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

The Kansas State Historical Society, founded by a group of newspaper editors in 1875, had, until a few years ago, an unusually fine out-of-state newspaper assemblage, including a pre-Civil War file of the New York Tribune, a long run of the Boston Investigator, and a large number of otherwise impossible-to-find Western and territorial papers. Then the society put up a new building that was smaller than it should have been and, in 1997, had an auction. One observer told me that the lots that Kansas ended up selling were so unusual, so valuable, that a group of buyers got together ahead of time to divvy things up, so that the bidding wouldn’t go completely insane. It was “once-in-a-lifetime stuff,” this observer said. The next step, according to Patricia Michaelis, the director of the library and archives division, was to dispose of most of the society’s comprehensive collection of original Kansas papers printed after 1875, offering them first to institutions and then throwing out the leavings. Michaelis believes that the original papers are doomed anyway: “They’re just inherently going to crumble apart, no matter what you do to them, because of the acid content.” About half of the people who use the library come for the newspaper collection. Do they like the microfilm? Michaelis laughed. “Well, it’s the only option we give them.”

At another midwestern historical society, out in a pole barn, a collection was stacked twelve feet high and twenty feet wide near rows of shaft-drive bicycles and the disassembled pieces of a nineteenth-century machine shop. There were thousands of volumes of local papers and a run of The New York Times. Shawn Godwin, 2an employee of the society at the time, wrote me that this “cube of history” was made to disappear by order of the head archivist: the volumes were chainsawed in half and fed into the steam engine that powered a vintage sawmill exhibit. “I asked one of the more sympathetic assistant directors if it would be possible to sneak a few of the volumes away,” Godwin writes. “He indicated if I was discreet and did not make a big deal about it it might be okay.” Godwin saved a small stack and tried to avoid looking at the column of smoke rising from the sawmill.

The cleanout continues. Since the mid-eighties, the vast U.S. Newspaper Program, 3a government project whose aims are to catalog as many newspapers in the country as possible (a worthy goal) and to microfilm those local papers that were passed over in earlier decades, has given libraries about forty-five million dollars in so-called preservation money — and zero dollars for storage space. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which pays for the U.S. Newspaper Program (and funds a related enterprise, the Brittle Books Program), makes no requirement that libraries actually preserve, in the physical sense of “reshelve,” their originals after they have been sent out for federally funded filming. The effect of all this NEH microfilm money has been to trigger a last huge surge of discarding, as libraries use federal preservation grants to solve their local space problems. Not since the monk-harassments of sixteenth-century England has a government tolerated, indeed stimulated, the methodical eradication of so much primary-source material.

Surely this material is all available on the Web by now, or will be soon? In time, eighty or a hundred years of a great urban paper could well become the source for a historical database of richness and utility. But at the moment, the scanning and storing and indexing of hundreds of thousands of pages of tiny type, along with halftone photos and color illustrations, would be a fearsomely expensive job; and even if money were limitless, there would remain the formidable technical challenge of achieving acceptable levels of resolution using digital cameras for formats as large as those of a newspaper spread. Nor will high-quality digital facsimiles of our major papers ever exist unless we decide right now to do a much better job of holding on to the originals — even the mangy ones with crumbly edges. You can’t digitize something that has been sold off piecemeal or thrown away, after all; and attempts to scan the page-images of newspapers from old microfilm have not worked well — and will never work well — because the microfilm itself is often at the squint-to-make-it-out level. HarpWeek, a venture that offers a digital copy of Harper’s Weekly on the Web, spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to scan the available microfilm, but they found that thirty percent of the resultant images were bad. Now they’re working from two original sets of the journal, both of which they’ve cut out of their bindings in order to set the loose pages flat on the scanner.

Amid the general devastation, there are some librarians of courage and foresight whose ccomplishments are as yet unsung. The Boston Public Library, owing to the belief of Charles Longley — the recently retired curator of microtexts and newspapers — that his institution’s accumulated newspaper files are “part of the City’s own heritage 4and the Library would be remiss in not retaining them,” not only has held on to all its existing collections but has continued to lay away all the recent output of Boston and selected Massachusetts papers, wrapped in brown paper, right up through the present; and the library has taken ownership of important sets of bound Boston newspapers once owned by Harvard and other libraries in the region as well. Longley was lucky: his views were shared by the city’s longtime librarian, the late Philip McNiff; often a change of administration proves fatal to a great collection.

At Ohio State, a librarian named Lucy Caswell, who wears quiet silk scarves and directs the Cartoon Research Library, is almost single-handedly attempting to rebuild a bound-volume collection of national scope — buying back for scholarly use material offered by dealers and collectors, most notably the lifetime harvest of Bill Blackbeard and his San Francisco Academy of Comic Art.

Several years ago, Caswell bought some volumes of the Chicago Tribune (from a dealer, who bought them from another dealer); two of them, one from 1899 and one from 1914, were out on a trolley at the Cartoon Research Library when I visited — four-inch-thick buckram-backed bulwarks, with heavy pull-straps triple-riveted to the binding in order to assist the frowning researcher in hauling their massiveness from the shelf. Their exteriors are scuffed and battered, but they are things of beauty nonetheless; they made me think of Mickey’s book of broom-awakening spells in Fantasia. I opened the volume from 1914. The inside boards displayed the seal of Harvard University, and below it I read:

FROM THE BEQUEST OF

ICHABOD TUCKER

[Class of 1791]

OF SALEM, MASS.

The paper wasn’t crumbling — it was easily turned and read. I called Harvard’s microform department and asked if they had the Chicago Tribune on paper from 1899 and 1914, just to be sure that the Ohio volumes weren’t from a duplicate set that they had sold. A sincere-sounding reference woman in the microforms department said, “Oh, we would never have hard copies going back that far — they just don’t keep.” They don’t keep, kiddo, if you don’t keep them.

Aside from what Lucy Caswell and Charles Longley have been able to save, the annihilation of once accessible collections of major daily papers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is pretty close to total. Some state libraries — Pennsylvania’s, for instance, in Harrisburg — reached back further than the 1870s or 1880s as they designed their disposal programs, and used 1850 as a draconian dump-after date. “Pennsylvania was the first state to undertake statewide microfilming and destruction of its newspaper files,” Bill Blackbeard told me. “They did an extraordinarily, brutally thorough job of it. Unfortunately, some of the earliest color Sunday comic strips were printed in Philadelphia newspapers. So I never have gotten to see very many of those.” The State Library of Pennsylvania did not keep its original bound set of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and neither did the Free Library of Philadelphia — a librarian there wrote me that wood-pulp newsprint “falls apart.” Bell and Howell Information and Learning (formerly University Microfilms) will, however, sell the whole Inquirer to you on spools of archival polyester, encased in little white cardboard boxes, for $621,515.