Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  Dr. Shahani contributed some refinements to this procedure, but it was developed by several alumni of Koppers Chemicals, principally a smiley, self-effacing man named Richard Spatz, who knew a lot about pressure-treating wood and applied that knowledge to wood-pulp paper. Spatz was dipping books in his garage for years, and air-drying them in the game room, before the world began to pay attention. The Bookkeeper system, as it is known, is inherently safer for organic life-forms than diethyl zinc, and it is apparently benign for books, too, but of course nobody can be certain of its benignancy for a hundred years or more. If you test the paper after its Bookkeeper bath, it shows a higher (less acidic) pH, which is good, but whether magnesium oxide’s neutralizing powers will endure in the book as it is repeatedly breathed on, paged through, and photocopied, and even whether the substance, assuming it does stick where it was put, is ultimately of any significant value to the health of the paper, is unknowable now as well. Perhaps those few minutes spent splayed in a vacuum will shorten a book’s life more than the alkaline deposits will prolong it. Acidity discourages paper-eating bugs; over hundreds of years, that may be very helpful. Some conservators believe that all mass deacidification is a mistake: given the near infinitude of recipes for paper, new and old, and the impossibly complex reactions that ensue over time, the alkaline buffer may do bad things to fibers, and to inks and dyes and bindings, that we cannot foresee.

  If Bookkeeper is harmless, and it may possibly be, the good thing about it is that it allows preservation administrators (who seem to have a hard time simply leaving things alone) to feel that they’re taking the initiative and doing something powerful and talismanic, that requires pipes and gauges and special vocabularies, for their chosen volumes. For once you dunk or spritz or gas a group of books, they immediately become charmed objects, items on which your preservation dollars have been spent, and as such are less likely to find themselves carted off to the discard area (called “Gifts and Exchanges” at the Library of Congress) the next year. Deacidification buys time for them in that managerial sense, at least.

  But then the books that you haven’t dunked or spritzed or gassed may begin to seem suspect. At the Library of Congress, deacidified books are now identified with a white dot on the spine, like Dr. Seuss’s Star-Bellies. Two subclasses of material thus arise: the chemically purified, and the mortally diseased. Those that haven’t earned their white dots may in time become easier to sacrifice to a reformatting project—they’ve been passed over once, after all, and their untreated acidity makes them (if you accept the prevailing view) an imminent danger to themselves on the shelf. If in fifty years63 the chemical purification turns out to be itself harmful in some unexpected way, the polarity will simply reverse: those books that underwent the therapy will become the newly diseased, the white dot will signal distress, the distress will pull in fresh grant money, and new treatments will come into play to undo the damage of well-meaning earlier maltreatments. Waste may be the only constant.

  Leave the books alone, I say, leave them alone, leave them alone.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  Bursting at the Seams

  We will never know how much capital the Library of Congress spent on organometallic R and D over those decades—the costs were bundled1 in and hidden. Millions more were tossed into the other gaping preservational cash pit, the Optical Disk Pilot Project, an early digitization experiment also pushed by William Welsh and Peter Sparks. By Department of Defense standards, the amounts were minuscule, but they were lost at a time of great hardship for the library—when operating hours and staff were being cut—and their redirection has left our historical record compromised and disfigured. With all the money the library spent noodling with fire in a vacuum, and testing the longevity of the acrylic layer on soon-to-be-outmoded optical disks, they could have put up several large, unflashy, dimly lit, air-conditioned print-shelters out in Virginia or Maryland that would have kept millions of low-use books, newspapers, and bound periodicals out of the summer heat, shelved in call-number order, awaiting their infrequent summons. (The library did rent some space, in Landover,2 Maryland, beginning in 1976, but it wasn’t nearly enough.) The library’s scientists could have spent those decades learning more about the chemistry and aging characteristics of old paper, rather than studying the behavior of an exotic metal alkyl on old paper. Coolness is pertinent because, as with cut flowers, film, diskettes, or hamburger, lower temperatures slow down intermolecular couplings and scissions and thus attenuate time’s asymptotic slide. One study in 1966 compared a long-frozen Everyman’s Library edition3 of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination—it had traveled to Antarctica with Scott’s expedition and wasn’t retrieved until 1959—with the identical edition from used-book stores in Manchester and Glasgow: the paper in the polar Poe was stronger.

