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

All these test books, along with the five hundred from 1900 to 1949, and assorted other lots (including seven books 10printed between 1534 and 1722, “all of which were in excellent condition after several centuries of use”), have now disappeared from view — temporarily, one hopes. The Barrow lab closed in the seventies; the books reportedly went to the Library of Congress. Bill Minter, the encapsulator, observed to me that even in their mutilated state these books would be interesting to study now: using Barrow’s baseline fold data, we might measure whether the paper had become appreciably weaker after thirty further years of natural aging, and how well deacidified paper held its deacidification, and we could get a better sense of what Barrow meant by “not suitable for regular library use.” Minter proposed to Chandru Shahani that the Library of Congress do some experiments on the Barrow test specimens (“For the past ten years I’ve been talking about this!” Minter says), but to judge by his research, Shahani is not terribly interested in the actual aging of paper — he remains fascinated by laboratory ovens, and by the possibility of developing an improved and simplified artificial-aging test.

Many of the books may be gone, but their quotably quantified test results live on in the hearts and bibliographies of preservation managers, who by the late seventies began to have fantasies of sampling the paper in their own collections, in order to see how catastrophically degraded and grant-gettably reformattable it was. Most libraries don’t have MIT Fold Testers, though — and anyway you wouldn’t want to be cutting strips out of your library’s books with Barrow’s abandon; you need something quicker and less extreme, albeit variable and imprecise. You also want something that undergraduates and other low-wagers can do with minimal training. And that’s how the library world settled on the double-fold test.

Anyone can do it. Open a book to a random page and fold its lower right corner in toward you, forming a triangle against the paper, until you feel it crease under your thumb. Then fold it back in the opposite direction until it folds against the far side of the page. That is one double fold. Do that until the paper breaks, or until you reach some stopping point, as specified by your library’s preservation department — one double fold, two, four, five. Double folding may seem oddly familiar to some, for it is how kindergarteners are taught to divide a piece of paper without scissors. Now, however, it is used to survey research collections in order to determine their “usability” and hence their fate.

“Usable,” as it happens, is another piece of specialized preservo-vocabulary. A unusable book is not a book that you can’t use. “An ‘unusable’ record,” 11wrote Gordon Williams in 1964, “is one already so deteriorated the paper breaks when folded once. A ‘usable’ record is one with obvious signs of past use but that might be expected to last at least another twenty-five years if untreated and stored under average library conditions.” But that is just one of dozens of definitions and regional variations. Indiana University defines a brittle book as one that doesn’t survive three double folds followed by a gentle tug, while an extremely brittle book is one whose page “breaks off 12in your hand when folded once”—in such cases, “it is often best to withdraw, replace or reformat the item.” At Northwestern, staff members are urged to do the “four corner test” 13for brittleness, “because we might end up reformatting the item,” but they are advised not to pull the corner. At Cornell and Berkeley, a brittle book is one that doesn’t withstand one double fold. At Johns Hopkins, when I called, it was one-and-a-half double folds; i.e., “three half folds.” The Library of Congress also uses three half folds. Ohio State defines brittleness as a paper’s breakage “when a lower corner 14is folded back and forth four (4) times (the ‘two-double-fold test’).” It’s two double folds at the University of Maryland, too, “at a width of no more than 1/2 inch,” followed by “a very gentle tug”; 15books that fail this test are “in jeopardy when anyone 16simply turns the leaves.” David Lowe, who manages an NEH-funded microfilming project at Columbia University, 17explained his library’s procedure to me: “Three-eighths of an inch from the corner you fold once, then back under for a single double fold, and then try to tug gently. Then single folds after that up to a total of four single folds — so only twice, after the double fold. Four is the max. If it withstands four, we don’t torture it any more.”

The University of Florida has an even tougher standard: “A book is considered 18brittle for University of Florida’s Preservation purposes, when the paper is weak enough to fail the ‘double-fold test’ at five [double] folds or less.” (Perhaps it’s five because of Florida’s humidity; you need to do more folding to get the results you would get up north.) A library staff member who encounters what is by this extreme definition a brittle book routes it to the Brittle Books Department, with a flag in it bearing the “dft result” (“dft” means double-fold test) — from there the marked book enters the twilight realm of “planned deterioration.” 19If and when 20the book produces a double-fold test number of less than one, it is withdrawn.

This is of course utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami. If you wanted to test the effective springiness of a watch spring or a Slinky, would you bend a short segment of it back and forth until it broke? If you had a tree in your yard that survived storms by bending and dipping in the wind, would you consider cutting it into firewood because one of its twigs snapped when you bent it in two? Would you check the resilience, and hence the utility, of a diving board by counting how many times you could fold it back on itself before it failed? No, you would not. In fact, a diving board that you could double-fold ten times might be an unacceptably floppy diving board.

The point is that if you bend an intentionally stiff-but-flexible item past the point of its return-memory, you will begin to break it, and that incremental breakage brings a separate set of physical processes into play, with their own plottable curves and points of final rupture. Klaus Hendriks, the paper scientist from Canada, wrote that “one cannot qualify a book page 21that can be turned over and read as being at the end of its lifespan, even if a corner breaks off after one fold. As long as no mechanical force acts upon it, it will survive a while longer. One will be able to read it and turn it over for years to come.”

Late one night, after the children were in bed, I began some random experimentation at the household bookshelves. My wife asked me what I was up to.

“I’m — I’m performing the fold test,” I said.

“Please stop breaking the corners off our books,” my wife said. “It can’t be doing them any good.”

Before the survey was suspended, I had found that Saintsbury’s Essays in English Literature, Thomas De Quincey’s study of Richard Bentley, Lessing’s Laocoon, and Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop flunked their fold tests. A few months later, I bought a book of essays by Edmund Gosse 1called Questions at Issue, published by Appleton in 1893. The more I read it, the more I liked it, and the more I liked it, the more I wanted to find out how it would rate in the eyes of a preservation administrator. I put my thumb to work on a lower corner of page 153, the last page of an essay called “The Limits of Realism in Fiction.” There was almost instant breakage — the corner fell away before it had completed the first leg of the double-fold cycle. If I were doing a survey of my collection, I would be forced to assign this book a dft result of 0.4 or so — a death sentence in some libraries. If I cut a strip out of page 153—which I am unlikely to do — I probably wouldn’t even be able to get it clamped and under proper tension in the MIT machine before it would break. This was the sort of book over which preservation people shake their heads and say, “It’s got one read left in it.” Or, in a sad but firm voice, “We’ve got just one chance to turn these pages, and it better be when they’re under the camera.” Untold numbers of books with fold-test results better than that of my copy of Questions at Issue have met their unmaker in windowless offices of preservation reformatting.