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

At no point during that morning in Washington did anyone mention the documented vulnerabilities of “archival” silver-halide microfilm, although the Council on Library Resources’s own program officer had pointed them out in print a decade earlier. Nobody explained that the word “brittle” as used in their statistics had a narrow, technical definition. Nobody felt the need to suggest to those present that just because you take pictures of something doesn’t mean you must throw it away, and that in fact the low-cost storage of the source originals ought to be a part of any prudent effort to “protect the human record.”

And, most interestingly, none of the expert witnesses uttered a syllable about space.

Had these seasoned library leaders — Welsh, Haas, Gregorian, and others — all suddenly forgotten the shelving squabbles that they’d had to adjudicate in their own institutions? Were they entirely unconscious of the fact that if you cut up and “save” three million books on film you have three million fewer books to store, and that the creation of a databased union list of what has been filmed may well have a fivefold effect on discarding, just as Robert Hayes had suggested in the very report on which they were basing their twenty-year action plan? (“The great argument in favor of microfilm is space saving,” Hayes wrote in the expanded 1987 version of his report.) Had they blanked on fifty years of pro-condensational oratory? Of course they hadn’t. Space assuagement was what they longed for, and yet, as if by prior agreement, they mentioned it not.

Since the perfection of the Xerox machine, microfilming has been unnecessary to any book-preservational act. If I were a preservation administrator, and I were absolutely sure, because I had an infallible accelerated-aging test for paper, that all surviving copies of Edmund Gosse’s Questions at Issue at my library and everywhere else were going to disintegrate into illegibility tomorrow at 3:30 P.M., and if I were determined to preserve the contents of that book for the human record, and if I had no secret craving to make use of the shelf space that Gosse’s book occupied, would I have the book microfilmed? Certainly not. I would instead make two full-sized eye-readable photocopies, one bound and one unbound. The bound copy would go on the shelf tomorrow, and the unbound one would become the master, and go into storage in order to make copies for other libraries as they wanted them. Preservation photocopying, as it is called, is faster and cheaper than microfilming, and much easier to check for errors and to correct when errors are found than film is (the film technician must splice retakes into the frame sequence, and there is a stipulated limit of three splices per roll), and the image is cleaner on a paper copy, and you don’t need to read it on a screen in a windowless hellhole— and you will get a better digital scan and searchable OCR text from it as well, when or if that time comes.

Savage, ungovernable space yearnings, in concert with an ill-conceived long-term plan to stock the sparkling digital pond with film-hatchery trout — these, and not groundwood pulp or alum-rosin sizing, were the real root causes of the brittle-books crisis.

At several points during their congressional testimony, Vartan Gregorian, Lynne Cheney, and others referred admiringly to a brand-new movie called Slow Fires. This documentary, conceived and commissioned by Warren Haas, paid for by money given to the Council on Library Resources from the Exxon and Mellon Foundations, with further infusions from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is the most successful piece of library propaganda ever created. Haas chose Terry Sanders, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, to produce and direct; Haas had heard good things about Sanders on a visit to UCLA, and during their interview Sanders struck Haas as a person who was willing to listen. At the outset, Sanders was a blank slate—“Basically, it’s not a subject that I know the slightest bit about,” Sanders told me — but he was, Haas recalls, a “quick study.” Sanders got Haas, Welsh, Sparks, and a few others to come up with a wish list of what they wanted the film to do and say, and he read the packets of material he was sent. He felt that he could use some help with the writing: “I’m not particularly a wordsmith — this needed some poetry to it.” So he asked Ben Maddow, whose Asphalt Jungle had been nominated for an Oscar in 1951, to come up with the screenplay.

Still, Sanders was worried. “When I would tell people about the film that I was doing, about the paper and books turning to dust and the acid eating away — as I told them, their eyes would literally glaze over. It was not an exciting topic to anyone. So that was a good early warning signal that [we’d] better do everything possible to make it an interesting film. We were running scared the whole way.” They spent months trying to think of a title; finally, Ben Maddow came up with a real grabber: Slow Fires.

Haas himself (blue shirt, 1wise-looking eyebrows) begins the movie quietly, saying something innocuous about how we can’t get carried away by electronic fads; but soon we are in a lushly photographed, somberly sound-tracked world, visiting the Austrian National Library in Vienna, where expressionless international preservationists have convened to discuss (at a meeting funded by the Council on Library Resources) the world’s paper crisis; and then we’re at Harvard’s Widener Library, in a gorgeous slow dolly shot of bookshelves accompanied by narrator Robert MacNeil’s voice of literate probity: “Here Nobel Prize winners roam the open stacks — historians reevaluating the past, scientists looking to see what other scientists have already done.” Then MacNeil’s voice drops slightly: “Yet month by month, year by year, these precious volumes are burning away with insidious slow fires. ”

Lap-dissolve to a pair of stone lions: at the New York Public Library, we learn, “millions of books are victims of a chemical disease.” The NYPL’s chief of conservation, John Baker, says that the books may not look so bad (he’s right, they don’t): “But when you open them, many, many of them are so brittle and deteriorated that they simply fall apart in your hands.” (We never see such an outcome in the film, however.) Then we’re off to the Library of Congress, containing, MacNeil narrates, “the cumulative daily life of the nation, invaluable and irreplaceable.”

Yet even here, inside this shell of splendid masonry, millions of volumes are falling apart, inside their covers, and within the very fortress meant to preserve them.

At this, there is a stare-shot of a worn and tattered book and a sudden (but soft) violin-tremolo of fear on the sound track. Vartan Gregorian comes on, a jolly charmer, but serious now, announcing that there are “seven million disintegrating books” in the Library of Congress.

The film’s kidney-punch is delivered in William Welsh’s office. Welsh, who from some angles looks a bit like Kirk Douglas, or maybe I’m thinking of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler in the TV version of Batman, holds a small old book while he describes the library’s 1984 deterioration survey. “So we had a survey made of our collections,” he says, “and we discovered, much to my horror, that twenty-five percent of our book collections of thirteen million books— twenty-five percent —were embrittled. That means they would crumble.” Welsh does not describe the MIT Fold Test that was the basis of this embrittlement percentage, but he does vividly demonstrate what he means by the temporally indeterminate phrase “would crumble.” He opens the book he is holding. It has a loose binding, but its pages are not falling apart; indeed, they appear abundantly readable. Nothing breaks off or crumbles away as Welsh flips through it.