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

But it seems they weren’t. I had lunch with two learned booksellers, Ian Jackson and Peter Howard, who between them have examined hundreds of thousands of library discards from all over the world, as well as private caches in attics and sheds and all kinds of hot, inclement places. I read them some sample dust -passages, along with a statement from the Commission on Preservation and Access’s 1992 annual report that offered “the fact that over twenty-five percent of the world’s great collections was embrittled and lost to future scholarship.” Lost to future scholarship? Peter Howard blinked and said, “Seems like nonsense to me.” Ian Jackson observed that late-nineteenth-century South American book-paper was some of the worst he had come across; its manufacture was influenced by the German chemical industry, which created, Jackson said, “the horrible paper that browns.” He gave as an example the hundred-odd volumes produced by a Chilean scholar, José Toribio Medina, between 1880 and 1930, books that “remain the bedrock of South American bibliography.” They were all reprinted in the sixties, because the original paper couldn’t hold up to heavy reference-room use: it was brown and fragile. “The paper is just — it’s worse than German,” Jackson said. And yet even copies of Medina in the original exist and are collected. Jackson owns thirty thousand books, most from the acid-paper era; in his life he has run into “a few dozen”—not thousands or hundreds — that have reached what he called the Wheat Chex stage.

Since German paper seemed to present unusual problems, I also talked to Helmut Bansa, editor of Restaurator, an English-language conservation journal published in Munich. Bansa said that books can become so brittle that they can be handled only with the “utmost care.” “But they will not embrittle to dust,” 2he said. “This is not true.” Nor has he ever seen (and this is a very important point) a book that could not be copied. “The worst state is if you have a sheet of paper and you turn it around an angle, let’s say, of ninety degrees, then it will break. This is the worst state I’ve ever seen.”

I also talked to Peter Jarmann, a bookbinder and conservator at St. Bonaventure University, south of Buffalo, who has perfected a technique called “quarter-joint binding” that allows books to open flatter (while facedown on photocopiers, say) with less damage. Jarmann has encountered books, especially those with oversewn bindings, that are so brittle that their pages cannot be turned without breaking them out of the binding. Has he come across any books that are turning to dust? “I think they’ve slowly discovered that this idea that they’ll all turn to dust is a myth,” he said. “The books get weak to a point, and they kind of stop at that point. And whether they break out of the binding kind of depends on the binding. They’re more likely to fall apart in a stiff binding than in a binding that gives.”

John Dean, head of preservation at Cornell, told me that his library has the usual problems with flakes of paper at the photocopiers and that their Southeast Asian collections are extremely delicate. “But as far as actually, literally turning to dust,” Dean said, “I must confess I have never really seen that phenomenon myself, and I don’t think any of the research has actually demonstrated that this is the case. I think that that particular rhetoric is a metaphor, and it may be an attention grabber, I’m not really sure.”

I brought up the dust question with Robert McComb, the former paper scientist from the Library of Congress. McComb said: “What they were afraid of is if they even took the book off the shelf and put it on a book cart, it might start falling apart. There have been a few examples of that. I didn’t say a lot, but there’s been a few.” He’s seen exactly two books that “when you opened the covers a little bit they just broke into hundreds of little pieces.” McComb says he once came across a book in which a piece of bacon had been used as a bookmark. “How long it had been in there, Lord knows, but wherever that bacon grease had gone, that paper was exceedingly fragile.”

I asked Ellen McCrady, who edits the Abbey Newsletter, the periodical of record for U.S. book preservationists and conservators, about the Commission’s notion that we must convene a vast communal filming bee right now because millions of books will crumble over the next twenty years. “I think they leapt at that solution and oversold it,” McCrady said. “Pat Battin was gung ho on microfilming, and to her this was the solution. I used to resent that. She used to call it ‘preservation.’ Microfilming is not preservation. Microfilming is microfilming — it’s copying. She was overstating her case, and associating herself with higher things, and so on.” McCrady believes that microfilm ought to be used to save things that would not otherwise survive, but Battin took it too far. “If you want to be a leader, you have to have credibility, and you shouldn’t distort reality in order to gain the favor of the masses. It’ll backfire.”

Lots of microfilming — that was the important thing. Get as much under the camera as possible, as soon as possible, using “a comprehensive mass-production strategy.” 1And yet Battin’s “major attack” 2on the brittle-books problem was not just about microfilm. There was also the deacidificational thrust and the alkaline-paper thrust. To further the cause of deacidification, the Commission on Preservation and Access hired Peter Sparks, who was by then looking for work as a freelance consultant, to write a slim study called “Technical Considerations in Choosing Mass Deacidification Processes.” And that was about it.

The alkaline-paper thrust, on the other hand, was a commendable attempt to convince publishers to use (in a slight misnomer) acid-free paper: paper that had not merely a neutral pH when it came off the roll, but an extra dose of Rolaidsian additive mixed in, a buffer or “alkaline reserve” which would counteract any hydrolytic toxins that the fibers might secrete or otherwise encounter in their golden years. In adopting this goal, the Commission nudged its way into a campaign already in progress, headed by Ellen McCrady, who had for years argued for the use of acid-neutral paper; her Abbey pH pens are used by librarians as a quick check of acidity. (The pen line comes out a pale purple if the book is alkaline, yellow if it is acid.) Allied alkaline forces were able to celebrate a victory sooner than anyone could have foretold, mainly because stricter EPA regulations were compelling papermakers to redesign their plants in order to reduce the acidity of manufacturing effluents. March 7, 1989, was the big day for acid-free paper: 3urged on by Vartan Gregorian and a writer named Barbara Goldsmith (who later joined the board of directors of the Commission on Preservation and Access), a group of authors (including Robert Caro, Joan Didion, and Kurt Vonnegut) and publishers (including Harper, Random House, and Simon and Schuster) pledged that they would publish first printings on acid-free paper. (Actually, some of the publishers had gone acid-free for hardcovers several years before.)

In time, most of the bigger papermakers switched to alkaline-buffered output, following the lead of the S. D. Warren Company; some of the smaller ones couldn’t afford to and closed. Today, most hardcover books state on the copyright page that they are printed on acid-free paper. (The competing hope that the industry also employ recycled postconsumer fibers, the chemistry of which is difficult to control, has possibly lopped some years off the life expectancy of some “permanent” papers, however.) Vartan Gregorian’s New York Public Library placed a full-page ad in The New York Times to celebrate acid-free “pledge day,” and its public-relations office took the opportunity to issue a press release filled with some further alarming (and false) numbers — such as “35 out of the 88 miles 4of shelves in the Central Research Library contain 2½ million dying books”; “Seventy percent of all books printed in this century will be unusable in the year 2000”—followed by a deferential nod to the NYPL preservation program, which runs “one of the largest and most sophisticated microfilming laboratories in the world.”