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

4. James T. Babb: In the 1952–1953 annual report of the Yale University library, Babb announced that “our shelves are weighted down with many books and periodicals that we easily could do without.” In the past, he said, Yale was “ambitious to be a library of record; that is, have one copy of every book of any importance.” This was “a highly questionable ambition,” Babb believed; and it was time to undo what his forebears had done. He proposed, and the Yale Corporation approved, a “drastic” plan to “1. Decatalogue and discard material which is considered to have no further scholarly value,” and “2. Purchase or reproduce with our own equipment, in microtext form other books and periodicals, the original then being discarded.” James T. Babb, Report, 1952–1953, quoted in John H. Ottemiller, “The Selective Book Retirement Program at Yale,” Yale University Library Gazette 34:2 (October 1959).

5. “Roses, jasmine”: Fremont Rider, And Master of None: An Autobiography in the Third Person (Middletown, Conn.: Godfrey Memorial Library, 1955), p. 46.

6. “converted to psychism”: Fremont Rider, Are the Dead Alive? (New York: B. W. Dodge, 1909). Theodore Dreiser supplied the book’s title; David Belasco based a play on it called “The Return of Peter Grimm.”

7. “They are thoroughly disgusted”: Fremont Rider (writing as Alfred Wayland), Are Our Banks Betraying Us (New York: Anvil Press, 1932), quoted in Rider, And Master of None, p. 98.

8. “astonishing flood”: Rider, And Master of None, p. 99.

9. “You are right!”: Roosevelt’s letter (typewritten except for the last two sentences) reads: “Dear Mr. Rider: Thank you ever so much for your very nice letter and the pamphlet which you sent me. I have been much interested in reading it. You are right! Keep it up— Very sincerely yours, Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The letter is dated “At Warm Springs, Georgia, May 6, 1932.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Fremont Rider, Fremont Rider papers, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. (Suzy Taraba, Wesleyan’s university archivist and head of special collections, located it and sent me a copy.) Roosevelt gave his nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

10. He began a system: Rider, And Master of None, p. 152: “Wholesale methods of disposition do not bring the highest possible prices; but they enabled Wesleyan to dispose of its discards at very small handling cost”; after buying fifty thousand volumes and selling off thirty thousand, Rider was pleased to discover that “the additions to the Library actually cost it nothing.”

11. “mathematical fact”: Fremont Rider, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library (New York: Hadham Press, 1944), p. 8.

12. “natural law”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 16.

13. “veritable tidal wave”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 13.

14. “It is a problem”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 13.

15. “We absolutely must ”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 13. Rider’s book predated by a year Vannevar Bush’s famous article in the Atlantic Monthly, “As We May Think” (July 1945), which envisioned a scholar’s workstation holding thousands of books on microfilm.

16. later students of library progress: Robert E. Molyneux, “What Did Rider Do? An Inquiry into the Methodology of Fremont Rider’s The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library, ” Libraries and Culture 29:1 (summer 1994); and Steven Leach, “The Growth Rates of Major Academic Libraries: Rider and Purdue Reviewed,” College and Research Libraries, November 1976. Leach writes: “The Rider hypothesis cannot be used reliably to project library growth”; after reaching three million volumes, “an individual library can anticipate a deceleration in its rate of collection growth.” On the other hand, Leach confirms “Rider’s fundamental perception that library growth would become an increasingly perplexing problem for university libraries.” Molyneux finds “serious flaws in Rider’s analysis” and argues that Rider’s law of exponential doubling “resulted from a miscalculation which was either not caught in the subsequent versions of these tables or caught and not reported.” It is “troubling,” writes Molyneux, that “Rider’s analysis escaped criticism and was cited approvingly for so many years, especially given the fact that the theory so obviously contradicted common experience.”

17. “tacit confession of past failure”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 56.

18. “new expenses and fresh problems”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 57.

19. “gratifyingly close”: Fremont Rider, “Microcards vs. the Cost of Book Storage,” American Documentation 2:1 (January 1951), reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing. See also p. 203, where Rider (anonymously) says that the storage cost would come “gratifyingly close to 99 %,” and Rider, The Scholar, pp. 101–2. Rider had no qualms about clearing out existing card catalogs; his paper “The Possibility of Discarding the Card Catalog” appeared in Library Quarterly in July 1938.

20. “micro-reading machines”: Fremont Rider, “Author’s Statement,” in Keyes Metcalf et al., “The Promise of Microprint: A Symposium Based on The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library, ” College and Research Libraries, March 1945.

21. Microcard Foundation: Rider, And Master of None, pp. 204–5; Martin Jamison, “The Microcard: Fremont Rider’s Precomputer Revolution,” in Libraries and Culture 23:1 (winter 1988).

22. Atomic Energy Commission: See Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information, p. 47. The Department of Defense and the weather bureau were also users of Microcards: Rider, And Master of None, p. 205.

23. “produces heat which”: J. S. Parsonage, “The ‘Scholar’ and After: A Study of the Development of the Microcard,” Library Association Record, November 1949, reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing.

24. conventional microfilm: Microcards are hard on the eyes, but Readex Microprint, another opaque system that relies on reflected light, is worse, in my experience.

25. 1,600 Microcard-viewing machines: Jamison, “The Microcard.” In his autobiography, Rider claims that there were three thousand reading machines in use, but he often exaggerated. Rider, And Master of None, p. 205.

26. “To any one who has New England blood”: Rider, And Master of None, p. 112.

27. “All that we have to do”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 115.

28. “required reading”: Metcalf et al., “The Promise of Microprint.”

29. “it is difficult”: Edward G. Freehafer, in Metcalf et al., “The Promise of Microprint.” In the same symposium, Donald Coney of the University of Texas wrote: “Mr. Rider’s proposal for the transfer of books to micro-cards is a genuinely epochal idea. If widely adopted, it would mark the first significant change in books since the substitution of the codex for the roll.”

30. page full of praise: Rider, And Master of None, p. 202.

CHAPTER 9 — Dingy, Dreary, Dog-eared, and Dead

1. Rider’s friend and ally: Rider wrote a letter of support endorsing Clapp for the position of librarian of Congress. Betty Milum, “Eisenhower, ALA, and the Selection of L. Quincy Mumford,” Libraries and Culture 30:1 (winter 1995), n. 16. Clapp’s diary records a breakfast with Rider (July 13, 1951) and a request from the Microcard Foundation to borrow material from the Library of Congress for copying (March 16, 1951). Verner Clapp papers, Library of Congress. Both Rider and Clapp were frustrated inventors — Rider developed the Wesleyan book truck (“astonishingly practical,” he said in his autobiography), and he had “revolutionary” ideas for vertical-takeoff-and-landing propellers; Clapp became caught up in the inventions that the Council on Library Resources was paying for.