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

Until Battin came to Washington, librarians (with the exception perhaps of Peter Sparks) had not prominently claimed that books were turning to dust. It wasn’t true, for one thing. Slow Fires alluded to the idea, but only in passing, and there had been a March 1987 piece by Eric Stange 10in The New York Times Book Review, based on interviews with Welsh, Sparks, and others, entitled “Millions of Books Are Turning to Dust — Can They Be Saved?” But Stange was a print journalist, not a librarian, and he tells me that the title wasn’t his idea anyway — editors came up with it. Battin, however, with an authority derived from nearly ten years as director of one of the country’s great book collections, used dust boldly, repeatedly. In one of her early communiqués from the Commission on Preservation and Access, in June 1988, she outlined the specifics of the cooperative microfilming plan that she and the NEH had just presented to Congress. Twenty libraries would each microfilm 7,500 of their volumes every year for twenty years, for a total of three million volumes — the three million being “the estimated number of volumes 11it would be important to save in order to preserve a representative portion of the 10 million or more volumes that will turn to dust by that time.” Robert M. Hayes had estimated that 11.4 million books were going to enter the “at-risk” category in the next twenty years — now suddenly ten million of them were going to turn to dust.

In a publication called Change, Battin wrote that “approximately 25 percent of the world’s great collections are already brittle and turning to dust because of the alum sizing introduced into paper-making around 1850”; in a 1989 piece for Educational Record called “Institutions Have Moral Responsibility to Preserve Great Book Collections,” she mentioned those “university librarians who have long witnessed and attempted to stay the crumbling pages of books as they slowly turn to dust.” The 1990 annual report for the Commission added the red-flag adverb literally: “Books, along with other paper-based materials, are literally turning to dust because of the chemically unstable acid-based paper that became popular in the mid-1800s.”

Battin’s articles went out to libraries around the country, accompanied by a leaflet written by one of the Commission’s interns: “Ideas for Preservation Fund Raising: A Support Package for Libraries & Archives.” Here is its first paragraph:

Have you seen a first edition

12

copy of Emily Brontë’s

Wuthering Heights,

or perhaps a 1847 edition of her sister’s

Jane Eyre

? They are most likely in the same condition as Milne’s 1926

Winnie the Pooh

and Huxley’s 1932

Brave New World:

Dust…. Each copy slowly destroyed as it sits quietly unnoticed in the literature section of your library. (Ellipses in original)

Have no fear — the first editions of the Brontës, Huxley, and Milne are doing fine. The statements in this passage are so untrue that they induce a kind of blinking awe. Once the dust delusion took hold, it seems to have neutralized any scruple of restraint among its proponents. They just started making things up.

The Commission was also a clearinghouse for inspirational fund-raising publicity. They copied and distributed, for instance, an article from the University of Tennessee’s alumni magazine that begins: “A slow fire is burning 13in Hodges Library. It’s destroying books that can’t be replaced. There isn’t any smoke, nor are there flames. But thousands of books are crumbling into dust, fatally burned by the acid in their own pages.” The article, “Goodness Gracious, Great Books Afire,” ends with a request for checks made payable to the Library Preservation Fund.

The more the word dust was repeated by library folk, the more real the idea became. Sidney Verba, Director of the Harvard University Library (and a member of the founding board of the Commission on Preservation and Access), pounded the broadloom before Congress in 1989:

If what differentiates humans from other species is the ability to use language, and if what differentiates civilization from pre-civilized forms of life is the ability to record that language by written words, then it follows that our essence as humans is contained in the written words we pass from generation to generation. These written words, entrusted to library collections, are turning to dust — and with that part of our lives is going as well.

In 1990, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Nature of Things aired an episode about brittle books called simply “Turning to Dust”; staff of the Commission on Preservation and Access “collaborated” (so its 1989 annual report stated) with the CBC during the development of the show.

Perhaps the most arresting document from those consciousness-raising days is a flyer produced by the American Library Association in 1990. On the front are three sequential photographs of A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh. (It appears to be a dummy book, not a real edition of the novel.) In the first picture, a few raggedy-edged pages poke out of the text-block; in the second picture, the front cover has developed three black lesions that look to have been made with a blowtorch, while cornflake-sized paper bits hemorrhage from the fore-edge; in the third picture, there is a cremational pile of fine dark powder and tiny fragments — only the vestigial word Dust is still legible. Below the three pictures are the words Going, Going, Gone. The sequence is a fictional simulation, needless to say; no book ever, anywhere, has spontaneously disintegrated in this manner — not in a research library, and not during a photo shoot for a publicity brochure. Inside the front flap, the American Library Association’s text informs us that “literally” millions of books are turning to dust, that more than a quarter of the books in libraries “may not survive the century,” that the one “tried-and-true” technology is microfilming; and we are urged to “let Congress know that money spent on book preservation is money well spent.” On the back of the flyer it says: “Funded in part by the Commission on Preservation and Access.”

Not only are people liable to spend more money on a problem when they are good and scared, but they are also more likely to accede to things that they would otherwise find abhorrent, such as mass-disbinding, if they believe that a state of emergency warrants them. Was it a state of emergency? Were millions of books turning to dust? I called up Peter Waters to get an idea of what he thought of Slow Fires and the embrittlement crisis.

From 1971 until he retired from the Library of Congress in 1995, Waters oversaw the training of a generation of conservators; he has been sewing, gluing, rehinging, resizing, washing, de-verminizing, and generally giving careful thought to paper and print and their future prospects for most of his life; and, like all great book conservators, he has eavesdropped on the history of papermaking through his fingertips. But Waters is also one of the world’s experts on book emergencies. His experience began in Florence 1in 1966, when the Arno’s sludge, admixed with “undesirable wastes,” filled the treasuries of the Biblioteca Nazionale. There were two major disasters in Florence, according to Waters — the first was the flood itself, and the second was the “extreme post-recovery damage” to the books resulting from the manner in which they were handled (piled wet to head height) and dried in their mud-beplastered state. (Interestingly, volumes of twentieth-century newspapers fared better than some two-hundred-year-old gelatin-sized rag-paper books in the tobacco dryers that officials used for some of the collection.) Waters was consulted about recovery efforts after the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, and after the 1988 inferno at the Russian Academy of Sciences Library in Saint Petersburg. He was called in to advise after a fire in 1978 at the Klein Law Library in Philadelphia — Klein was building a new library building; the entire collection was insured; Klein’s librarian, who “seemed to be in a total state of shock,” said he had “no plans” to enter the rare-book room for several days; when Waters and his colleagues finally convinced him to allow them into the room, they found that water from the fire hoses had risen to a height of three feet before it had drained away, causing the swollen books to burst from the shelves; many were “covered with mold to a thickness of at least a centimeter.”