Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  But in 1964, Clapp’s feelings about mass deacidification and other prolongations of incarnate bookness were only mildly enthusiastic anyway. Even if deacidification could be made to work, he wrote, he expected it to be “comparatively expensive”;16 and he mentions “storage at reduced temperatures” only in passing. Those were fine techniques to fiddle around with, but microfilm was for pragmatists: “The sensible solution17 to look to is, again, a solution based upon replacement of originals by high-reduction microfacsimile.”

  Notice the rhetorical fine-tuning. In 1961, Clapp was attempting to demonstrate that microfilm was good for libraries purely on economic grounds, because it was cheaper than the safekeeping of originals. Now, several years later, perhaps chastened by some of the less-than-fruitful hardware-development outlays the Council had made, he was saying that even if microfilming always remains more expensive than safekeeping, it is the best answer to a different problem—the problem of catastrophic deterioration—an answer that, he points out, has the side benefit of reducing “storage, binding, and other maintenance costs”18 as well. Microphotography is, he notes, “already the standard method19 for preserving newspapers”—why not books as well? Microfilm and attendant book-riddance is always the solution, but the primary problem it solves is beginning to shift. The idea of destroying to preserve is gaining ground.

  Late in life, Clapp wrote a long, multi-part essay20 for Scholarly Publishing about W. J. Barrow and the quest for permanent paper. It is required reading in some library schools, and for good reason: it is engagingly written and full of interesting sidelights about the development of papermaking. Clapp portrays his friend Barrow (whom he had known and advised since 194821) as a hero—“an essentially solitary worker22 lacking formal training” who single-handedly identifies the true causes of paper’s demise (not wood pulp, not polluted air, not gaslights, but alum-rosin sizing), and who invents an alternative acid-free recipe (or possibly adapts it without attribution from a formula developed by the S. D. Warren23 Company) that changes publishing forever.

  Clapp’s essay has helped move along reforms in the paper industry, and for that we should be grateful. But Barrow was not the pioneering self-taught visionary that Clapp made him out to be; one book conservator, Thomas Conroy, writes that Barrow

  treated his sources crudely,24 refusing to correct theory in the light of observation, and (a greater personal defect, but a smaller scientific one) giving inadequate credit to his predecessors. Much of Barrow’s appeal to librarians was that he proposed simple solutions to extremely complex and unfashionable problems. When serious attention was again given to preservation, starting in the late 1960s, Barrow’s writings were taken as given, and used directly as foundations for further work; his articulations were not challenged or confirmed.

  Sally Roggia, in a recent dissertation, writes that Barrow was an “aggressive promoter”25 who in the fifties and sixties began to be “widely, if incorrectly, credited26 with original scientific research and findings that were essentially confirmations of work that had been known for decades, and not new discoveries.” Roggia says that librarians and archivists must “stop holding onto myths27 especially when, as in Barrow’s case, the myth contradicts reason and common sense.”

  Clapp’s authority, his steady money, and his careful shaping of the truth created the Barrow myth. “I have spent many hundreds of hours28—yes many hundreds” editing Barrow’s writing, Clapp informed Barrow’s son after his death; “I do not mean to denigrate your Father’s achievement in any way when I say that in the programs of research which he conducted with assistance from this Council we were a full, if a junior partner.” So when Clapp talks about Barrow’s amazing discovery of the “catastrophic decline”29 in fold endurance and the “disastrous condition of paper30 in the second half of the nineteenth century”; when he titles a historical section “The Road to Avernus”31 (i.e., hell) and describes papermaker’s alum as “the librarian/archivist’s worst enemy,”32 we should pause for a moment, and recall that Clapp was a man besotted with microtext, who had spent lots of Ford Foundation money in attempts to perfect micro-machines and image-storers that would allow research libraries to unload their shelved and cataloged book inventory, and that in his role as chief assistant librarian of the Library of Congress he presided over the undoing of its peerless newspaper stock, a willed act that has undermined American historiography far more seriously than anything that alum-tormented newsprint could possibly have done to itself. Clapp, with Barrow’s laboratorial help, demonized old paper; he did so partly in order to compel improvements in new paper, and partly to make a convincingly urgent case for filmed replacements.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  It’s Not Working Out

  Clapp says that W. J. Barrow “knew more about old papers1 than anyone else alive.” If so, it was a taxidermist’s knowledge. Barrow spent his life coating old papers with melted plastic—not an activity that one normally associates with paper connoisseurship. He quit college2 in the twenties to work in his cousin’s company, the Barrow Corporation, which made work clothes. He managed clothes factories until 1931, when the company collapsed; a year later he set up shop as a conservator at the Virginia State Library. There, experimenting on the library’s collections, he gradually refined the now infamous Barrow method of document lamination.

