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

I brought up Peter Waters and his question of whether any library anywhere had a substantial inventory of losses caused by brittle books crumbling to dust. In response, Battin patted the marbled boards of Croisset’s memoir. “This was withdrawn,” she explained. “That’s what we did. That’s our inventory — what’s been withdrawn.”

The book she had given me — its pages quite intact well over a decade after the microfilming company disbound it — qualified as an example of a book that was crumbling to dust? Had she possibly exaggerated somewhat?

“I don’t think the statistics were exaggerated,” Battin answered carefully. She said that Sidney Yates, the congressman, used to call her up saying “I need to know this and I need to know that.” Battin finally told him, “We’ve got the best information we can get. We can either wait ten years, and do careful counts, and lose more, or we can go on with these figures.” In other words, it’s an emergency because our statistics tell us so, and we have to go with the statistics that confirm that it is an emergency because since it is an emergency we have no time to waste gathering other statistics that might indicate that it isn’t an emergency, so please give us seventeen million dollars right now.

Battin finally said to me: “You probably are quite right that ‘turning to dust’ may well be hyperbole, as a way to catch the imagination of people.”

I, obviously, have a different view of the Brittle Books Program and the U.S. Newspaper Program than Patricia Battin does. The Newspaper Program, in particular, has, in my opinion, drained beauty and color and meaning from the landscape of the knowable past in ways that are reminiscent of what happened to the English countryside as a result of the government-financed destruction of the hedgerows in the fifties and sixties — and runs of daily newspapers, unlike rows of hawthorns, can’t be replanted. But after more than a year of interviewing librarians, I am aware that many of them don’t agree with me (although some do). I talked to Robert Dowd, who coordinates a subset of the Newspaper Program out of an office at the New York State Library in Albany. Dowd said: “There are cases of course when we are going to find the microfilm, it is not any good, and the papers from which the microfilm is produced are gone, because they were disposed of, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that.”

We have, I said to Dowd, lost intellectual content as a direct result of our massive effort to preserve it.

“I’m not going to disagree with you,” Dowd replied. “It’s absolutely true, we have, and it’s unfortunate. What’s the other option, we don’t try? That’s obviously not the way to go.”

But that is the way to go. When trying does far more harm than not trying, don’t try. Go slow. Keep what you have.

“Unless someone sits down with the papers to be considered for disposal, and compares issue by issue, perhaps even page by page,” there is no way to be sure that issues aren’t being lost, Dowd said.

Since that isn’t happening, I said, the conclusion we must draw, artifactuality aside, is that we have to hold on to the originals.

“Somewhere in the back of my mind I absolutely agree with you,” Dowd replied. He told me about some of the New York State Library’s volumes of a Buffalo paper that he has saved because, even though there is ostensibly complete microfilm, he happens to know that there are things in the volumes that the microfilm copy lacks.

And yet, though Dowd acknowledges the losses to history, his project cuts up almost all the newspaper volumes they film, for the usual reason: to get the “very, very best image we can” consistent with high-speed production. Were they forbidden to cut the volume, his filmers would have to take precious time moving it around under the camera: “You’d lay it down, then you’d move it over, then you’d flip it over, then you’d move it over — that kind of thing, so the handling becomes a factor.” If the library that owns a particular run of newspapers wants them back, their loose leaves are returned; if not, they usually go in the trash. Even the ones that aren’t thrown away are the worse for filming: once disbound, newspaper pages don’t stay aligned and have less edgewise strength-in-numbers than pages within intact volumes — they are harder to keep safe.

Dennis Hardin supervised work on the U.S. Newspaper Program at the Indiana Historical Society, and he continues to film local papers. “If the library wants them back,” Hardin says, “we wrap them up in kraft paper and send them back or take them back, but in a lot of cases, if they were looking to unload them to make more space, we make an agreement with them that we will just discard them.” Of the volumes he photographs, “very, very few go back on the shelf.”

But there are still runs of interesting Indiana papers — family-owned, small-town papers — that Hardin hasn’t been able to get his hands on. “Many publishers do not want to turn over their bound volumes to us,” he said. “For one thing, one of our policies here is that we have to take the bindings off…. Well, a lot of publishing offices, especially men and women who are elderly who have had the paper in their family all their lives, don’t want to see their legacy just taken and torn apart that way.” Hardin keeps his eye on these remaining caches of paper. “Having been at it for eighteen years, we are fairly aware of where certain unfilmed collections still reside. I’m still more than twenty years away from retirement, so some of these elderly publishers and county recorders and so forth, we just kind of keep track, and as we are able to gently prod them into doing the right thing with their newspapers before they retire, or maybe leaving their papers to someone who will take care of that for them after they’re gone.”

I pointed out to Hardin, as I had to others, that dealers make a living buying and selling ex-library wood-pulp newspapers volumes — many seemed to hold up surprisingly well. Hardin replied: “At any given moment, there’s lots of it that’s still in pretty good shape, but that’s not to say that some day, eventually, every one of them will crumble. It is inevitable — it is inevitable. And though you may still find bound volumes of papers from the twenties or even earlier — you may find a bound volume from 1912 that still has the Titanic story in it in pretty good shape — but as inevitable as the sinking of that ship was, those papers will crumble.”

In the summer of 1999, an ex-library bound volume of the New York Sun containing issues from April 1 through June 30, 1912, sold for three thousand dollars on eBay: it was in “immaculate” condition and contained weeks of news about the Titanic disaster. The sinking of the Titanic was not, of course, inevitable — other big ships sailed safely across the Atlantic before and afterward. The reason that ship sank was that human beings in positions of trust made horrible errors of judgment.

Which brings us back, finally, to the foreign-newspaper collection at the British Library. In August 1999, I got the list of the U.S. papers that the British Library was getting rid of. How could they be saved? In a rush, I formed the American Newspaper Repository, with my mother, my father, and my wife on the board of trustees — they were the only ones I felt I could ask to serve on such short notice. The repository’s purpose was, as a lawyer phrased it for the IRS, “to acquire, preserve, and make available to the public, original newspapers of historic and scholarly interest that would otherwise be destroyed or dispersed into private ownership.” (I took some satisfaction in seeing the word “preserve” used in its traditional sense.) Having faxed off letters of inquiry to the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Getty Foundation, I flew to London a week before the British Library’s September 30, 1999, deadline for bids. About forty volumes were set out for inspection by potential purchasers, and I was given a tour of the shelves. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. I suddenly felt, turning the pages of a beautiful Chicago Tribune volume from 1909, as if I’d stumbled on a lost, jewel-encrusted city in the jungle, and that curio dealers were waiting for a sign to begin chiseling away at it.