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

“This is a book taken from our collections that shows the condition that I’ve described, embrittlement,” he says, and he pulls a page out and crumples it in his fist. Working his fingers, he allows the illegible confetti that he has just created to flutter onto his lap. He looks meaningfully at the camera, as if what he has done is devastating in its irrefutability. “You see what happens when you do that to it,” he says.

Slow Fires has a sequel, Into the Future (1997), about the novel burdens of keeping digital media alive. Into the Future is very good, but Slow Fires has moments of trying tendentiousness. 2It would be a better film if what it was saying happened to be truth and not head-slapping exaggeration — then its use of crisis language borrowed from struggles over DDT, AIDS, and acid rain, and its footage of murmuring papyrologists attempting to reassemble fragments of ruined Egyptian texts (“within a generation or two our own books in our own libraries will look like this unless we take heed”), and its pity-inducing pans over shots of charred library interiors and of the Florence flood, would have some justification. But one mustn’t chide the director of a made-to-order film for doing his best to tell the story that the people who hired him asked him to tell. “I’m not the expert at all,” Terry Sanders told me. No prominent paper scientists — not William Wilson, or Chandru Shahani, or Klaus Hendriks — were interviewed in the film or asked to review the script for accuracy. Nonetheless, the film won Grand Prize 3in the science category of the 1989 Salerno Film Festival.

One interesting difficulty Sanders had was in getting some actual shots of the devastation of the “chemical disease.” “Librarians were very sensitive about showing me their really, really badly damaged books, because it didn’t seem right,” Sanders says. “I said, ‘You know, you can’t do a whole film on this without showing the seriously damaged books.’ So finally I got to film some, and they’re in there.” And yet there is in the film no shot of a book — one of millions of allegedly afflicted books that were said to be available to the film crew “in every nation, in every culture”—whose pages have slowly burned away or otherwise self-destructed to the point of unreadability as a result of acid hydrolysis. That is because no such population of books exists. There are some pictures of books with brown or yellow paper that is obviously acidic, paper that is fragile and edge-crumbled, that would fail the fold test; there are books in obvious need of care (or at least more attentive shelving), with loose, damaged pages that could do with a protective box or a librarian’s pink shoestring to keep them together. There is a shot of a row of intact old quartos onto which some paper looks to have been crumbled and sprinkled for dramatic effect. But there is no book or newspaper volume shown that wouldn’t stay right where it was, disclosing its intellectual contents to the careful-fingered inquirer, for centuries.

The movie’s melancholiest moment comes in a scene at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, in Andover, Massachusetts. A prep person in the film lab talks as she cuts open a very well preserved volume of the Portland Evening News. (An unusually valuable volume, by the way: one of the headlines is AMELIA EARHART’S PLANE CRASHES.) The prep woman explains: “As you can tell from the color of the newspaper, they’re turning brown, and they’re highly acidic. They’re burning up.” Suddenly the piteous atrocity of her task asserts itself for an instant: “It kind of bothers me to guillotine newspaper collections, because I know the actual papers are not going to go back on the shelves,” she says. Then she is able to reassure herself with the received ideology: “But to contain the information on microfilm is the ideal way to preserve the newspapers.”

Slow Fires was an enormous hit for its sponsors. It was a highly persuasive, credible (thanks to Robert MacNeil), tastefully photographed piece of intentional fear-mongering that targeted the various “donor publics” that Peter Sparks, Haas, and Welsh had in mind — not only legislators, who were invited to special screenings of the movie on the Hill, but right-minded, library-card-carrying TV-viewers who cared about books and history and, in the movie’s own solemn words, “the preservation of civilization itself.” (Peter Sparks appears in the movie, by the way, pointing out features of a brightly colored scale model of the diethyl-zinc plant, complete with little plastic people in lab coats.) It first appeared on PBS stations in December 1987, and it was re-broadcast twice in the United States thereafter; after seeing it on WNET, one anxious banker called and volunteered to “do anything to help 4save brittle books.” Slow Fires has been translated into Russian, Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish; it has appeared on TV in at least seventeen countries and at two of the directorates of the Commission of the European Community; it has made the rounds along with a “giant Brittle Books exhibit” 5created by Kent State’s audio-visual lab, and over the years it has enlivened hundreds of regional library conferences and library-school classes and scholarly get-togethers like those of the American Philosophical Association and the Medieval Academy. The title has been absorbed into the working language of librarianship: an exhibit entitled “Slow Fires at Harvard’s Libraries” carried the torch in Cambridge in 1991; while the all-important Association of Research Libraries prepared a briefing paper that read thus: “ ‘slow fires,’ triggered 6by the acids in paper, are spreading through research libraries, transforming book and journal collections into piles of paper fragments.”

In some libraries, according to Terry Sanders, the movie is shown to new employees as part of orientation and training programs. “I can virtually go into the library anywhere in the world and mention Slow Fires and suddenly I’m a celebrity,” Sanders told me. “I’ve written the Gone with the Wind of the library world.” Because the movie has been part of the basic training of a generation of librarians, many have come to accept what it says unquestioningly; and library-loving lay viewers, who have no independent way of verifying the film’s dismaying claims, can only defer to the professionals.

Representative Pat Williams was one of Slow Fires ’s first converts. Having heard Daniel Boorstin make a last plea for more federal money, Williams ended the subcommittee meeting by saying that he and his fellow committee members wanted to “help sound the alarm and see what we can do to fight these slow fires.” Soon afterward, Williams got in touch with Sidney Yates, the powerful Democratic congressman from Illinois who oversaw the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Warren Haas set up a screening of Slow Fires for Yates and his staff. “I’ve never been so impressed by a congressman making himself an expert in a very short time,” Haas says. “He’s a remarkable guy.”

With such a magnificent launch to the idea that microfilm was the key to the survival of civilization, it seemed a fair bet that Congress would increase its funding to the NEH’s Office of Preservation. But how much would the increase be? To make sure the campaign continued to gain ground, Haas decided that he needed somebody doing full-time advocacy work at the Commission on Preservation and Access, which he formally spun off as a separate non-profit charity, with the help of a million or two from the Mellon Foundation, while he continued to run the Council on Library Resources. Late in 1987, he brought in a woman who would prove to be a more determined brittle-book reverberator than any who had come before. She was Columbia University’s librarian and vice president for information services, Patricia Battin. “She will emerge,” 1said one of her colleagues at an awards ceremony in 1996, “as one of the most important figures of the second half of the twentieth century.”