  You take a fragile manuscript, or the disbound leaf of a book or newspaper, you layer it between two sheets of plastic, with some tissue included for strength and some chemicals to counteract acidity, and heat this sandwich up. Then you run it through a pair of rollers at great pressure until the plastic fuses permanently to the paper. It’s similar to what happens to new drivers’ licenses at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but instead of wallet IDs, Barrow was operating on eighteenth-century historical documents. The method became very popular; unlike traditional techniques of paper conservation, the procedure was quick and cheap and could be performed by anyone. “The Barrow laminating process,”3 wrote Clapp, “thus perfected by 1942, has withstood the test of time and has become the standard method.”

  But time’s test run had not ended. No conservation lab uses lamination now; and one website for newspaper collectors advises: “Don’t laminate any item in your collection. Lamination irrevocably destroys any value!” The plastic that Barrow used was cellulose acetate, the same substance that microfilm4 of that era was made of. In 1933, around the time Recordak’s Charles Z. Case began selling microfilm to libraries, a salesman from the Celluloid Corporation pitched a new product, Protectoid,5 to the National Archives. People at the archives began laminating documents between flat plates, in a 750-ton hydraulic press. Barrow couldn’t afford the flat-plate machine and used rollers instead. (Perhaps he’d had some experience with the making of celluloid collars from his factory work.) But acetate laminations, like acetate microfilms, aren’t stable at ambient temperatures and humidities. They go brittle. The reason that Barrow knew7 so much about deacidification, in fact, is that he’d had to figure out how to counteract the paper-attacking acetic acid that was awakened in the hot plastic as it squeezed through the rollers. (His method was hotter and squeezed harder than the National Archives’s flat-plate method.) Some laminated papers turned yellow or brown; some vintages of acetate contained particular plasticizers that weakened the paper they protected; and as the Barrow Lab sold its patented lamination machines to enthusiasts around the country, and the fame of the method spread from Virginia to other state archives—and to the New York Public Library8 and the Library of Congress9—bad things began happening. “We have found10 that some materials are permanently damaged by lamination,” wrote David Stam, head of the NYPL, in 1984. Someone at a state land agency in Pennsylvania treated a great many early American manuscripts, including papers by William Penn and papers with wax seals, to a rustic version of the Barrow hot-rolled process. When the Pennsylvania State Archives inherited these documents, and saw the shape they were in, they got a grant from the Pe
w Charitable Trust to “disemBarrow” or delaminate them.

  It was slow work. Jane Smith, a conservator, spent three years with a face mask on, using acetone and other solvents to remove the coating. “They were deteriorating rapidly, much more rapidly than anybody ever imagined,” she told me. “You could pick one up and twenty were stuck to it.” Plasticizers were “exuding from the lamination plastic,” and the result was “actually damaging the document physically, because as lamination breaks down, it lets off many nasty things—acetic acid, formic acid.” Most laminated documents aren’t this bad: “I’ve seen plenty of collections of documents that have been ‘Barrowed,’ and they’re in okay condition,” Smith said. “They’re inherently changed, because you’ve just melted plastic into the interstices of the paper, so you do not have a piece of paper anymore. You’ve introduced thermal oxidation and heavy pressure, and you’ve just filled all of the pores of the paper with melted plastic, which causes some forms of paper to become translucent. You can see through them—not completely through them like a sheet of glass, you’re not able to read them as clearly, because you’re getting conflicting information from both sides all at once.” Rumor has it that one state archive which owns a great many documents laminated by a Barrow disciple “smells like a pickle works”—the vinegar syndrome at work.

  I asked Smith what the satisfactions were to her delamination work. “Anybody at all, if they were interested, could see the tremendous difference between a piece of plastic that looks like a place mat at your dinner table, for your children, and a beautiful piece of seventeenth-century British-import or early Pennsylvania paper. You went from a piece of plastic to a piece of paper, and it was phenomenal. The texture reappeared. It was really a glorious thing.” When old microfilm contorts, and the emulsioned image separates from the base, you have nothing at all left to read; when lamination buckles, on the other hand, you still have the surviving document underneath.

  Swayed by the doctrine of reversibility, some paper conservators now use, in place of lamination, a much gentler technique called polyester film encapsulation, whenever they must enclose paper in plastic in order to protect it. William Minter, of Woodbury, Pennsylvania, developed this method: the document lives between two sheets of polyester that are sealed around the edges by a tiny, ultrasonically actuated titanium jackhammer that vibrates forty thousand times a second. The paper doesn’t get heated or squashed in rollers, and if for some reason you need to get your hands on the original, you can slice the margins of the encapsulation to free the paper. Less reversibly, a German company called ZFB (Zentrum für Bucherhaltung,11 or Center for Conservation) has built a room-sized machine that is able to pull apart, or “split,” a fragile newspaper or book page into two extremely thin surfaces and then glue these layers together, with a new, stronger paper sandwiched within. Barrow was “working with the best technology and the best materials available at the time,” Minter told me. “Unfortunately, it’s not working the way it was intended.”

