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

“We’ve cut two or three hundred thousand books here in flat platen work,” he told me. “It is what it is. I know that the types of materials that we were working from were such combat-battered brittle materials anyway that there wasn’t any circulation left in them. I also realize the dilemma of in any way projecting a preservation agenda based on destruction, even though that’s been possible in a couple of weird ways.”

I wondered what percentage of the disbound Booklab books were kept by libraries afterward. If I was to go to a university and ask to see their disbound, shrink-wrapped Booklab originals, I said, what would my chances be of seeing something?

“I would say that your chances are probably very minimal,” Frost answered. “Certainly in the ten- to twenty-percent category of stuff that we did. I could be wrong.” The libraries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art don’t throw away their leaf masters, according to Frost. “They don’t believe in brittle books. That’s almost seven or eight or nine libraries right there, in that one museum. But that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule that most of these would be thrown away.”

I asked him who had been the verbal source original for the estimate that microfilming had resulted in the discard of “over sixty percent” of the books recorded. John Dean, of Cornell, had come up with that a long time ago, Frost said.

“I don’t think so,” said John Dean, when I reached him. “I have no basis for that kind of number at all.” Dean did confirm a discussion in 1993 (at an annual meeting of the NEH’s Office of Preservation) of how much to keep after microfilming. “Faculty and bibliographers and curators were saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to throw this stuff away, I don’t want it filming.’ ” The idea that libraries should now digitize their goods so that other libraries can throw out their copies is one he attributes to “the brutalist school.”

The oddity here is that Cornell has been a hotbed, or testbed, of crypto-brutalists — but that’s a matter for a later chapter. Perhaps the sixty-percent estimate Gary Frost had in mind came not from Cornell’s John Dean, who disowned it, but from Yale’s Gay Walker. Walker wrote in 1989: “Based on a non-scientific survey 2of the field, the majority of filmed volumes are subsequently withdrawn from collections.” The survey to which Walker refers was eventually distributed as part of an informational compilation called Brittle Books Programs, produced by the Association of Research Libraries. “Of all responding libraries,” 3write the surveyors, Jan Merrill-Oldham and Gay Walker, “nearly half discard 90 percent or more of the original copies of volumes after they have been reproduced.” Almost a quarter of the thirty-five libraries surveyed kept none of the volumes after reformatting, they found; two libraries declined to answer. Walker does not volunteer Yale’s own percentage; but included in this compilation is another 1986 document in which she writes that items at Yale designated for withdrawal should “have all ownership marks removed 4or marked out and a ‘discard’ stamp applied to the inside front flyleaf and the inside back cover as well as the title page… items are sent to the Gifts and Exchanges Unit when a truckload has accumulated.” In a 1987 article for Restaurator, Walker offers another hint: “In the great majority of cases, 5the very deteriorated, brittle, disbound original is withdrawn from the collection and often placed in a library booksale for a minimal amount.” Walker was “Arts of the Book Librarian” at Yale when she wrote that.

Walker and Merrill-Oldham’s survey is, in any event, the best estimate I’ve found of discarding practices at the height of the brittle-books agitation. To be cautious, though, let’s say that only half of the books, not (as Walker says) “the majority,” were thrown out. Between 1988 and 1993, the NEH paid for the microfilming of about 500,000 books, and the Library of Congress’s Preservation Microfilming Office filmed another 150,000 6volumes or so. At a fifty-percent retention rate (which is, for the Library of Congress of that era, extremely conservative), 325,000 books were removed from U.S. libraries as a direct result of federal money. Add the newspapers to that.

But the losses exceed that number. In the same paper, Walker wrote that the “filmed copy must be a perfect one — other copies of the book will be discarded upon the strength of the listing.” Does this still seem strange — that libraries would cast aside their own copies of books simply because they have been judged by others worthy of filmed preservation? It was never a strange idea within the preservation movement. Recall that Robert Hayes had built it into his cost-benefit analysis: the creation of a film would have a multiplier effect around the country, triggering local bibliectomies. (Sometimes a library would buy the microfilm from the filming library to replace its original; but sometimes the library would simply feel better about deselecting its original in the knowledge that preservation-quality microfilm was potentially there to be bought, even if it wasn’t actually bought.) Hayes figured that five physical copies would disappear from libraries for every book filmed, but let’s say, more conservatively, that from 1988 through 1993 fifty percent of the filmed books spawned three physical disappearances — one at the filming library and two of duplicates somewhere else. And let’s say that none of the remaining fifty percent (i.e., those books that were physically reshelved post-microfilming) prompted any parallel discards elsewhere — highly unlikely, but also conservative. That triples the loss-estimate and brings it to 975,000 books. Almost all these books were old and out of print, so the replacement cost, assuming that these original editions could be found on the used-book market, and ignoring costs of recataloging and reprocessing, is high — say (again conservatively) forty dollars a book. As a very rough, lowball guess, thirty-nine million dollars’ worth of originals left our nation’s libraries, thanks to federal largesse. It’s as if the National Park Service felled vast wild tracts of pointed firs and replaced them with plastic Christmas trees.

It isn’t just accessible physical copies of books that we lost during that awful period; we also lost content. “A major concern about filming 7is that many filmed titles have missing pages, even though the film was inspected,” Gay Walker wrote — the Ace comb effect applies to books, too. (That is, when libraries replace several differently damaged copies of a book with microfilm of the same copy of a book, and the microfilm turns out to lack something, we’re less well off, informationally as well as artifactually, than we were before the program began.) In the late eighties, the University of California at Berkeley sent test shipments of thirty to fifty books each to five top-notch microfilm labs, telling them that they wanted “the highest quality film 8of the books sent to them, totally reproducing the text of the volumes.” Even in the test batch, one of the five filmers was discovered to have missed pages. Other problems continue to crop up: a 1993 audit of microfilm from Ohio State, Yale, and Harvard found that one third of the film collections “did not resolve to 9the established ANSI [American National Standards Institute] resolution standards”; the auditors hypothesized that “some camera or processing settings were incorrect.”

Helmut Bansa, editor of Restaurator, told me that he has heard that some U.S. libraries “want to have the originals back.” He wouldn’t give details, though. “I can only report that some American libraries that have done this microfilming and throwing away now regret to have done that.” Which ones in particular? “Even if I would know I wouldn’t tell you,” Bansa said.