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

There are about eighty preservation administrators at work now. The only major research library in the country that still has no full-time or part-time preservation administrator is the Boston Public Library. It is also the only large library in the country that has kept all of its post-1870 bound newspaper collection.

Not all preservation administrators approved of what the Commission on Preservation and Access was up to, though. “I just saw Pat as leading the whole profession down a tube,” says Randy Silverman, the director of preservation at the University of Utah’s library. Utah has a dry climate, and Silverman, a practicing bookbinder and conservator, knew that there wasn’t a brittle-paper crisis in his library. In fact, he wasn’t running into many brittle books at all, and in the ones he did see “gutter-snap,” as he called it, was often the problem: the pages broke at the perforations of an oversewn binding. He and Matthew Nickerson, 1a graduate student, replicated the standard double-fold survey procedures on a random sample of books from the university’s collections and found, as they expected, brittleness rates at about two percent — their point being that storing books at lower humidity was possibly a better (and far cheaper) way of extending their lives than cutting them up to take pictures of them.

Silverman’s main objection to Battin’s NEH-funded program, however, was that in the first several years there was no money for book repair. “The profession was steered by this great fear,” he told me, and the fear led to mass microfilming, which “took the focus away from other activities. My hobbyhorse is trying to repair books — you know, fix them — and there was no money left for conservation. All the money was going to film. And every time you got done filming, you were able, in some people’s minds, to simply throw the books away.” There were plenty of things, Silverman knew, that an experienced book-repair person could do for a population of damaged or fragile books 2to keep them on the shelf and available for use — and the repairs wouldn’t cost nearly as much as would microfilming them or giving them high-end conservation treatment. Detached pages, flapping spines, a broken text-block — many troubles were fixable if you knew what you were doing. But most preservation administrators were trained as reformatters and managers and not as practitioners of a traditional craft; having no personal experience doing repair, they sent things to the microfilmers that would have required only a little thread, some paste and Japanese paper, and some close attention.

Early on, Silverman began writing a polemic against the Commission and its selling of “microfix” (his word) as the sole solution, but he buried it. “It was really loaded ten years ago. I would shoot off my mouth in private. It was too dangerous to say stuff, because in fact you couldn’t change it.” Some of his colleagues had private misgivings, 3as well; but, as Silverman wrote me after we talked, “the reality was nobody could stand up to Ms. Battin because they all had their hand in the NEH till that she was stockpiling.”

Once, however, Silverman challenged Battin publicly. It happened at an American Library Association convention, circa 1991; Battin was giving an update on the national microfilming campaign. “She made it clear that people really needed to participate in the brittle book program by writing grant proposals,” Silverman says. There was a lot of money that year for microfilming, and it was in danger of not being spent: “If it wasn’t used she feared that Congress would determine that the brittle-book crisis (as she had promoted it to them) would appear not to require funding and once the critical momentum was gone she feared it would never be reestablished.” Silverman spoke up during the question-and-answer period. “I tried to make a point that the exclusive focus on microfilming equaling ‘preservation’ was leaving the repair of the physical collections unaddressed. She told me that book repair was a local maintenance issue and did not qualify for national funding because it was each library’s responsibility to maintain its own collection.”

Battin wrote authoritatively in 1990: “The issue of repair as an alternative to microfilm was not considered as a federal responsibility in the initial legislation.” Later, apparently in response to protests from some grantees, the NEH changed the rules somewhat; George Farr was at pains to point out several times to me that the NEH has “provided support” for the repair and reboxing of more than fifty thousand books (out of more than eight hundred thousand that were filmed), but when I repeated Farr’s claim to one preservation manager, this manager (who asked for anonymity) said, “Whoa, whoa, first, the assertion is wrong. He hasn’t paid for fifty thousand books. He has allowed us to pay for the repair of books as part of our cost share. Do you know how these grants work? We write a grant to NEH, NEH gives us two dollars, and we have to add in a dollar of our own. It’s two to one. The NEH guidelines allow us to repair books that have gone through the process, as part of our contribution. In the ultimate bottom line, which is the total of what we’ve contributed, [along] with what NEH provides, he’s technically correct. But there is no money in the federal budget to support the repair of collections.”

Patricia Battin gave me a brittle book when we met one afternoon in Washington, at the offices of the Council on Library and Information Resources on Massachusetts Avenue. The book is a play by Robert de Flers 1and Francis de Croisset, in French, accompanied by a memoir and a frontispiece photograph of de Flers in profile (he’s reading a sheet of manuscript) and a facsimile of his handwriting. It is a charming little book, published in Paris in 1929 and library-bound in pink, black, and red marbled boards soon thereafter (since it originally came out in paperback), and now tied with a soft, salmon-colored shoestring. The bookplate says “Columbia University in the City of New York” in Gothic letters, and bears the seal of the university, in which Wisdom, or some nobly enthroned woman, says something in Hebrew while holding up a book to three naked children. There is a scriptural reference at the feet of the children, citing a passage in Peter: “Laying aside all malice 2and guile and as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby.”

In 1986, as part of a “Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project” 3organized by the Research Libraries Group (which Patricia Battin had run for a time), Columbia stamped the book WITHDRAWN and sent it to Micrographic Systems of Connecticut, where it was neatly guillotined and then filmed, with financial support from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation — whereupon Patricia Battin took it with her to Washington as a sample. The paper is brown around the edges and has the Necco-wafer smell of acidic paper, but it is otherwise intact; somebody has apparently performed a fold test on the lower corner of page 115. Fifteen years ago, Columbia’s preservation administrators decided that this book was at risk for immediate disintegration and deserved emergency filming with our tax money; today, though a photographer reduced it to a stack of loose leaves, nothing remotely decompositional has occurred. On a hot day recently, I untied its string and held up some of its pages; they did not tear or shatter or do anything except move air and make interesting soft flapping noises. Columbia University has a reel of master microfilm now and no book.

Guillotining was de rigueur in the 1988 Brittle Books plan. Not every book was cut, but most were. “I’ll try to explain this in a way that I don’t get misunderstood,” Battin said to me, when I asked her why the books couldn’t simply have gone back on the shelf after they were microfilmed. “Here we have a disaster of major proportions, and I do believe that. We have limited amounts of money. If you do it in a cottage-industry way, in which you try not to disbind the book, it’s going to cost you a lot more than if you say, okay, we have to make this economic decision, and we can save the knowledge in more books if we do it on this kind of mass—” 4Battin hesitated for an instant and then continued, “which means disbinding.”