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

I read Waters a passage from one of Patricia Battin’s articles, “The Silent Books of the Future: Initiatives to Save Yesterday’s Literature for Tomorrow,” published in 1991. “If swift and drastic action 2is not taken,” Battin writes, “the great voices of 19th century scholarship will be stilled far more effectively and finally than by war, flood, censorship or fire.” Then comes the parade of scary numbers: “80 % of the materials in our libraries are published on acid paper and will inevitably crumble. The Library of Congress alone reports that 77,000 volumes in its collections move each year from the ‘endangered’ state to brittleness and thence to crumbs.”

Thence to crumbs? What did Waters think of that kind of talk? “Well, unfortunately I think I have to say that it’s absolute nonsense,” Waters said. “The truth of the matter is, you have to go and look very, very hard indeed to find really crumbled books.” Waters does not question that books become brittle with age; he does question the notion that a diagnosis of brittleness means the end of a book. “Only if the collections are physically abused will they start breaking up,” he told me; the phenomenon of “yellow snow,” associated with oversewn bindings, should simply move us to handle books with more care, even enclose them in protective boxes. (Peter Waters’s son Michael Waters designed a computer-controlled box-making device to enclose thousands of fire-damaged books in Saint Petersburg at a cost of roughly a dollar per boxed volume; the Library of Congress’s custom-box maker is also one of the younger Waters’s machines.) “If books are protected in boxes, and left in good order, even in the normal environmental conditions of a library, there is no mechanism — not chemical or physical — for them to crumble. It simply can’t happen.”

Waters has reviewed the statistical deterioration survey of the Library of Congress’s collections and found that its data fail to support the endlessly repeated estimate of seventy thousand (or seventy-seven thousand) books going brittle yearly — never mind Battin’s “and thence to crumbs” fillip at the end. “You’re still going to meet a great number of people who believe that time is running out, or has run out, and that all this material is going to crumble,” he told me. “And there really is not one single piece of hard evidence to support it.”

Waters calls Slow Fires “that ridiculous movie”; of the phrase “slow fires” itself, Waters says that it “misrepresents the real-time state and conditions of the Library of Congress’s collections” and that it has “given birth to ignorance as to the survivability of so-called brittle book material.” He has been saying these things publicly for years. In a 1992 speech entitled “The Deterioration of Library Materials: A Doomsday Inevitability or a Manageable Preservation Challenge?” delivered while he was still at the Library of Congress, he said:

Let us first dispense with the most commonly held belief, which in my opinion has led to panic and uncontrolled and ineffective reformatting policies throughout the United States. It is,

that once paper reaches the brittle condition, it will not survive.

There is no basis in truth or scientific evidence to support this belief. Brittle book material can and will survive for an indefinite period of time, if they are physically protected and not abused by stack attendants, readers, poor housing conditions

and administrative policies that ignore or write off their existence.

(Emphases in original)

As an example of the longevity of extremely weak paper, Waters instances the Library of Congress’s dime-novel collection. These books were printed on groundwood pulp; for years they were stored in poor conditions (high heat and humidity). The collection now contains, Waters says, “some of the most brittle material that you could ever wish to see. Now the whole collection has been boxed, and if I could live for five hundred years, I would still expect them to be in the condition they are now, providing they’re not physically abused.” (The boxes also serve to caution dime-novel researchers to handle the paperbacks carefully.) Waters writes: “Here is a crucial question — does any library have a substantial inventory of losses caused by brittle books crumbling to dust? I think not. Total loss is much more likely from theft and vandalism.”

But in 1980, Peter Waters unwittingly supplied one of the reformattisti’s most potent images, printed in the Smithsonian Magazine and subsequently in The New York Times Book Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and on the cover of American Scientist. When Smithsonian was doing a piece 3on the opening of the Madison building (“called by some a monstrosity”), they sent a talented photographer named Yoichi R. Okamoto to take pictures. One of Okamoto’s tasks was to document the problems of preservation; he showed up in Peter Waters’s office in the Adams building. “He was talking about what he’d been told about brittle books,” Waters recalls, “and he said, ‘Is there some way you can demonstrate this?’ ” So Waters manually “scrumpled up” a page into a handful of fragments — as his old boss Frazer Poole 4had done in many a brittleness demonstration before him, and as William Welsh was to do some years later in Slow Fires.

Okamoto said, “Well, supposing you blew it?” They went out to the corridor with several books and began blowing around fragments. Okamoto wasn’t satisfied with these shots and returned to take more. “Although I shall go down in history as destroying books at the library,” Waters says, “it was a great photograph.” When it appeared in Smithsonian (full page and in color), the caption somewhat misleadingly read, “ ‘Brittle book’ flies apart as conservator Peter Waters blows on it. Slowing decay is major Library job.”

The brittle book in the photograph would not have flown apart if Waters hadn’t first reduced it to cornflakes by hand. “I scrumpled it and blew the remains,” he says.

Peter Waters is not alone in his opinion that the brittle-books petitioners, most notably the Commission on Preservation and Access, used Rachel Carsonesque language that was, in Waters’s words, “designed to dramatize a situation, which can lead to funding support, rather than depicting an accurate reflection of the state and rate of collections deterioration.” Paul Conway, Yale’s head of preservation, calls it “the Henny Penny school,” where you say the sky is falling, “and then it turns out to be something else.” Conway explains: “There were principled people who felt that the way to build national money is to focus, focus, focus and raise the issue to the national agenda. So it became a political process, which is focusing and narrowing, where voices are raised and attention is gained. If you take that logic to its extreme, you have to build a crisis state. You read the literature from the late eighties, you get this constant drumbeat.” Fire… calamity… crumbs… endangered… chemical disease… dying patients… facing extinction… dust. Patricia Battin at one point even wrote of “millions of rotting books,” 1a counterfactualism of brazen repulsiveness. She probably plucked it from Slow Fires, which talks of books “rotting on the shelves.”

But it was the earnest avowal that books were “turning to dust” that really enlisted sympathy outside the library world, because “dust” as a terminal state is so siftably granular, so irreclaimably fragmented, so impossible to copy. What was words is now dust. The phrase certainly worked on me. Even though I had spent a fair amount of time in library stacks around the country and had never encountered a book that could be described as having attained a near-dustlike (as opposed to dust y ) condition, I believed that millions of these books, or at least thousands of them, must be hidden away in places that visitors never saw. I trusted that library authorities were saying something that was close to the truth.