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

Grand Prize: The Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter, November — December 1989. Daniel Boorstin, however, says some excellent things in the film about the book as a technological achievement and, perhaps with diethyl zinc on his mind, calls the library “a laboratory of our memory and a catalyst of our expectations.”

“do anything to help”: Commission on Preservation and Access, “ ‘Slow Fires’ Film Wins Award, is Widely Shown,” Newsletter insert, February 1988.

“giant Brittle Books exhibit”: See the photograph in the Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 20 (February 1990). The exhibit included a leather-bound book, two feet by three feet, with some distressed bits of paper arranged in front of it, and a quotation from Slow Fires reproduced in large letters: “The great task of libraries, worldwide, is the preservation of the ordinary.”

“ ‘slow fires,’ triggered”: Quoted in Merrily Taylor, “Paper — Why Friends Should Care About It!” Among Friends of the Library of Brown University 5:2 (March 1989).

CHAPTER 24 — Going, Going, Gone

“She will emerge”: Billy E. Frye (provost of Emory University and chairman of Battin’s Commission on Preservation and Access), speaking in 1996 CAUSE Elite Award Winner: Patricia Battin (Washington, D.C.: CAUSE, 1996), videotape.

Booz, Allen and Hamilton: The grant was “sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries in cooperation with the American Council on Education under a grant from the Council on Library Resources.” Warren Haas was president of the Association of Research Libraries when he got the grant for Columbia. Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Organization and Staffing of the Libraries of Columbia University (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1972).

“the personal computer”: Patricia Battin, “The Electronic Library — a Vision for the Future,” EDUCOM Bulletin, summer 1984.

“The basic shape of our collections”: Patricia Battin, “Preservation at the Columbia University Libraries,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program, p. 37.

“active assault”: Battin, “Preservation at the Columbia University Libraries,” p. 37.

oversewing: W. Elmo Reavis invented the oversewing machine and began selling it in 1920. Like Barrow’s process of lamination, oversewing was something that seemed fast and cheap and durable at the time, but it is irreversible, and it has worked out badly. You begin by milling off the back of the book. This destroys the serried integrity of its signatures, so that it can’t from then on be repaired in the traditional way, by “sewing through the fold,” and it removes about an eighth of an inch of inner margin. The oversewing needles stab obliquely into the paper from there, consuming more margin. If you then try, a decade later, to rebind an oversewn book, you have to mill off the back a second time, and you may end up with a book so tightly bound that you can barely get it open enough to read the inner text; the pages are likely to break and pull out at their puncture-points as you try to force them open, say, facedown on a photocopier. Between 1920 and 1986 (when specifications underwent modifications), countless books were oversewn that shouldn’t have been, as libraries decommissioned or reduced their in-house binderies and sent books to commercial firms equipped with Elmo Reavis’s angle-stabbing machines and their descendants. See Elmo Reavis’s appendix to Library Binding Manual: A Handbook of Useful Procedures for the Maintenance of Library Volumes, ed. Maurice F. Tauber (Boston: Library Binding Institute, 1972); and Jan Merrill-Oldham and Paul Parisi, Guide to the Library Binding Institute Standard for Library Binding (Chicago: American Library Association, 1990); and Robert DeCandido and Paul Parisi, eds., ANSI/NISO/LBI Standard for Library Binding, draft 7.3.1, June 12, 1998, sunsite.berkeley.edu/Binding/NISO7_4.txt.

“scraps of faded, rusted, brittle paper”: New York Public Library, “When Did Newspapers Begin to Use Wood Pulp Stock?” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 33 (1929).

“we will not add to our collections”: Battin, “Preservation at the Columbia University Libraries,” pp. 38–39.

“old boy network”: CAUSE, 1996 CAUSE Elite Award Winner. The CAUSE Elite Award was sponsored by Systems and Computer Technology (now SCT), which sells database software and consulting services to universities and government agencies. CAUSE was a non-profit corporation devoted to furthering the “use and management of information systems in higher education” (Jane N. Ryland, “CAUSE: Notes on a History,” September 1998, www.educause.edu/pub/chistory/chistory.htm); in 1998, it merged with Educom, another non-profit advocate of educational networks and information systems; the new entity became EDUCAUSE. One of the founders of Educom in the sixties was James Grier Miller, former psychopharmacologist and OSS spy evaluator; Educom’s acting president in 1970 was retired CIA man Joseph Becker. See Robert C. Herrick, “Educom: A Retrospective,” Educom Review 33:5 (1998), www.educause.edu/pub/ehistory/ehistory.htm; and EDUCAUSE, “EDUCAUSE is Official!” www.educause.edu/coninfo/educause_official.htm (July 1, 1998) (viewed October 25, 2000). The current president of EDUCAUSE is Brian L. Hawkins, who was for a decade a computer administrator at Brown University and an adviser to companies such as IBM, Apple, NeXT, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft; Hawkins and Patricia Battin together edited The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the Twenty-first Century (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998). Hawkins believes in a thoroughgoing liquidation of research collections: “Not only would electronic storage be far cheaper, it would also eliminate the present duplication,” he writes, in a chapter of The Mirage of Continuity entitled “The Unsustainability of the Traditional Library.” EDUCAUSE is jointly funded by educational institutions and by large corporations; IBM, for instance, is currently a “Platinum Partner,” meaning that in exchange for $100,000 or more in annual contributions, IBM receives “a guaranteed corporate presentation opportunity at the annual conference,” plus free advertising, the best floor space at the conference, and other benefits. The president of a company called Word of Mouse, which sells advertising on mouse-pads at university libraries, said that “the people at EDUCAUSE know my customers and open the right doors.” Word of Mouse is a Bronze Partner of EDUCAUSE. EDUCAUSE, “Corporate Partner Program,” www.educause.edu/partners (viewed October 25, 2000).

piece by Eric Stange: Eric Stange, “Millions of Books Are Turning to Dust — Can They Be Saved?” The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1987. Two months later, the Chicago Tribune published an article that began: “The book is a life’s work condensed into 200 pages. It has survived for decades. The next time somebody looks at it, it will crumble to dust.” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1987, national edition, p. 3, Nexis. During a period of heavy bleaching in paper manufacture, John Murray, in 1824, instanced a Bible that was “CRUMBLING LITERALLY INTO DUST.” John Murray, Observations and Experiments on the Bad Composition of Modern Paper (London: G. and W. B. Whitaker), quoted in Roggia, “William James Barrow.”

“the estimated number of volumes”: The Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter (June 1988). In an interview with The Bottom Line, Battin says that 3.3 million is “the estimated number of volumes that must be saved as representative of the 10 million that will turn to dust.” “Preserving Our Crumbling Collections: An Interview with Patricia Battin, President, Commission on Preservation and Access,” Betty J. Turock, interviewer, The Bottom Line 3:4 (1989).