Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  Soon he was writing guidebooks to Bermuda, California, and New York; he was managing editor of Library Journal and Publishers Weekly for a while; he founded a company that did the printing work for R. R. Bowker; he started a monthly magazine called Information and one called The International Military Digest. He began to make money in Florida real estate.

  Then came an apparent manic episode, followed by crisis and collapse. Rider bought a Vanderbilt estate, Idlehour, on the south shore of Long Island, and spent several hundred thousand dollars fixing it up as a self-help college and “vacation hotel-club.” Promoters sold life memberships in the club, but because (as Rider tells it) he refused to operate it as a speakeasy, nobody came, and he declared bankruptcy in 1929. But in 1932 he rose from the dead with a powerful (although pseudonymous) pamphlet called “Are Our Banks Betraying Us?” In it, possibly conscious of his own reduced financial position, he called for a moratorium on the payment of mortgages, and he said that people are “deeply and dangerously embittered.”

  They are thoroughly disgusted7 and disappointed with the present “system,” not merely because their fingers have been burned, but because they realize perfectly well that, in many cases, the burning was neither just nor justified. They want a “new deal.”

  The pamphlet produced, according to Rider, an “astonishing flood8 of enthusiastic approval.” He mailed a copy to Franklin Roosevelt; Roosevelt shot off a thank-you letter that ended, handwritten, “You are right!9 Keep it up!” This was two months before Roosevelt’s first use of the phrase “new deal” in his nomination speech.

  In 1933, needing steady money, Rider accepted the librarianship of Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, his native city. He began a system10 of buying books in bulk and selling off the discards. Though a bankrupt himself, he did wonderful things for the library’s finances, and he wrote a “Study of Library Cost Accounting” that, in his words, “enkindled” the profession. But his great work, his extraordinary New Deal for librarians, came in 1944: The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library, handsomely self-published, as most of his books were. Rider had discovered a “mathematical fact,”11 almost a “natural law”12 of library growth, which is that over the past three centuries library collections have doubled every sixteen years. Rider devotes a page to an elongated graph plotting collection size against years—the “parabolic” trend lines zoom up to near verticality. The chart of this “veritable tidal wave13 of printed materials” would make anyone in charge of a library bolt for high ground. We confront, Rider says, far more than a library problem: “It is a problem14—and a problem to the nth degree complex and baffling—of civilization itself.” How can we respond, when “mere palliatives are going to be utterly ineffective”?

  We absolutely must15 analyze our whole problem from entirely fresh viewpoints, and must endeavor to find, in one direction or another, sweepingly new solutions for it.

  As it turns out, Rider was wrong—later students of library progress16 have demonstrated that collections don’t double every sixteen years and have not done so in the past. No matter—Rider believed his figures to be true, or at he least hoped they were more or less true (he liked and wrote science fiction), and books do undeniably pile up fast. What is a library to do to contain this doubling and redoubling growth? It could build an annex or a new building and shelve the hideous growth in it—that’s what once would have happened. Ah, but the “storage warehouse” is, Rider holds, a “tacit confession of past failure”17—all it does is change where the growth takes place, and “it, of itself, creates new expenses and fresh problems.”18 The library could adopt a severe policy of “weeding out” its stacks, but, says Rider, with justification, a library that weeds is a library that is “no longer providing its users with the material it has weeded out!”

  Microphotography should have saved us long ago, but it hadn’t, and Fremont Rider knew why: librarians had been treating micro-materials “as though they were books.” They were not books—they were “a brand-new form, an utterly and completely and basically different form,” and therein lay our historic opportunity:

  No one seems to have realized that, abruptly, for the first time in over two thousand years, libraries were being offered a chance to begin all over again.

  Rider’s version of the new beginning was the Microcard library: a set of catalog cards bearing the usual author-title information on the front, and the highly reduced images of every page printed in emulsion on the back. Since card catalogs already had cabinet space assigned to them, a complete Microcard replacement of the existing card catalog, accompanied by a disposal of the physical books it stood for, would result in a savings in storage cost “that comes gratifyingly close19 to 100%.” Rider had grand visions for his Microcards—he even envisioned “micro-reading machines20 built into organs, pianos, and the like, [and] special reading machines on easels for orchestra use.”

  He set up the non-profit Microcard Foundation,21 controlled by a board of trustees that included several prominent librarians (Keyes Metcalf, by then running Harvard’s libraries, and Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, among them), and with the help of Kodak and other companies he began to sell Microcard reproductions of volumes of genealogy and local history, publications of the Early English Text Society, and the Rolls Series of medieval chronicles. In the fifties, librarians at the Atomic Energy Commission22 became interested; they reproduced older reports on Microcards, so that weapons laboratories could throw out their originals; soon the AEC was distributing current reports on Microcards, too.

