrote David Stam, head of the NYPL, in 1984. Someone at a state land agency in Pennsylvania treated a great many early American manuscripts, including papers by William Penn and papers with wax seals, to a rustic version of the Barrow hot-rolled process. When the Pennsylvania State Archives inherited these documents, and saw the shape they were in, they got a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust to “disemBarrow” or delaminate them.