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

In 1993, I decided to write some essays on trifling topics — movie projectors, fingernail clippers, punctuation, and the history of the word “lumber.” Deborah Garrison, then an editor at The New Yorker, called to ask if I wanted to review a soon-to-be published history of the world. Perhaps I should have written the review; instead, I suggested a brief, cheerful piece about the appeal of card catalogs. I began talking to librarians around the country, and I found out that card catalogs were being thrown out everywhere. I grew less cheerful, and the essay grew longer.

When it was published in 1994, I became known in the library world as a critic (and, to some, as a crank and a Luddite), and as a result, librarians at the San Francisco Public Library thought of me two years later when they wanted to tell someone what had happened in their institution: administrators had sent a few hundred thousand books to a landfill after they discovered that a new library building was too small to hold them. I gave a speech on this subject in the auditorium of the new building, and I published an article about it in The New Yorker. There was a local fuss, the head of the library eventually lost his job (over deficits, not book dumping), and I found myself described as a “library activist.”

In the midst of the controversy, a man named Blackbeard told a reporter that he had a story for me. He wouldn’t reveal any details to the reporter (who was Nina Siegal, of the San Francisco Bay Guardian ); I was supposed to call him. I didn’t make the call right away, though, because the squabble over the San Francisco Public Library was sufficiently distracting, and because my family and I were packing to spend a year in England. Some weeks later, going through some papers, I found the name, Bill Blackbeard, and his number, which I dialed. Blackbeard had a formal, slightly breathless way of talking; he was obviously intelligent, perhaps a little Ancient Marinerian in the way that lifelong collectors can be. He had edited collections of comic strips (early Popeye, Terry and the Pirates, Krazy Kat ), and he ran something called the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art — a one-man curatorship, apparently — which owned, he said, a very large number of ex-library newspaper volumes, including one-of-a-kind runs of the great early Hearst papers. Some of what Blackbeard told me I couldn’t quite comprehend: that the Library of Congress, the purported library of last resort, had replaced most of its enormous collection of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers with microfilm, and that research libraries were relying on what he called “fraudulent” scientific studies when they justified the discarding of books and newspapers on the basis of diagnosed states of acidity and embrittlement. I said that it all sounded extremely interesting and that maybe he should write about it himself; I thanked him and hung up. I was tired of finding fault with libraries; in theory, I loved libraries.

Almost two years later, I thought of Blackbeard again, and I decided to pay him a visit. He had by this time sold his newspaper collection, which filled six tractor trailers, to Ohio State University, and he had moved to Santa Cruz, where his wife liked to surf. He was in his early seventies, fit, clean shaven, wearing a nubbly gold sweater and a baseball hat turned backward. One room of his very small house was filled with dime novels and old science-fiction magazines in white boxes. In his youth, he’d written for Weird Tales; he’d driven armored vehicles in the Eighty-ninth Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in the Second World War; and in 1967, filled with an ambition to write a history of the American comic strip, he’d discovered that libraries were getting rid of their newspaper collections. The San Francisco Public Library had, Blackbeard said, an “incredible treasure trove.” Staff members told him that they would love to have him take it away, but unfortunately he was a private citizen — the library’s charter permitted the transfer of material only to a non-profit organization. “I became a non-profit organization so fast you couldn’t believe it,” Blackbeard told me. Soon he had acquired a bound run of William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, which the Hearst Corporation had donated to the Los Angeles Public Library (the library kept the custom-made burnished mahogany shelves), and another American run from the Stanford University Libraries. He went around the country picking up newspaper volumes, which he called “files,” a usage that confused me at first. Sometimes he cut the comic strips or Sunday sections out and sold the remains to dealers; sometimes he kept the volumes whole. “When I suddenly discovered that I could have any of them that I wanted, I just went off my rocker. It was the most wonderful thing in the world.” Blackbeard also told me about a test that librarians were using on paper, in which they folded the corner of a page back and forth until it broke.

Not long after I visited Blackbeard, I moved with my family from California to southern Maine. I sat in my new office, surrounded by boxes of books, staring out the window at a valley filled with young trees. There were several off-white nests of webworms clinging like the ends of Q-tips to some of the trees’ upper branches. I looked at the webworm nests, and I thought, Why not find out what’s happened to the newspapers? Why not learn more about the fold test? I called The New Yorker and asked Deborah Garrison if she could stand another article about libraries. She said yes, and I went to work. I learned about pyrophoric compounds, mummy wrappings, oversewing, artificial-aging ovens, redox blemishes, and a group called the Council on Library Resources, founded by Verner Clapp. I became familiar with the efforts of a woman named Patricia Battin, and I watched a movie, Slow Fires. I began moaning and typing things like “Oh, my friends, it’s worse than you think.” I realized that I had something that was longer than a magazine article.

Then, four fifths of the way through writing this book, I found out that one of the last remaining collections of American wood-pulp newspapers would be cut to pieces unless I started a non-profit corporation — just as Blackbeard had — and raised the money to save it. I sent out letters and grant applications; then I resumed work on the manuscript. And that’s how Double Fold —so named in honor of the brittleness test that Bill Blackbeard first told me about — came to be written.

This isn’t an impartial piece of reporting. I’ve tried not to misrepresent those whose views differ from my own, but I make no secret of my disagreement; at times, a dormant prosecutorial urge awoke in me, for we have lost things that we can never get back. I must also say, though, that the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the other illustrious institutions herein held up for criticism, employ a great many book-respecting people who may not know of, or approve of, what their superiors or their forebears have done.

The following people read the manuscript, or parts of it, and made useful suggestions: Nicolas Barker, Viscountess Eccles, David McKitterick, Paul Needham, Randy Silverman, Thomas Tanselle, and Peter Waters — which is not to imply that they agree with everything I say. Many others were helpful in various ways, including Marty Asher, Ann Godoff, Melanie Jackson, Cressida Leyshon, Timothy Mennel, Charline Parsons, Susanna Porter, David Remnick, and Sasha Smith. I’m grateful to my parents and my parents-in-law, and, most of all, to my beloved wife, Margaret.