  There were difficulties with the reading machines, though—for one thing, Microcards, being opaque, demanded lots of reflected light, and this light (in the cautious words of an early enthusiast) “produces heat which,23 when concentrated on the small section of the card being read, would be apt to have serious effects.” The installation of a cooling fan reduced the hazard of fire, but the viewed image never achieved enough contrast or crispness—it wasn’t as good as the screen-shadows of conventional microfilm,24 scratched and faded though they may be. Nonetheless, libraries made heavy investments in these book-substitutes: in 1954 there were twenty-five Microcard publishers (Barnes and Noble produced some titles) and 1,600 Microcard-viewing machines25 in the United States. All for naught. “To any one who has New England blood26 in his veins,” Rider wrote late in life, “waste—absolute, and completely unnecessary waste—is more than an economic loss: it is a venal sin.” Rider died a sinner in 1962.

  But there is no lasting shame in taking a wrong turn. The shame comes in the fact that physical books were spent, wasted, too, as part of Rider’s brainsick spendthrift-frugality. For a topological question arises: how can one get all the pages of a given book onto the back of a card (or several cards, if the book is long), when book pages are double-sided? Rider’s answer was simple—destroy twice as many books:

  All that we have to do27 is to take two copies of the book that we are proposing to micro-copy, return these two copies to their original unbound form, and then spread them out. How do we do this? We take the two copies; trim off all the waste paper margins on all the four sides of the pages; and then “reimpose” the resulting pages in an order and layout especially adapted for the easy reading of them on the back of a catalog card.

  The notion that in these acts of petty vandalism we would be somehow “returning the books to their original unbound form” is a characteristic Rideresque flourish—as if the book’s binding were a bit of Victorian gingerbread, an excrescence, a superficial late addition to the primordial, Promethean page-heap. (Fortunately a number of Microcard publishers found ways to reproduce pages without disbinding—by re-photographing microphotographs—or concentrated their work on manuscript papers that weren’t bound in the first place. They also gradually abandoned the idea of opacity, and began using clear plastic rectangles through which light passed—microfiches—instead.)

  Library leaders were hypnotized by Rider’s book. It was the talk of conferen
ces; it gave a heroic forward tilt to the administrator’s cause. The journal College and Research Libraries published a symposium called “The Promise of Microprint,” in which Keyes Metcalf wrote that The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library “should be made required reading28 for library school students” and said that it “may well prove to be one of the most important books dealing with libraries in this generation.” A senior librarian from Brown University wrote excitedly that “it is difficult,29 to put it mildly, in the absence of some still more efficient space-saving device, not to embrace micro-cards as the panacea for libraries ‘growing pains’ ”; this informationalist dreamed of a time when libraries would have a fixed size: “When will the rate at which material is published on micro-cards permit a library to withdraw. . . enough books from its shelves to balance the amount of material which is newly published in conventional book form and must be added?” Ever the self-promoter, Rider includes in his 1955 autobiography, And Master of None, a page full of praise30 for The Scholar from eminent librarians. Archibald MacLeish: “a superb job, superbly done”; James T. Babb of Yale: “by far the most interesting and stimulating piece of library literature I have tackled in a long time”; Harold Leupp of the University of California: “the most constructive approach to the problem I have heard from any source”; William Warner Bishop, of the University of Michigan: “The book fairly takes my breath away. You have given librarians much to think about and to think about furiously.”

  Never mind that Rider’s “constructive approach” advocated the dissection (in matched pairs) and deacquisition of millions of volumes over time (excepting, to be sure, “prestige material,” gift collections, and some special cases—books with color illustrations, for instance); never mind that Rider was proposing that the central research trove of a large academic library would shrivel, “by inexorable mathematical law,” into “endless aisles of [Microcard] file cases,” aisles in which the scholar would, Rider wrote, “find most of his materials, and do most of his work.” One might have expected library generals to have kept their distance from this amiable entrepreneurial crank. Instead, these furious thinkers served on his Microcard Foundation and Microcard Committee; they helped him plan and standardize and refine his conception; they bought his product; they were clearly intrigued by the potential despoliation that his proposal held out to them.

  Rider had successfully found and cultivated their fear, fear of the demon Growth that was alive in the stacks, doubling relentlessly, a monstrous exploding pustule of cellulose. The only reason there wasn’t more actual damage done to research collections as a result of The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library is that Microcards were so obviously inadequate to the demands of the scholarly eye and mind that the hundred-percent-space-saving swap-out couldn’t proceed as its promoter envisioned.

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  Dingy, Dreary, Dog-eared, and Dead

  Fremont Rider’s enduring achievement was to convince the heads of research libraries that it was somehow embarrassing to add more low-cost storage space. Any outlay, no matter how lavish (and the act of microfilming a little-used book is, and has always been, at least twenty times more costly than the act of putting it in storage), seemed preferable to the face-loss of having to rent an old building and set up ranks of shelves in it. Book-storage warehouses were, Rider told his quaking readers, “not ‘solutions’ of the growth problem, but simply ‘confessions of avoidance’ ”—which is like saying that it is a confession of avoidance to buy new shoes for your child because he or she is sure to outgrow them. They were determined foot-binders, this crew—Metcalf at Harvard, Tate at the National Archives and MIT, Wagman from Michigan, Babb from Yale, Raney and Fussler from the University of Chicago—men who were pledged, in spite of every setback, to bring the costs of mass-microfilming down to the parity point of new construction, so that their Mr. Fixit hungers, their joy in lenses and basement darkrooms and hand cranks and developing fluids, would seem to be the result of the soberest, the most parsimoniously conservative calculations.

