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

33. “NORTHAM COLONISTS HOLD MEETING”: Foster’s Weekly Democrat & Dover Enquirer, January 16, 1914.

CHAPTER 5 — The Ace Comb Effect

1. “News is selected”: G. C. Bastian, Editing the Day’s News, 1923, quoted in Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, p. 279.

2. “Papers are torn apart”: Joseph G. Herzberg, Late City Edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), p. 13.

3. “there will be many times”: James F. Green, “Problems with NYT Eds. & Indexes,” posting to Library Collection Development List, March 9, 1994.

4. Chicago Sun-Times published a story: The article, by Peter Lisagor, appeared in the Sun-Times on September 17, 1970. See Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 226–27. Some of what Nixon said was quoted by Henry Brandon in The Retreat of American Power (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), p. 134; Kimball would like to see it all in its original form.

5. Newspapers in Microform: Various volumes (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984 and earlier).

6. Bosse: David Bosse, Civil War Newspaper Maps: A Cartobibliography of the Northern Daily Press (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).

7. “significant gaps”: For example, fourteen days were missing from the Chicago Daily Tribune for 1862 and 1863, and January 2 through April 28, 1865, were missing from the Chicago Post. Bosse, Civil War Newspaper Maps, pp. 211–12.

8. Edwina Dumm: See Lucy Shelton Caswell, “Edwina Dumm: Pioneer Woman Editorial Cartoonist, 1915–1917,” Journalism History 15 (spring 1988). In another Ace comb variation, several libraries get rid of a particular title before anyone has microfilmed it, knowing, however, that another set exists; later, the single remaining copy available for microfilming turns out to have gaps. Matthew J. Bruccoli, working on a biography of John O’Hara, wanted to study a run of the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Journal, in which O’Hara had published his earliest journalism. (O’Hara wrote a column for the Journal called “After Four O’Clock”—of which, according to Bruccoli, O’Hara was “intensely proud.”) The Journal ’s own backfile had gone to the Schuylkill County Historical Society when the paper went out of business, but Bruccoli discovered that this run lacked volumes for 1924 through 1926, the period of O’Hara’s activity there. The other libraries in the area had, Bruccoli told me, donated their runs of the Journal to paper drives during the Second World War, “apparently with a certain amount of glee.” In his foreword to The O’Hara Concern (New York: Popular Library, 1977), Bruccoli writes: “The disappearance of this material resulted in the most serious hole in my research.”

CHAPTER 6 — Virgin Mummies

1. Dr. Isaiah Deck: “On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt, by Dr. Isaiah Deck, chemist, etc., New-York,” in Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New-York, for the Year 1854 (Albany: C. van Benthuysen, Printer to the Legislature, 1855), pp. 83–93.

2. 113 Nassau Street: Deck, “On a Supply of Paper Material,” p. 93. The New York Times: Elmer Davis, History of the New York Times, 1851–1921 (New York: The New York Times, 1921), illus. f.p. 74. Vanity Fair: “The staff of ‘Vanity Fair’ met on Fridays in the old editorial rooms, 113 Nassau Street, and drank, and smoked, and discussed the next issue.” Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Detroit: Gale Research, 1970), pp. 137–38, quoted in n. 63 of a biography by Dave Gross of nineteenth-century American hashish-eater and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870), nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Ludlow/THE/Biography/foot63.htm.

3. six thousand wagons: Joel Munsell, Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making (New York: Garland, 1980; facsimile of 5th ed., Albany: J. Munsell, 1876), p. 146. Munsell derived this figure from “The Rag and Paper Business,” New York Tribune, November 4, 1856, p. 3.

4. Mill women sorted: See Library of Congress, Papermaking: Art and Craft (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1968), illus. p. 67.

5. four-inch squares: “The woman stands so as to have the back of the blade opposite to her, while at her right hand on the floor is a large wooden box, with several divisions. Her business consists in examining the rags, opening the seams, removing dirt, pins, needles, and buttons of endless variety, which would be liable to injure the machinery, or damage the quality of the paper. She then cuts the rags into small pieces, not exceeding four inches square, by drawing them sharply across the edge of the knife, at the same time keeping each quality distinct in the several divisions of the box placed on her right hand. During this process, much of the dirt, sand, and so forth, passes through the wire cloth into a drawer underneath, which is occasionally cleaned out.” Richard Herring, Paper and Paper Making, Ancient and Modern, 3d ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1863), pp. 75–76.

6. cutting machine: O’Brien, Story of the Sun; Munsell, Chronology, p. 82.

7. black specks: Herring, Paper and Paper Making, p. 88. India rubber, writes Herring, “is a source of much greater annoyance to the paper maker than is readily conceived.”

8. equal to England’s and France’s combined: Munsell, Chronology, p. 144.

9. Rag imports: Munsell, Chronology, pp. 126, 138.

10. “Complaints of the price and scarcity”: Munsell, Chronology, p. 136.

11. “on account of the high price”: Munsell, Chronology, p. 136.

12. Several generations of papermakers: See Munsell, Chronology, and Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943).

13. a paper made from horseradish: Munsell, Chronology, p. 137.

14. “seem to invite us”: Quoted in Hunter, Papermaking, p. 233.

15. “reluctant to spare even a fragment”: Hunter, Papermaking, p. 286n.

16. “flames would literally spout”: Quoted in Bob Brier, Egyptian Mummies (New York: William Morrow, 1994), p. 318.

17. “locomotives of Egypt”: Mummies were bought “by the ton or by the graveyard” as locomotive fuel, Mark Twain half-skeptically noted in his 1869 book of travels, Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; or, the New Pilgrims’ Progress (New York: Hippocrene Books, n.d.; facsimile of Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1869), p. 632.

18. Punch: “Musings on Mummy-Paper,” Punch 12 (May 29, 1847), p. 224.

19. twenty-three tons: Munsell, Chronology, p. 120.

20. “fairer (Pharaoh)”: The pun is Deck’s, not mine.

21. exactly contemporary with the publication: Deck’s article is dated “March, 1855” at the end, although it appeared in the 1854 volume of the American Institute’s Transactions.

22. J. Priestly bought 1,215 bales: Munsell, Chronology, p. 142.

23. “It is within”: “The Rag and Paper Business,” New York Tribune, November 4, 1856.

24. “made from the wrappages”: “Paper from Egyptian Mummies,” Syracuse Daily Standard, August 19, 1856 (undated editorial reprinted from The Albany Journal ). See also Munsell, Chronology, p. 149.

25. “into the hopper”: Munsell, Chronology, p. 198. The report appeared in an editorial in the Bunker Hill Aurora, sometime in 1866.

26. Dard Hunter was oddly hesitant: Hunter, Papermaking, pp. 287–91. Joseph Dane goes further. He believes mummy paper to be a “delusion” and a “myth,” and he has no confidence in Hunter’s sources for Syracuse, Broadalbin, and Gardiner; and he isn’t at all sure about Deck’s Swiftian proposal, either. But Dane hasn’t read Deck’s proposal, which, he says, is “untraceable”—Hunter gave no citation for it and called it a “manuscript,” which makes Dane suspicious. I traced Deck by calling the helpful librarian at the Onondaga Historical Association, Judy Haven. Joseph A. Dane, “The Curse of the Mummy Paper,” Printing History 18:2 (1995).