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Double Fold

  Barrow’s breathtakingly confident predictions—as to the impermanency of twentieth-century paper and as to the permanency of twentieth-century plastic—haven’t come true, but it was his misuse of the fold test that really overstimulated librarianship. In the paper-science lab, the test is almost always performed with the help of a small desktop machine called the MIT Fold Tester,1 which turns a strip of paper back and forth through 270 degrees at the rate of 175 double folds per minute. It is the most sensitive of all the physical tests for paper—sensitive in the scientific sense, meaning that test strips which are strong in every other way may seem weak when fold-tested. “Changes in folding endurance2 of paper,” write D. F. Caulfield and D. E. Gunderson of the Forest Products Research Laboratory, “show up long before there is a change in the tensile strength, bursting strength, or tearing resistance.” If you are interested in proving that a page of a book has undergone a dramatic degradation, the fold test is the test for you.

  But it is an inconsistent test, according to B. L. Browning,3 a paper scientist who was a contemporary of Barrow: “The folding endurance test is less reproducible than most other physical tests, and a considerable scatter of values is commonly obtained even on relatively uniform machine-made papers.” Especially when you’re testing differences between old book papers, which can break after one, two, or five folds, the results are so variable that they must be discounted. “Values of one or only a few folds are not usually considered significant,” Browning writes. Of all tests, folding endurance is most influenced by humidity. The muggier the day, the more times your sample will be willing to fold, all other things being equal. In order to get meaningful results, you have to precondition your paper in an environment of known humidity. Barrow, self-taught, with no scientific background, only gradually became aware of these difficulties.

  None of that would matter much, except to paper scientists, if the fold test, allowing for all of its invalidating irreproducibilities, were a useful rough indicator of paper’s ability to do what readers ask of it. Is it? We ask of a book that its pages remain attached to their binding and turn. Maps must fold and unfold as a condition of use, dollar bills must survive pocket-crumpling and repeated wallet-bound contortions—book paper must turn without breaking. The late Klaus Hendriks, a scientist at the Canadian Conservation Institute, wrote:

  While folding endurance4 is more sensitive to changes in paper than any other strength test, papermakers essentially use it only in the manufacture of paper for applications such as bank notes and maps.

  The fold test, in other words, is the wrong test to be using on books. Indeed, Hendriks rejects other currently available mechanical measurements as well: “None of the commonly used paper tests5 bear any resemblance to the way a paper document or book is handled in practice,” he writes.

  Nonetheless, Barrow favored the fold test above all others because, he contended, it “simulates the bending of a leaf6 to and fro in a book in use,” and because it “seems to lend itself most readily to analysis”—meaning it made the best graphs. (In one of the Barrow Laboratory’s books,7 Verner Clapp and Barrow are photographed together as they admire a large wall-mounted graph of the precipitous decline in paper’s fold endurance; the inverse, in a way, of Fremont Rider’s exponential growth chart.) In 1967, as part of one of the last big experiments8 he designed before his death, Barrow put his team of technicians to work on five hundred more books—this time imprints published between 1800 and 1899. Some of these books would be nice to have now—an 1817 edition of Marmontel’s Les Incas, ou la destruction de l’empire du Pérou (with plates); Bayard Taylor’s A Visit to China, India, and Japan in the Year 1853 (1855); Jones’s Medical Electricity (1895); the 1857 edition of William Cowper Prime’s Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia; Secret Journals of the Acts and Proceedings of Congress (1821 ed.); and Margaret Oliphant’s Makers of Venice. But Barrow, ever the dissector, had them snipped and clamped into the fold testers, which must have been waggling away into the wee hours, since the experimental regime demanded thirty strips per book—ten strips cut across the lines of print, ten cut from inkless paper, and ten cut parallel to the lines of print—not to mention another eight strips per book to be clamped and torn in the Elmendorf Tester. Barrow, who sometimes seems really to despise paper, found the “debasement of quality” to be “pervasive” in the books published between 1850 and 1869, but it “reached an all time low” at century’s end. (The descriptive writing here is probably Verner Clapp’s, not Barrow’s; Clapp’s literary assistance9 at times amounted to ghostwriting.) Over two thirds of the 1870–1899 group endured one fold or less, which meant they were, he said, “not suitable for regular library use.”

  All these test books, along with the five hundred from 1900 to 1949, and assorted other lots (including seven books10 printed between 1534 and 1722, “all of which were in excellent condition after several centuries of use”), have now disappeared from vie
w—temporarily, one hopes. The Barrow lab closed in the seventies; the books reportedly went to the Library of Congress. Bill Minter, the encapsulator, observed to me that even in their mutilated state these books would be interesting to study now: using Barrow’s baseline fold data, we might measure whether the paper had become appreciably weaker after thirty further years of natural aging, and how well deacidified paper held its deacidification, and we could get a better sense of what Barrow meant by “not suitable for regular library use.” Minter proposed to Chandru Shahani that the Library of Congress do some experiments on the Barrow test specimens (“For the past ten years I’ve been talking about this!” Minter says), but to judge by his research, Shahani is not terribly interested in the actual aging of paper—he remains fascinated by laboratory ovens, and by the possibility of developing an improved and simplified artificial-aging test.