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

02. unhappy time at a pesticide company: Kelly told me that the plant would get a boatload of white arsenic from Europe and make a big pile of it in a warehouse. Then, in the heat of summer, managers would hire men off the street to shovel it into the reactor to make pesticides like calcium arsenate and lead arsenate. The men “were sweating like pigs, and they’d get arsenic dust all over them,” Kelly said. “Inside of about two weeks, they’d be unable to work because of arsenic poisoning. The plant said, ‘It’s okay, just go ahead and work, you won’t get hurt.’ Finally they couldn’t work any more so they just laid them off and got some more in.” Kelly left the company after nine months.

03. thirty and seventy pounds of liquid DEZ: The DEZ was initially diluted with a solvent (which “provides increased safety in the handling of the agent,” according to Williams and Kelly’s patents) but later used in its undiluted, neat form. John C. Williams and George B. Kelly, Jr., “Method of Deacidifying Paper,” U.S. patent nos. 3,969,549 (July 13, 1976) and 4,051,276 (September 27, 1977).

04. “thoroughly acidified”: John Williams, phone interview, April 2000.

05. General Electric was lukewarm: GE was “unwilling to take the risk of an incident with the chemical diethyl zinc.” Carolyn Harris, “Preservation of Paper Based Materials: Mass Deacidification Methods and Projects,” in Conserving and Preserving Library Materials, ed. Kathryn Luther Henderson and William T. Henderson (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 67.

06. “small air leaks”: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Book Preservation Technologies, OTA-0-375 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), p. 30. One GE worker burned his arm when some diluted DEZ “dripped on his skin from piping that he was cleaning.” The injury did not require hospitalization (p. 73).

07. “we have demonstrated”: George B. Kelly, Jr., “Mass Deacidification,” in Preservation of Library Materials, ed. Joyce R. Russell (New York: Special Libraries Association, 1980). In the discussion that followed this paper, Kelly was asked whether other conservation labs might adapt an existing vacuum-drying chamber to treat books using DEZ. “It is possible,” Kelly wrote, “but you are going to have to have some extremely good engineers and extensive modifications of the chamber. You cannot afford one mistake. One mistake and you have a disaster on your hands. Proceed with caution.”

08. “400 to 600 years”: W. Dale Nelson, “Space Technology Used to Prolong Life of Books,” Associated Press, May 23, 1982, Nexis.

09. “at least five million volumes”: “Conquest of Brittleness, the Ruin of Old Books,” The New York Times, August 8, 1984, sec. B, p. 8, late city final edition, on microfilm. In a 1990 Times article on deacidification, Malcolm Browne, the great war journalist, apparently divided 77,000 by 365 days in order to come up with a fresh-seeming number: “At a rate of more than 200 volumes a day, books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, are turning to dust. But after a decade of research, accidents and administrative delays, the library reports that it is about to take a major step toward stopping the rot.” Malcolm W. Browne, “Nation’s Library Calls on Chemists to Stop Books from Turning to Dust,” The New York Times, May 22, 1990, p. C1.

10. “handling of diethyl zinc”: Library of Congress Information Bulletin, April 23, 1984; quoted in Karl Nyren, “The DEZ Process and the Library of Congress,” Library Journal, September 15, 1986.

11. “no known safety risks”: Daniel Boorstin, “Letter to the Honorable George M. O’Brien, Member of Congress [Transmitting] Statement on the Library of Congress’s Diethyl Zinc Gas Phase Book Deacidification Process,” July 10, 1984, quoted in a footnote to Smith, “Deacidifying Library Collections.”

12. weapons procurers: The library’s secretiveness and its unwillingness to document its experiments in peer-reviewed journals are discussed in Jack C. Thompson, “Mass Deacidification: Thoughts on the Cunha Report,” Restaurator 9:4 (1988).

13. 113 degrees: Glenn Garelik, “Saving Books with Science,” Discover, March 1983.

14. “self-sustaining and uncontrollable”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 25.

15. The results were “mixed”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 31, 42–43.

16. Thus many of the stacked books: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 42–43.

17. “Cause of odor a mystery”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, October 1994, lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).

18. “a Library of Congress representative”: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center, Accident Investigation Board Report of Mishaps at the Deacidification Pilot Plant, Building 306 on December 5, 1985, and February 14, 1986, James H. Robinson, Jr., Board Chairman (September 4, 1986), p. 96.

19. Later, Welsh admitted: Representative Vic Fazio “criticized the librarians for secretly diverting funds from other library programs to support the DEZ experiment,” reported The Washington Post. “ ‘Specifically,’ [Fazio] wrote Boorstin last Dec. 2, ‘over $2.3 million of the $3,740,474 obligated since fiscal year 1981 has come from funding sources other than those approved by…Congress.’ ” Phil McCombs, “Library’s Preservation Go-Ahead; Dangers of Book-Saving Process are Discounted,” The Washington Post, February 11, 1987, p. C-1, final edition, Nexis. At the hearing, Fazio said, “You didn’t realize you had gotten hooked on this approach.” Welsh answered, “I realized I was hooked, but not that I was using that much money without your permission.” Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, pt. 2, February 10, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 417.

20. “The time drivers”: See NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 79.

21. “Shortly after the water injection”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 6.

22. “[Name whited out] has been applying pressure”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 80. A memo of December 5, 1985, reporting the “Incident at Magnetic Test Quiet Lab 306” to a NASA manager ends thus: “Any inquiries concerning this incident should be referred to Dr. Peter Sparks, Library of Congress, 202-287-5213.” NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 49.

23. Before NASA had completed its investigation: NASA had produced an interim report on the December 5 explosion, but not a final one, when the second explosion took place. “By February 14, 1986, Mr. Marriott’s group was well into the investigation of the December 5, 1985, mishap and verbal reports had been provided to the Director of Engineering, and an interim written report was provided on January 17, 1986” (NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 15). One respondent stated that he was “upset that they were working out at building 306 before the report from the December 5, 1985, Accident Review Board was released” (p. 92). The Library of Congress asserted that the DEZ facility was shut down after the “fire” in December “pending a review of the cause of the fire.” Cleanup began, the library claimed, “following completion of the review,” whereupon the “second incident occurred.” Library of Congress, “Library’s Book Deacidification Program Moves Forward Following Review of Incidents and Pilot Plant,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:27 (July 7, 1986).