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

That some librarians realized that what they were doing was crazy, as Paul Conway says they did, and that the guillotinage got no worse than it got, is due in large part to the abolitional insistence of one scholar, G. Thomas Tanselle. Tanselle, an editor of Melville, is vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a former president of the Grolier Club; he teaches classes on bibliographical analysis and scholarly editing at Columbia, and he owns a large collection of books produced by several dozen American publishers between 1890 and 1930. (Nothing in his collection has crumbled, by the way.) In December 1990, at Columbia’s library school (now disbanded), and a month later at the New York Public Library, Tanselle delivered a pointed but civil speech, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading”:

Scarcely a day now passes

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that the microfilming epidemic does not thrust itself on my attention in some way, either through my discovering that certain materials are no longer available in original form in a particular library or my being asked to join an appeal aimed at rescuing a category of material scheduled for destruction.

Tanselle mentions seeing, at the New York Public Library’s annex, “a whole range of shelves of nineteenth-century newspapers marked with signs that read ‘Microfilmed. To be discarded.’ ” He says: “One makes do, of course, with whatever survives, for there is no alternative. But when we are confronted with such recent loss of evidence, loss produced intentionally in the name of preservation, we have yet another reason to remark on the pervasiveness of human folly.”

As the human folly continued, Tanselle in 1992 gave an address at Harvard’s Houghton Library (published in the Harvard Library Bulletin ) in which he said that all library books should be “placed in the charge 2of those who are experienced in the care of artifacts,” and he quoted a nineteenth-century bibliographer: “The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation.” (A wish to keep what is physically on the shelf does not, however, have to “stand in the way,” Tanselle observed, “of an enthusiastic acceptance of the developing technology for the electronic dissemination of texts.”) In 1993, with mass-microfix still at large, he produced a strongly worded but still remarkably gentlemanly screed for Common Knowledge, which began, “The present time will be regarded in the future as an age of book destruction.” Its title, “The Latest Forms of Book-Burning,” proves to be a direct reference to Slow Fires and its sponsor:

The term “preservation”

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in the title of the Commission on Preservation and Access was never intended to refer to preservation of physical objects containing texts, but only to texts abstracted from objects; and in practice this “preservation” has been an agent of destruction for the objects.

Slow Fires

is the title of the Commission’s widely publicized film about the self-destruction of books containing acidic paper; the copies used in the Commission’s program of microfilming, however, are doomed to a much swifter conflagration.

That piece turned some heads, and then in 1995 Tanselle wrote, for a Modern Language Association committee, a “Statement on the Significance of Primary Records” that was adopted by the MLA’s executive council. Tanselle again praises organized efforts to film and to scan, but he says that regardless of how texts may travel among minds in the future, we have decisions to make about the tangible objects that are in libraries now. Unless the public grasps the value of these primary records, he writes, “sizable portions 4of certain classes of textual artifacts face destruction.”

Tanselle’s tenets, though they were ridiculed by some as being impractical or self-marginalizingly extreme, are really quite simple and helpful. One is that we shouldn’t spend lots of time trying to determine which books have artifactual value (or “intrinsic value”) and which don’t. According to standard library theory, your rank-and-file book is assumed to have no intrinsic value; it is a dented and tarnished word canteen whose contents may be poured off at will into other, often smaller receptacles. A relatively few books — ones that bear a famous person’s signature or marginalia, for example — may qualify as objects 5of artifactual value, and these objects often live in rare-book departments. In practice, writes Tanselle, this categorization is influenced mainly by book dealers’ price lists: “Books of high market value 6will receive expensive conservation treatment, and other books will be microfilmed or photocopied and then thrown out. Such a policy is not worthy of a research library.” The distinction between rare books and utilitarian word-ware is not only impossible to make — because the degree of future rare-bookishness is unforeseeable now, as is the degree of informational interest — but harmful, as well: “I think it is undeniable 7that the common attitude of disregard for the physical evidence in books has produced an insensitivity to the destruction of books that would not be condoned by professionals dealing with any other category of artifact,” Tanselle writes.

The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas. They are things and utterances both. And libraries, Tanselle believes, since they own, whether they like it or not, collections of physical artifacts, must aspire to the condition of museums. All their books are treasures, in a sense; the general stacks become a sort of comprehensive rare-book room — not staffed and serviced as rare-book rooms are, obviously, but understood as occupying the same kind of unreformattable sensorium. Only by “approaching books as museum objects 8do we most fully and productively read them,” Tanselle provocatively writes. Once a large research library makes the decision to add a particular book to its collection, it has a responsibility to try to keep that physical book in its collection forever. That duty continues in force even if publishing undergoes revolutionary changes and libraries buy only electronic texts from some moment forth. The keeping needn’t involve expensive measures, however: “Most books are not frequently used, 9and neglect can sometimes be an artifact’s best friend.”

There are plenty of vicissitudes of the flesh, to be sure, and libraries, like museums, will inevitably get rid of things, but if they can at least try to begin to understand, as museums generally do, that everything they own is a piece of human handiwork as well as a bitmappable or re-keyable or filmable sequence of words, then we have a better chance of avoiding some of the damage that will otherwise accompany the ongoing shrinkathon.

Once the Modern Language Association came out in favor of primary records, feelings began to shift a little. The indiscriminate spine-shearers and the upper-tier administrators who approved their work began to get the sense that they’d gone a little overboard. Patricia Battin retired from the Commission on Preservation and Access in 1994—succeeded for a brief period by an equally radical futurist from Cornell named Stuart Lynn, and then eventually, mercifully, as the Commission was folded back into the renamed Council on Library and Information Resources, by a moderate, historically minded humanist, Deanna Marcum. And there is now a new book category in some libraries: “semi-rare,” as at the New York Public Library, or “medium rare.” The medium-rare book is defined as possessing more intrinsic value than the common book, but not so much as a rare book. Tanselle would rightly question the taxonomic confusion in these distinctions, but at least they indicate improvement. Possibly you won’t be allowed to copy a medium-rare book facedown on a library’s copying machine (which can be rough on spines and pages); on the other hand, you won’t necessarily need to read it in a special room with white gloves on.