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

It was slow work. Jane Smith, a conservator, spent three years with a face mask on, using acetone and other solvents to remove the coating. “They were deteriorating rapidly, much more rapidly than anybody ever imagined,” she told me. “You could pick one up and twenty were stuck to it.” Plasticizers were “exuding from the lamination plastic,” and the result was “actually damaging the document physically, because as lamination breaks down, it lets off many nasty things — acetic acid, formic acid.” Most laminated documents aren’t this bad: “I’ve seen plenty of collections of documents that have been ‘Barrowed,’ and they’re in okay condition,” Smith said. “They’re inherently changed, because you’ve just melted plastic into the interstices of the paper, so you do not have a piece of paper anymore. You’ve introduced thermal oxidation and heavy pressure, and you’ve just filled all of the pores of the paper with melted plastic, which causes some forms of paper to become translucent. You can see through them — not completely through them like a sheet of glass, you’re not able to read them as clearly, because you’re getting conflicting information from both sides all at once.” Rumor has it that one state archive which owns a great many documents laminated by a Barrow disciple “smells like a pickle works”—the vinegar syndrome at work.

I asked Smith what the satisfactions were to her delamination work. “Anybody at all, if they were interested, could see the tremendous difference between a piece of plastic that looks like a place mat at your dinner table, for your children, and a beautiful piece of seventeenth-century British-import or early Pennsylvania paper. You went from a piece of plastic to a piece of paper, and it was phenomenal. The texture reappeared. It was really a glorious thing.” When old microfilm contorts, and the emulsioned image separates from the base, you have nothing at all left to read; when lamination buckles, on the other hand, you still have the surviving document underneath.

Swayed by the doctrine of reversibility, some paper conservators now use, in place of lamination, a much gentler technique called polyester film encapsulation, whenever they must enclose paper in plastic in order to protect it. William Minter, of Woodbury, Pennsylvania, developed this method: the document lives between two sheets of polyester that are sealed around the edges by a tiny, ultrasonically actuated titanium jackhammer that vibrates forty thousand times a second. The paper doesn’t get heated or squashed in rollers, and if for some reason you need to get your hands on the original, you can slice the margins of the encapsulation to free the paper. Less reversibly, a German company called ZFB (Zentrum für Bucherhaltung, 11or Center for Conservation) has built a room-sized machine that is able to pull apart, or “split,” a fragile newspaper or book page into two extremely thin surfaces and then glue these layers together, with a new, stronger paper sandwiched within. Barrow was “working with the best technology and the best materials available at the time,” Minter told me. “Unfortunately, it’s not working the way it was intended.”

Barrow’s breathtakingly confident predictions — as to the impermanency of twentieth-century paper and as to the permanency of twentieth-century plastic — haven’t come true, but it was his misuse of the fold test that really overstimulated librarianship. In the paper-science lab, the test is almost always performed with the help of a small desktop machine called the MIT Fold Tester, 1which turns a strip of paper back and forth through 270 degrees at the rate of 175 double folds per minute. It is the most sensitive of all the physical tests for paper — sensitive in the scientific sense, meaning that test strips which are strong in every other way may seem weak when fold-tested. “Changes in folding endurance 2of paper,” write D. F. Caulfield and D. E. Gunderson of the Forest Products Research Laboratory, “show up long before there is a change in the tensile strength, bursting strength, or tearing resistance.” If you are interested in proving that a page of a book has undergone a dramatic degradation, the fold test is the test for you.

But it is an inconsistent test, according to B. L. Browning, 3a paper scientist who was a contemporary of Barrow: “The folding endurance test is less reproducible than most other physical tests, and a considerable scatter of values is commonly obtained even on relatively uniform machine-made papers.” Especially when you’re testing differences between old book papers, which can break after one, two, or five folds, the results are so variable that they must be discounted. “Values of one or only a few folds are not usually considered significant,” Browning writes. Of all tests, folding endurance is most influenced by humidity. The muggier the day, the more times your sample will be willing to fold, all other things being equal. In order to get meaningful results, you have to precondition your paper in an environment of known humidity. Barrow, self-taught, with no scientific background, only gradually became aware of these difficulties.

None of that would matter much, except to paper scientists, if the fold test, allowing for all of its invalidating irreproducibilities, were a useful rough indicator of paper’s ability to do what readers ask of it. Is it? We ask of a book that its pages remain attached to their binding and turn. Maps must fold and unfold as a condition of use, dollar bills must survive pocket-crumpling and repeated wallet-bound contortions — book paper must turn without breaking. The late Klaus Hendriks, a scientist at the Canadian Conservation Institute, wrote:

While folding endurance

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is more sensitive to changes in paper than any other strength test, papermakers essentially use it only in the manufacture of paper for applications such as bank notes and maps.

The fold test, in other words, is the wrong test to be using on books. Indeed, Hendriks rejects other currently available mechanical measurements as well: “None of the commonly used paper tests 5bear any resemblance to the way a paper document or book is handled in practice,” he writes.

Nonetheless, Barrow favored the fold test above all others because, he contended, it “simulates the bending of a leaf 6to and fro in a book in use,” and because it “seems to lend itself most readily to analysis”—meaning it made the best graphs. (In one of the Barrow Laboratory’s books, 7Verner Clapp and Barrow are photographed together as they admire a large wall-mounted graph of the precipitous decline in paper’s fold endurance; the inverse, in a way, of Fremont Rider’s exponential growth chart.) In 1967, as part of one of the last big experiments 8he designed before his death, Barrow put his team of technicians to work on five hundred more books — this time imprints published between 1800 and 1899. Some of these books would be nice to have now — an 1817 edition of Marmontel’s Les Incas, ou la destruction de l’empire du Pérou (with plates); Bayard Taylor’s A Visit to China, India, and Japan in the Year 1853 (1855); Jones’s Medical Electricity (1895); the 1857 edition of William Cowper Prime’s Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia; Secret Journals of the Acts and Proceedings of Congress (1821 ed.); and Margaret Oliphant’s Makers of Venice. But Barrow, ever the dissector, had them snipped and clamped into the fold testers, which must have been waggling away into the wee hours, since the experimental regime demanded thirty strips per book — ten strips cut across the lines of print, ten cut from inkless paper, and ten cut parallel to the lines of print — not to mention another eight strips per book to be clamped and torn in the Elmendorf Tester. Barrow, who sometimes seems really to despise paper, found the “debasement of quality” to be “pervasive” in the books published between 1850 and 1869, but it “reached an all time low” at century’s end. (The descriptive writing here is probably Verner Clapp’s, not Barrow’s; Clapp’s literary assistance 9at times amounted to ghostwriting.) Over two thirds of the 1870–1899 group endured one fold or less, which meant they were, he said, “not suitable for regular library use.”