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

Bell and Howell/UMI now owns microfilm negatives for most of the big papers in the country; and, to the extent that there are no originals left to scan when scanning resolution improves, its “master” microfilm (some of it inherited from now defunct filming labs and of poor quality) will perforce become the basis for any future digital versions of old newspapers, access to which the company will also control. Bell and Howell has successfully privatized our past: whether we like it or not, they possess a near monopoly on the reproduction rights for the chief primary sources of twentieth-century history.

Where did all the spurned papers go? Many were thrown out — and continue to be thrown out as statewide filming projects progress — but a colossal residue rests at a company called Historic Newspaper Archives, Inc., the biggest name in the birth-date business. If you call Hammacher Schlemmer, say, or Potpourri, or the Miles Kimball catalog, to order an “original keepsake newspaper” 5from the day a loved one was born, Historic Newspaper Archives will fill your order. In the company’s twenty-five thousand square feet of warehouse space in Rahway, New Jersey, innumerable partially gutted volumes wait in lugubrious disorder on tall industrial shelves and stacked in four-foot piles and on pallets. I paid a visit one winter afternoon. The Christmas rush was over, and the place was very quiet. Torn sheets, sticking out from damaged volumes overhead, slapped and fluttered in a warm breeze that came from refrigerator-sized heaters mounted on the ceiling. When an order came in for a particular date, a worker would pull out a volume of the Lewiston Evening Journal, say (once of Bowdoin College), slice out the issue, neaten the rough edges using a large electric machine called a guillotine (adorned on one side with photos of swimsuit models), and slip it in a clear vinyl sleeve for shipping. Every order comes with a “certificate of authenticity” printed in florid script.

Not everything was on shelves — some were piled three pallets high against the wall; and the University of Maryland’s large collection, a recent arrival, occupied about a thousand square feet of floor near the loading dock. The Herald Tribune set that the Historic Newspaper Archive is gradually dismembering is bound in pale-blue cloth and is in very good condition (where it hasn’t gone under the knife, that is); its bookplates announce 6that it was the gift of Mrs. Ogden Reid, who owned and ran the Tribune, more or less, in the forties and fifties. It is a multi-edition file: five editions for each day are separately bound. I would guess that this was at one time the Herald Tribune ’s own corporate-historical set; Mrs. Reid no doubt believed that she was ensuring its careful continuance by donating it to a library. Hy Gordon, the no-nonsense general manager of the archives, told me that he believes he got his Herald Tribune s from the New York Public Library. Gordon sold me one volume from the set, for February 1–15, 1934 (including rotogravure sections and color cartoons by Rea Irwin) at a discounted price of three hundred dollars plus shipping.

(The NYPL divested themselves of their Tribune run, but it must be commended for keeping a huge cobbled-together set of The New York Times, from 1851 right up through 1985, several decades of which exist in a special rag-paper library edition. They will let you read from it in room 315, where they serve “semi-rare” material under supervision. The run has some gaping holes — for instance, there are no volumes at all for the years from 1915 through 1925. And no research library, I believe, has saved the Times in paper over the past decade: the paper now prints thousands of color photographs a year, but you wouldn’t know that from the film.)

I told Hy Gordon that I thought some librarians had exaggerated the severity of newsprint’s deterioration. “Oh yeah, yeah, it doesn’t fall apart,” he agreed. “The ends might crack, but that’s all. The newspaper’s still fine.”

I said I was distressed that so many libraries were getting rid of their bound newspapers.

“Don’t be distressed,” he said. “There are a lot of things more important in life.”

Are there really? More important than the fact that this country has strip-mined a hundred and twenty years of its history? I’m not so sure. The Historic Newspaper Archives owns what is now probably the largest “collection” of post-1880 U.S. papers anywhere in the country, or the world, for that matter — a ghastly anti-library. They own it in order to destroy it. “Here are rare and original newspapers with assured value many from the Library of Congress,” says the Archives’ sales brochure — all for sale for $39.50 an issue. 7I saw identifying bookplates or spine-markings from the New York State Library, the New York Public Library, Brown University, the San Francisco Public Library, Yale, the Wisconsin Historical Society Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and many others. A now mutilated run of the New York World has this bookplate:

Presented to

THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

by

THOMAS W. DEWART

former President of The Sun

and by

ROY W. HOWARD

President and Editor of the

New York World-Telegram and The Sun

And there was a shelf of volumes bearing this warning:

THESE FILES ARE FOR

PERMANENT RECORD OF

The St. Louis Republic

HANDLE WITH CARE

Positively Must Not be Cut

or Clipped

The warning has not been heeded.

In April 1999, a few months after my visit to Hy Gordon’s warehouses in Rahway, I first came across a brief description of the British Library’s disposal project on their website. I was trying to find out whether European libraries keep the originals of their own domestic newspapers after they have microfilm backups made. (They often do; 1in fact, the British Library, to its great credit, still binds the big English dailies, like the Telegraph and the Guardian. Many American newspaper librarians would view that activity as eccentric and pointless.) Papers of “special historical importance or illustrative interest are not included in the disposals project,” I read — but that couldn’t be right, since on the accompanying list was the World, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Hearst’s New York American (only two years of it, though), the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (during the period that Theodore Dreiser wrote a column for it), the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and other major dailies. Each of these runs is of historical importance, needless to say, and some of them are bursting with illustrative interest. And each one has now, thanks to decades of copycat self-plunder in U.S. libraries, reached an almost unimaginable state of artifactual scarcity.

I called up a friendly-sounding person named Bhavna Tailor, who is in charge of Acquisitions and Stock Control at the British Library’s Newspaper Library (“stock control,” 2I have since learned, is English librarianship’s gentle phrase for “getting rid of the stuff you don’t want”), and I did my best to convey to her the preciousness of the things on her disposal list, and the mediocrity of some of the microfilm copies in which the library was placing its trust. The same day, I e-mailed her a letter. “My hope is that this extraordinary trove can be kept intact and available for future scholarship,” I said, “not cut up and sold piecemeal by dealers.” I would be willing to pay for removal and storage if I had to, I told her, either via a non-profit or as a private citizen, if it came down to a choice between that and seeing the papers irretrievably dispersed. Ten days later, I got a response from Tailor. She would keep my letter on file, she said, “and if there are no takers for the remainder of the US titles, then I will contact you and we can take matters from there.” I forwarded the list to Lucy Caswell, because she was the only librarian I knew who was actively taking in large wood-pulp backfiles (as they’re called), but she was still trying to digest the tractor-trailer loads of bound volumes and single sheets that her library had bought from Bill Blackbeard.