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

Edmund King, the director of the Newspaper Library, gave me tea in his office. I described to him, at the point of tears, the historical importance of Joseph Pulitzer’s World, and I asked if there was some way to convince the Library to call off its sale and keep the papers, or to act responsibly by transferring them to a non-profit entity such as the one I’d just started. I explained how the vintage-newspaper market worked in the States, and I told him that there were almost no duplicates of these papers left, and that the duplicates weren’t duplicates in any case because of editional variations. The decision to dispose of the foreign papers was made by the board several years earlier, King said. “As things stand, because we have gone to dealers, perhaps the best thing to do is to act as if you are a dealer, and place a bid for the runs.”

A few days later, on a Saturday, with the help of Nicolas Barker, editor of The Book Collector and a former head of preservation at the British Library, I got in touch with Brian Lang, the library’s director, on his cellular phone. (He was waiting in line at a supermarket when I first reached him.) I asked him to call off the sale. “I don’t have an answer for you now,” Lang said, but he seemed somewhat taken aback and willing to give the problem thought.

Heartened, I got back to the States and faxed Lang a long follow-up letter that I thought would clinch it. “The very best thing for these papers would be for the Newspaper Library to reshelve them carefully, tightly control their use, and keep them safe,” I wrote. I acknowledged the library’s space difficulties — but perhaps there was a way to turn that problem around, I suggested, and use the present disposal emergency to inspire a major donor to endow a new rare-newspaper storage facility in Colindale. If the library’s decision to dispose of the listed papers was firm, then I hoped they would consider donating the papers to the American Newspaper Repository. I listed the members of the repository’s advisory board, thinking that some impressive names might help sway him. (Two of the advisers, who have since become trustees, are William Hart, Chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Thomas Tanselle, an obvious choice.) I closed the letter by asking Lang again to suspend the September 30 sale, and to “take steps to ensure that this great surviving collection is kept intact for future scholarship.”

Lang got the letter, cc’d to Edmund King, on Monday afternoon; Thursday was the deadline for bids. I heard nothing on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning I started to get nervous. I called Lang’s office, and then I faxed a letter to King requesting “that no irrevocable sales or other dispersals of any of the foreign newspapers listed take place at least until I have gotten a response to my letter to Brian Lang.” At 5:30 P.M. British time, on the very eve of the deadline, Mike Crump, Director of Reader Services and Collection Development, e-mailed me. Brian Lang was in Estonia, he wrote. “We believe that at this stage we cannot stop the sale of material to dealers who have been examining it in good faith.”

There was also the good faith of international (and inter-generational) scholarship to consider, but no matter. By then it was too late to lodge protests with upper-level luminaries. The only thing to do, I realized, if I wanted to save at least some of the papers, was, as Edmund King had suggested, to bid on them myself, on behalf of the American Newspaper Repository. At 1:30 A.M. on September 30, 1999, I faxed in over $50,000 worth of blind bids, distributing the money unequally over every lot that was for sale. (I kept it to around $50,000, because that’s how much my wife and I figured we would clear if we liquidated one retirement account and paid taxes and early-withdrawal penalties. If no grant money came through, we planned to buy the papers with that money, and then pay for the shipping and storage of the collection by cashing out the other retirement account.) I bid £9,200 (about $15,000) for the Herald Tribune and the same amount for Pulitzer’s World; £4,875 (about $8,000) for the Chicago Tribune; £300 apiece for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the short run of Hearst’s American; £2,875 for The New York Times; and £2,440 for the San Francisco Chronicle. And I bid three pounds each for a hundred or so other titles. I stressed that the bids didn’t constitute a withdrawal of my plea that the British Library keep the collection or donate it as a whole to the repository, and I asked them to keep in mind, in the event that my bids were below what others offered, that the repository was committed, as dealers were not, to keeping the volumes whole. A day later, on the advice of William Hart, I submitted a second global “preservation bid” equal to the sum of all outstanding high bids received by the deadline plus one thousand pounds.

Mike Crump acknowledged my first bid letter as received, and then there was silence. I wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair, and to Chris Smith, Britain’s Heritage Secretary, and to John Ashworth, the chairman of the British Library’s board, and again to Brian Lang. Thomas Tanselle wrote a letter urging the library to reverse its position. Nicolas Barker wrote John Ashworth to say that the sale of the newspapers, under conditions of secrecy, would cause an “international scandal.” Barker observed that “no good has ever come from previous dispersals from the Library.” (The last significant dispersals came early in the nineteenth century, Barker said: “The gain was temporary and soon forgotten; the loss is permanent and irremediable.”) Lucy Caswell introduced a resolution at the annual meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association entreating the British Library to act responsibly; it passed unanimously and was sent by the association’s president to Brian Lang.

These efforts got nowhere. Alan Howarth, the Minister of Culture, Media, and Sport, wrote me that he was “assured that the procedures for disposal were rigorously followed in this case,” and he added that he had “no power to intervene in the Library’s decision.” Two weeks after the sale deadline, the library sent out its official notification: everything on the list was going to the highest bidder; no allowances were made for nondestructive intent. (The “preservation bid” was disallowed, as coming after the deadline.) My offers prevailed for the World and the Herald Tribune, and for ninety other titles, but failed for the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Motion Picture Daily, The Christian Science Monitor, and about thirty others. The library required payment by March 31, 2000, which was, thankfully, five months away and allowed time for fund-raising. Their invoice said, “Deselection (Newspapers) £19,282.00.”

Most or all of the titles I failed to get went to Timothy Hughes, the dealer in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I was especially unhappy over the Chicago Tribune (my great-grandfather was a Chicago newspaperman), and I called around to libraries in Chicago to see how serious a loss the destruction of that title would be. A helpful cataloger at the Chicago Historical Society wrote: “I went through the online database that contains the holdings records of the U.S. Newspaper Program and found that no one has a good run of the Trib on paper. Many institutions have the full run on microfilm, but the hardcopy issues that exist are mostly scattered issues and short (under 5 year) runs.”

Reading that, I found I couldn’t tolerate the idea that the British Library’s Tribune would be broken down. I asked Timothy Hughes to quote me a price. He wrote back that “its value to me is in selling the individual historic issues as well as the potential for birthday sales as I currently don’t have any runs from the mid-West. Exploring its potential to me over the years I’ve decided that the very least I would have to sell the run for would be $63,000. Otherwise I will just keep the run as it would be more profitable to me in the long run.” I told him he had a deal. The MacArthur Foundation came up with a grant of fifty thousand dollars, which covered much of the purchase price, and my mother and mother-in-law made contributions, as did Viscountess Eccles, a scholar-collector of Boswell and Johnson who with her late husband endowed the British Library’s David and Mary Eccles Centre for American Studies. Later, the Knight Foundation made a one-hundred-thousand-dollar grant.