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

“Have you seen a first edition”: Michael Miller, Ideas for Preservation Fund Raising: A Support Package for Libraries and Archives (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1990). The support package is the subject of a lead article in the Commission’s Newsletter for September 1990.

“A slow fire is burning”: Diane Ballard, “Goodness Gracious, Great Books Afire!” Torchbearer, fall 1990. The Commission distributed a typescript of the article, which omitted this title — perhaps it seemed too frivolous. The University of Oregon Library ran a money-raising ad in a house magazine that said, “Unless we act now, much of the collection in the largest research library in Oregon could disintegrate before our eyes.” Old Oregon (magazine of the University of Oregon) 66:4 (summer 1987).

CHAPTER 25 — Absolute Nonsense

His experience began in Florence: These details come from Peter Waters, “From Florence to St. Petersburg: An Enlightening and Thought-Provoking Experience,” paper read at the conference “Redefining Disasters: A Decade of Counter Disaster Planning,” Library of New South Wales, September 1995.

“If swift and drastic action”: Patricia Battin, “The Silent Books of the Future: Initiatives to Save Yesterday’s Literature for Tomorrow,” Logos (London) 2:1 (1991): 11.

When Smithsonian was doing a piece: Williams, “Library of Congress Can’t Hold All of Man’s Knowledge.”

old boss Frazer Poole: Poole, by the way, worked with the Barrow Laboratory before he came to the Library of Congress (on durable catalog cards), as part of the ALA/Council on Library Resources Library Technology Project. He probably learned the trick of crumpling paper to bits in order to shock people from Barrow and DuPuis.

CHAPTER 26 — Drumbeat

“millions of rotting books”: Battin uses this phrase twice, once in “Crumbling Books: A Call for Strategies to Preserve Our Cultural Memory,” Change, September/October 1989, p. 56; and once in “Silent Books of the Future,” p. 16. The continuation headline (not recorded in Nexis) for Malcolm Browne’s 1990 article in The New York Times is “Nation’s Library Calls on Chemists to Preserve Rotting Books.” Carolyn Morrow, the preservation librarian at Harvard, backed Battin up, saying that her library is “literally rotting from the inside out.” Edward T. Hearn, “Self-Burning Books: Millions of Tomes Need Rescue from Their Acids,” Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1989, Tempo, p. 2, final edition. Before Carolyn Morrow went to Harvard (as the first Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian, an endowed chair), she worked for Peter Sparks; in the early eighties, Sparks hired her away from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to staff a propaganda and fund-raising team at the Library of Congress which he called the National Preservation Program Office (NPPO). On Morrow, see Abbey Newsletter 8:6 (December 1984), copied on the CoOL website, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/abbey/an/an08/an08-6/an08-603.htm.

“will not embrittle to dust”: See also Helmut Bansa, “Selection for Conservation,” Restaurator 13:4 (1992), which offers “the scientifically correct fact that books do not ‘literally crumble to dust.’ ”

CHAPTER 27 — Unparalleled Crisis

“comprehensive mass-production strategy”: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1990 Annual Report.

“major attack”: Patricia Battin, “A Message from the President,” Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 3 (August 1988).

big day for acid-free paper: See “An End to the Yellowing Pages,” Newsweek, March 20, 1989, p. 80, which says that about a quarter of the volumes in American research libraries are “crumbling into oblivion.”

“35 out of the 88 miles”: New York Public Library, “Authors and Publishers Sign Landmark Declaration for Book Preservation,” news release (March 7, 1989), reprinted in Association of Research Libraries, Preserving Knowledge: The Case for Alkaline Paper (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1990).

“There appears to be high user acceptance”: Hayes, “Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits,” p. 26.

“Making clear to scholars”: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1992 Annual Report, www.clir.org/pubs/annual/annrpt91.htm.

“But if these original books”: The brittle-book crisis should also be taught, Miller’s report urged: “We should also begin at once to incorporate this awareness into graduate instruction in research methods.” J. Hillis Miller, Preserving the Literary Heritage: The Final Report of the Scholarly Advisory Committee on Modern Language and Literature of the Commission on Preservation and Access (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, July 1991), www.clir.org/pubs/reports/miller/miller.htm.

“The Endowment could not have advanced”: George F. Farr, Jr., “Preservation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,” in Luner, Paper Preservation.

particular collection: Here is a representative brittle-books grant to Columbia University from the 1993 annual report of the NEH: “$2,298,320 To support preservation microfilming of 15,000 embrittled volumes on the development of the world’s economy over the last two centuries and its impact on the formation of political and social institutions.” $2.3 million divided by 15,000 is about $150 per volume.

“number of preservation operations”: Battin, “Message from the President.”

CHAPTER 28 — Microfix

He and Matthew Nickerson: Matthew Nickerson, “pH: Only a Piece of the Preservation Puzzle: A Comparison of the Preservation Studies at Brigham Young, Yale, and Syracuse Universities,” Library Resources and Technical Services 36:1 (1992).

population of damaged or fragile books: Silverman tried to convince a former employer to accept several thousand post-microfilming discards that John Baker, head of preservation at the New York Public Library, was off-loading. (Baker is the one who in a voice of sorrow says, in Slow Fires, that many of the books “simply fall apart in your hands.”) The NYPL was delighted by the idea that somebody wanted the books, but the administration at Silverman’s library decided that there wasn’t space.

Some of his colleagues had private misgivings: Critical voices are faintly audible in the report of a Review and Assessment Committee, chaired by David H. Stam, that evaluated the work of the Commission on Preservation and Access in 1991: “Some saw the microfilming program as ‘anti-paper,’ its hidden agenda designed to foster the eventuality of the electronic library, with digitized materials coming from microfilm or other sources. Some saw a lack of interest in preserving rare books or in preserving the original documents, regardless of condition or perceived importance, after filming has been completed.” David H. Stam et al., Review and Assessment Committee, Final Report (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1991), p. 18.

CHAPTER 29 — Slash and Burn

play by Robert de Flers: Francis de Croisset, Le Souvenir de Robert de Flers, suivi de les précieuses de Genève par Robert de Flers et Francis de Croisset (Paris: Editions des Portiques, 1929).

“Laying aside all malice”: See the translation and explication of Columbia’s seal in “The Mission of the University,” Columbia University Fact Book 1995–96, www.columbia.edu/cu/udar/factbook/12.htm.

“Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project”: For a history of the Research Library Group’s microfilming projects, see Nancy Elkington, ed., RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook (Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, 1992), appendix 21.