  There were knowledgeable staff members during this period—most notably Peter Waters, Head of Conservation—who argued that for the vast majority of books, simply placing them on a shelf somewhere was the best and cheapest first step to preserving them, but Deputy Librarian Welsh’s heart was not in adding raw shelf storage. Welsh is, he told me, a people person—when he was at the library he knew hundreds of employees by name, and even now he immediately remembers lesser figures from fifty years ago, such as Clyde Edwards, the man who began systematically replacing newspapers with microfilm. Welsh is not a book person. He is the last of the Cold War librarians4—he arrived in 1947 after six years in the Air Force, where he was promoted to major and served as librarian of the Alaskan Division Headquarters of the Air Transport Command; he rose under Clapp and Luther Evans, worked on the CIA-sponsored East European Accessions List in the fifties, wrote the foreword to Newspapers in Microfilm in 1972 (the one, that is, which said that a microfilmed newspaper was considered complete if only a few issues per month were missing), and was made deputy librarian in 1976. Welsh believed that libraries shouldn’t be regarded as “warehouses of little-used material.”5 (Actually, that’s exactly what they are.) Though he boasted that the Library of Congress produces “vastly more than the microfilming6 programs of any other library” and that “we probably produce more [microfilm] than all other libraries put together,” he felt that film didn’t squeeze things down enough. So he turned to optical disks: “Disk storage is attractive7 because it is very much more compact than film—ten to twenty thousand pages on one side of a twelve-inch disk, compared to about a one-thousand-page capacity on a single reel of film,” he wrote. And the thousands of tiny copies on the twelve-inch disks are actually easier to read than the originals, Welsh held: “the extremely high resolution8 of the electronic scanning process improves the accuracy of the captured image, even making it possible to improve the readability of a faded or discolored original.” The scan is better than the original—and if it’s better, why keep the original? The digital process will, according to the Library of Congress Information Bulletin for September 12, 1983, “reproduce items with sufficient quality9 to permit the library to consider discarding the original.” In 1984, Welsh told The Washington Post that his optical disk jukeboxes could reduce the three Library of Congress buildings10 to one. As it turned out, the resolution of the images on the disks was a migraineiferous three hundred dots per inch—six hundred dpi is considered middling now—and the twelve-inch format never caught on. Copyright holders made strenuous objections, too, as they will when someone is trying to re-publish their work without paying them.

  Ainsworth Spofford, the late-nineteenth-century director of the Library of Congress, collected books and built new wings and fireproof buildings to hold them. John Russell Young and the great and glorious Herbert Putnam collected more books, and Putnam built a huge annex that opened in 1939. Then came Archibald MacLeish, a poet of some anthologization, who became distracted by the idea of using the library for military intelligence and war propaganda.11 (In 1941, MacLeish signed a letter of agreement12 with OSS founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan, undisclosed to Congress, wh
ich, for an initial fee of seventy-five thousand dollars plus expenses, committed the Library of Congress to intelligence-gathering for Donovan’s new Office of Coordinator of Information; the library would, for example, “build up biographical data on key men in public and military affairs in foreign nations.”) With MacLeish came the hiring of Luther Evans and the promotion of MacLeish’s personal assistant and vision-man, Verner Clapp. No storage edifice went up during Clapp’s long years of influence. That is why, after Clapp left the library to invent the new tomorrow by hiring defense contractors, Quincy Mumford inherited a collection that was, as he told Congress in 1958, “bursting at the seams.”13 But Congress was slow to respond to Mumford’s plea. In the end they combined a project to build a memorial to James Madison with the library’s request for a new building, and the architects, straining mightily, came up with the colossal, marble-finned kitsch box14 now permanently stuck to Independence Avenue. There are bronze sculptures of flying books welded above the doorway, covered with chicken wire to keep birds from perching on them.