  Foremost among these determined cost-reducers was Rider’s friend and ally11 Verner Clapp at the Library of Congress. Rider was harmless, in a way: his ideas were deranged, but he seems to have been slow in applying them to Wesleyan’s collections. (He did, however, perform what he called a “full cropping”22 on some wide-margined Wesleyan books, slicing off their tops, bottoms, and fore-edges—cover-boards and all—“so as not to store forever a lot of accompanying waste paper.”) Verner Clapp, on the other hand, spent more than thirty years at the Library of Congress, serving under four different chief librarians, and the impetuously technophilic decisions he and other managers made there have done irreversible damage to what was once our library of last resort. Rider barked, Clapp bit.

  Clapp’s book The Future of the Research Library (1964) begins with a respectful tribute:

  As World War II drew to a close, Fremont Rider, at that time the librarian of Wesleyan University, threw a bombshell into the library world by his demonstration of the exponential growth of research library collections. . . . But Rider, ever a constructive critic, provided along with his prophecy of doom a gospel of salvation: the research library of the future, he foresaw, would consist of microtext.

  Clapp believed in this gospel; after he left the Library of Congress to launch the Council on Library Resources, he contracted with the Microcard Corporation to create an improved, portable micro-viewer, and he funded the first scientific journal to be published exclusively in a micro-format—Wildlife Disease.33 The viewer-development program was a failure, but the prototypes, notably a tripod-mounted model with a segmented, insectoid abdomen and a staring monocle of an eye, are fine examples of late-fifties futurism. In the Council’s annual report for 1959, Clapp includes a section on “The Problem of Size”44 that contained up-leaping growth graphs based largely on Rider’s errant statistics of fifteen years earlier. Like Rider, Clapp was a man of wide reading and humanistic polish—he studied Herodotus in the original and wanted people to know it, and he thought that C. P. Snow’s division between the two cultures was “baloney, baloney,55 thorough baloney”—but his attitude toward old books (except the obviously valuable items in rare-book rooms) was marked at times by a puzzling vehemence, as in this description of a visit to a small-town library:

  After numerous inquiries66 we find someone who knows where the public library is, and we visit it. Dingy, dreary, dogeared and dead! Stupid people and stupid books that no one reads, that no one should read!

  The persistence of this dingy paper patrimony troubled Clapp: “The world’s population77 is laid to rest each generation; the world’s books have a way of lingering on,” he writes. How can we “extract profit and usefulness from this inheritance of the past,” he goes on to inquire, and yet at the same time “prevent it from clogging the channels of the present”? How can libraries, in other words, maintain the self-sufficiency that is essential for scholarly exactitude, without actually putting up more shelves?

  “Massive dissemination88 in microfacsimile”—that’s how. Microfilm is compact and clean, as fresh as only plastic can be (at least initially). Clapp’s fantasy of institutional transformation was a variation on Rider’s idea of making money by throwing books away—if you reduced the cost of creating and distributing microcopies and at the same time made them easier to use, then “the storage library would99 no longer hold much meaning.” Groups of cooperating libraries would, once a decade, agree upon a corpus of “lesser-used books1010 to be retired to microtext.” The mass retirements would be sufficient to hold each collection fixed at “whatever millions of original volumes the future shows to be optimum for a research library.” Growth—exponential, geometrical, even linear—would stop altogether. The size problem would be solved. Clapp worries in passing about the researcher’s inability to stand and browse a comprehensively microfilmed collection, but he thinks, happy man, that better cataloging would somehow compensate for
this difficulty.

  Warren Haas, who assumed the presidency of the Council on Library Resources in the seventies, described Clapp to me as “bubbling” and “full of beans.” Deanna Marcum, the current president of the (renamed and substantially repurposed) Council on Library and Information Resources, has written that Clapp “loved gadgets,1111 and was forever thinking about what could be invented to make library jobs more efficient or streamlined.” Clapp was looking for “solutions to the problems1212 of libraries”; and in his search he had help from his board of directors—a group that included some extremely bright war scientists and CIA consultants.

  Warren Weaver1313 was one of the Council’s founding board members. He had been chief of the Applied Mathematics Panel during World War II, performing the ballistics computations necessary to create machines that shot down planes with the help of radar (work known as “fire control”1414); this war effort led Weaver to the nascent field of Operations Research (OR), which endeavored to calculate, with the help of glittering curlicues of equations superimposed on a gaunt gray skeleton of simplifying assumptions, the least costly way to transport troops, position anti-aircraft guns, or bomb cities. Weaver was also interested in the statistical mathematics of human communication and the possibility of machine translation—and from there it was only a hop and a skip to the Council on Library Resources. (It didn’t hurt, either, that Weaver was a vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, which had paid for much of the early work of newspaper microfilming at Harvard and the Library of Congress.)