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

Sixty-three thousand dollars, or about fifty dollars a volume, may seem like a lot of money to pay for old news, but it’s actually a bargain. To buy the equivalent microfilm run from Bell and Howell would cost about $177,000. We’re at a bizarre moment in history, when you can have the real thing for considerably less than it would cost to buy a set of crummy black-and-white snapshots of it which you can’t read without the help of machine.

The San Francisco Chronicle ’s fate also bothered me, so I got in touch with Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco, who uses old newspapers a lot in his historical work; he and I made a case to the California State Library for buying the Chronicle directly from Timothy Hughes, which they did (seventy years for sixty thousand dollars), with the help of the Wells Fargo Foundation. “We’re trying to keep a library here that doesn’t go goofy — that pays attention to the immemorial challenges and trusts of libraries,” Kevin Starr, the state librarian of California, told me.

And then there was The New York Times from 1915 to 1958. At first, Hughes was hesitant to sell it as a whole (“It sort of defeats my purpose,” he said), but eventually we were able to agree on a price of fifty-six thousand dollars, which is, at a guess, five times more than he paid for it, but still a fair price. With the money he’s making, Hughes plans to buy an electric lift to speed the retrieval of volumes on high shelves, and he is thinking of building another warehouse.

In February 2000, shortly after the lots, amounting to approximately 6,400 volumes, arrived at Hughes’s warehouse from England — each volume dutifully stamped BRITISH LIBRARY DISCARD — I drove to Williamsport to make sure the Chicago Tribune volumes were properly wrapped and labeled, and I handed Hughes a certified check. Sixteen pallets, ten tons of major metropolitan history, were forklifted onto a truck which took them to a warehouse in New Hampshire, near where I live. On June 29, forty-seven hundred or so more volumes arrived direct from the British Library, in two large Hyundai shipping containers. I cut the bands of a five-foot-high pallet and tore away some of the transatlantic shipper’s black plastic: there were the words THE WORLD repeated over and over on the stack of spines. Pulitzer’s originals were safe. What I have to do now is buy shelves and put the collection in order.

Maybe someday a research library will want to take responsibility for these things, or maybe not — whatever happens, at least they aren’t going to be cut up and sold as birthday presents. Sometimes I’m a little stunned to think that I’ve become a newspaper librarian, more or less, and have the job of watching over this majestic, pulp-begotten ancestral stockpile. And of course I worry about running out of money, and about devoting months and years of my life, and my wife’s life, to this effort. But at the moment nobody else seems to want to do what must be done. Six thousand square feet of space near where I live, with room to shelve all the papers and to hold a small reading room, costs about twenty-six thousand dollars a year to rent — about the salary of one microfilm technician. That seems cheap to preserve more than a century’s worth of inherent vice, and virtue.

Libraries that receive public money should as a condition of funding be required to publish monthly lists of discards on their websites, so that the public has some way of determining which of them are acting responsibly on behalf of their collections.

The Library of Congress should lease or build a large building near Washington, and in it they should put, in call-number order, everything that they are sent by publishers and can’t or don’t want to hold on site. If the library is unwilling to perform this basic function of a national repository, then Congress should designate and fund some other archive to do the job.

Several libraries around the country should begin to save the country’s current newspaper output in bound form.

The National Endowment for the Humanities should either abolish the U.S. Newspaper Program and the Brittle Books Program entirely, or require as a condition of funding that (1) all microfilming and digital scanning be nondestructive and (2) all originals be saved afterward.

CHAPTER 1 — Overseas Disposal

1. Ten thousand volumes: British Library Newspaper Library, History: The British Library Newspaper Library, www.bl.uk/collections/newspaper/history.htm (viewed August 15, 2000). Edward Miller says that “30,000 volumes, mostly of nineteenth-century British provincial newspapers” were “lost irretrievably.” Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974). The British Library became an entity separate from the British Museum in 1973; several years ago, over much protest, the library moved its main quarters from the domed reading room in Bloomsbury (where Swinburne, Virginia Woolf, Karl Marx, and many others worked) to a building near St. Pancras station.

2. Pulitzer discovered that illustrations: “The World ’s achievement consisted in using illustration not only as a marvel to be admired for its own sake, as in the case of the Daily Graphic, nor as an occasional fillip for an otherwise dull page, as in the case of the Herald, but rather as a major tool in the art of reporting the news.” George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 96–97.

3. “Since the adoption”: Charles Z. Case, “Photographing Newspapers,” in Microphotography for Libraries, ed. M. Llewellyn Raney (Chicago: American Library Association, 1936), p. 53.

4. “Old wood-pulp files”: A. F. Kuhlman, “Are We Ready to Preserve Newspapers on Films? A Symposium,” Library Quarterly, April 1935, reprinted in Studies in Micropublishing, 1853–1976: Documentary Sources, ed. Allen B. Veaner (Westport, Conn.: Microform Review, 1976).

5. “total space requirements”: Keyes DeWitt Metcalf, “Some Trends in Research Libraries,” in William Warner Bishop: A Tribute, ed. Harry Miller Lydenberg and Andrew Keogh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).

6. “All that it is necessary”: New York Sun, June 1, 1837, quoted in Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), p. 124.

7. brought prices way down: Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 742–45.

8. interesting article: Detroit Evening News, January 10, 1892.

9. “the acidity of the paper alone”: Klaus B. Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper in Light of Six Centuries of Papermaking in Europe,” in Environnement et conservation de l’écrit, de l’image, et du son (Paris: Association pour la Recherche Scientifique sur les Arts Graphiques [ARSAG], 1994), p. 136. See also Otto Wächter, “Paper Strengthening: Mass Conservation of Unbound and Bound Newspapers,” Restaurator 8 (1987).

10. scientists have been making this observation: Sally Roggia cites Paper Makers Monthly Journal (June 1920), which summarizes a work by Aribert and Bouvier: the “most frequent and most harmful chemicals remaining in the paper are free acids and free chlorine”; it is “important to avoid acidity in the alum.” Sally Roggia, “William James Barrow: A Biographical Study of His Formative Years and His Role in the History of Library and Archives Conservation from 1931 to 1941,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999.