  Never mind the architecture, though: the building wasn’t ready to store anything until 1980. From the forties through the eighties, while other government agencies built like pharaohs, the country’s pre-eminent records-storage-and-retrieval system didn’t have, largely as a result of Clapp’s philosophical disdain for mere shelves, enough room to hold what it needed to hold. Welsh inherited the ill-starred Madison building, and he oversaw it after his fashion, but he stood in Verner Clapp’s long shadow, and he was by temperament and training a steady-spacer. Libraries should not grow, they should “grow.” In 1989, he was still extolling the virtues of “interdependence” and “miniaturiz[ing] existing collections.”15 (As soon as library managers start talking about resource sharing, or cooperative projects, or interdependence, you know they have local shelf-clearing in mind: they want somebody else to keep what they once had.) “Networking can and should16 enable us to avoid costs,” Welsh wrote. “If we can depend upon the network to help meet some of our needs, we can reduce our acquisitions, cataloging, and preservation costs and, perhaps most important, defer construction costs for new library space.”

  It wasn’t incompetence that led to the library’s five-decade space crisis, as it turns out, it was ideology—it was a steadfast unwillingness to build or rent enough buildings. That’s why, during this period, so many fine old things were undeservedly destroyed. The bones of the collection were deformed in a deliberate squeeze.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  The Road to Avernus

  In 1957, aided by a large grant from Verner Clapp’s Council on Library Resources, a document laminator named William James Barrow began a ten-year program of research into paper’s deterioration. As a first step, he assembled, from the collection of the Virginia State Library, five hundred nonfiction books printed between 1900 and 1949. Most were duplicates, all were undamaged. (“Bindings showed no wear, and leaves of some were unopened.”) Here are some of Barrow’s experimental victims, all published in the early decades of the twentieth century: John W. Foster’s Diplomatic Memoirs, Andrew Carnegie’s The Empire of Business, Seneca Egbert’s Manual of Hygiene and Sanitation, A Text-Book of True Temperance, published by the United States Brewers’ Association, Thomas Mosby’s Causes and Cures of Crime, Arthur Pound’s The Telephone Idea, The National Formulary of Unofficial Preparations, John Hearley’s Pope or Mussolini, and Mary S. Cutting’s Little Stories of Married Life.

  Out of each of these five hundred books, Barrow and his assistants cut eighteen test strips, from the middles of random pages. These he tested in various ways, tearing them in half using the Elmendorf Tear Tester, folding them under tension, analyzing their fiber content. The fold test, which he performed using a custom-made machine that worked the strip of paper back and forth through ninety degrees while subjecting it to a tugging force of one kilogram, was the most helpful, he found. Paper from older books survived many fewer oscillations between the clamps of his fold tester than paper from newer books. Correlating the fold-test data with some groundless guesswork1 (Barrow believed that three days in an artificial-aging oven2 at 212 degrees Fahrenheit was equivalent to twenty-five years of real life), he came up with a set of estimates of the life expectancy of the books whose pages he had minced.

  Here are Barrow’s results,3 summarized in the celebrated book called Deterioration of Book Stock, Causes and Remedies: thirty-nine percent fell in the Very Weak category, meaning they would “hardly last 25 years” and if unused “might be intact after 50 years.” Forty-nine percent were Low Strength, which would “deteriorate to the Very Weak category in 25 years. Their endurance would be less than newsprint.” Nine percent were Medium Strength A, likely to survive from twenty-five to fifty years with moderate usage; two percent were Medium Strength B and might be expected to last fifty years or more; one percent were High Strength. “If material which should be preserved indefinitely is going to pieces as rapidly as these figures indicate,” Barrow and his editors wrote, “it seems probable that most library books printed in the first half of the 20th century will be in an unusable condition in the next century.” Library administrators liked these numbers—some simply added together everything except High Strength and Medium Strength B and got a really frightening percentage: “The research carried out4 by William J. Barrow at the Virginia State Library indicated that 97% of the non-fiction books printed between 1900 and 1939 will have deteriorated to the point of being useless by the end of the century,” wrote a Preservation Committee at Pennsylvania State. Or you could flip it around, as Yale’s librarian Rutherford Rogers did in 1985: “Barrow startled the library world5 with his research results, which suggested that only 3 percent of the papers in books published between 1900 and 1949 could be expected to last for more than fifty years.” In any case, the numbers were disturbing. “Librarians will recognize that the problem is not a new one,” Barrow concludes, “but few will fail to be astonished at its magnitude.”

  But Barrow was wrong. There are today millions of usable library books dating from the first half of the twentieth century. As far as I can tell, all of the editions listed in his experiment exist now in libraries, available to readers. (Readers can’t use the specific copies that the Barrow Laboratory cut up, however.) There has been no apocalypse of paper. Perhaps Barrow sincerely believed in the estimates, perhaps not. Perhaps all those who, like Peter Sparks,6 cited Barrow believed in the estimates, perhaps not. In 1998, I read the numbers to William Wilson, the paper scientist who was measuring the natural aging of paper until someone tossed out his experiment. “A lot of these predictions were made to get people’s attention,” Wilson said. “I knew Mr. Barrow, by the way. I don’t know whether he really believed that or what. But it’s almost the end of the century, and somehow most of those books haven’t known that they were supposed to disappear.”

  Verner Clapp was the first to seize on Barrow’s numbers (he had paid for them, after all); in his Future of the Research Library, he used them as justification for his preferred path. “From the investigations7 of W. J. Barrow, it is now known that few of the books printed in the first half of this century can be expected to be of much use by its end,” Clapp wrote. In the early sixties, he paid the Association of Research Libraries to hire some statisticians8 to apply Barrow’s overeager deterioration model to a random sample of books in the National Union Catalog. They did some arithmetic and came up with 1.75 billion imperiled book-pages. Now the question became, as Clapp put it, “what to do about these 1.75 billion pages,9 many—perhaps most—of which are doomed within a relatively brief foreseeable future.”

  Deacidification was one possible course of action, wrote Clapp; and in the sixties the Council on Library Resources duly paid Barrow’s lab to test various early mass-deacidification treatments in Virginia. Barrow gassed books overnight with ammonia fumes, and he sprayed them with solutions of “magnesium acetate, urea, magnesium carbonate, calcium oxide (with the addition of
sugar), and magnesium bicarbonate.” He tried “pickling” a book: spraying it with chemicals and wrapping it in aluminum foil. None of these methods took. In 1966, Clapp encouraged Barrow to experiment with a treatment that a British liquor chemist had developed, using cyclohexylamine carbonate, CHC. The Barrow technicians interleaved books with CHC-impregnated sheets, and put sachets full of CHC granules in manuscript boxes; but the paper changed color, and the CHC reacted with humid air to form cyclohexylamine, which had “carcinogenic potential.” So that was out.

  After Barrow died in 1967, Clapp’s Council continued to fund the Barrow Lab, which forged on under the direction of Dr. Robert N. DuPuis,10 who in the fifties was director of research at Philip Morris. DuPuis wrote memos11 at Philip Morris that plaintiffs have since used as evidence of the tobacco industry’s extensive foreknowledge of the medical dangers of smoking; in 1955, he assured viewers of See It Now, Edward R. Murrow’s TV show, “If we do find any12 [components in tobacco smoke] that we consider harmful, and so far we have not, we’ll remove these from smoke and still retain the pleasure of your favorite cigarette.” In 1970, DuPuis became interested in the promise of morpholine, used in floor polish, to lift acid paper’s pH. Eventually, the Barrow Lab and George Kelly at the Library of Congress began some morpholine “vapor phase deacidification” tests, precursors to the diethyl-zinc trials. The Barrow Lab used treatment chambers made by Vacudyne,13 a company whose processing units, coincidentally, were helpful to cigarette manufacturers in their “vapor phase ammoniation” of tobacco leaves. (Ammonia raises the pH of smoke, allowing for a more powerful buzz per gram-unit of nicotine; morpholine raises the pH of paper—transiently, as it turned out.) Morpholine probably wasn’t a carcinogen—so Litton Bionetics14 determined through assays paid for by the Council on Library Resources in 1977—but it had a dead-fish smell, caused headaches and nausea,15 yellowed some paper, and sometimes changed the color of leather and pyroxylin-coated book jackets. Henry Grunder, a librarian at the Library of Virginia (formerly the Virginia State Library), wrote me that the Barrow Lab experimented with morpholine on his library’s books: “We frequently run into the tell-tale rubber stamp, with the lot number written in; and the darkening discoloration that it is said the process induced in some papers is also present. (It left that behind, although no residual alkalization.)”