Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  Now, 13.3 percent of 3.8 million is about five hundred thousand, subtract that—okay, that brings us down to our final number: 3.3 million brittle volumes to microfilm in the next twenty years.

  And now to figure out how much it’s going to cost. Assume a rate of twenty cents a page, sixty dollars a book, to film the chosen ones, and assume another twenty-two dollars in library overhead to do the choosing and cataloging and processing necessary before and after the work is done. Slap on another $88 million for things like training, research, program management, and communications, and you end up with a Brittle Books Program cost of $358 million.

  That’s a lot of money, true, but Dean Hayes is ready in chapter 6 of his report to point out the advantages, as well. At the top of his list is “Saving of Storage Costs.” If each of the 3.3 million books that get microfilmed induces five out of ten of the libraries which hold duplicates to get rid of their own copies of those books, replacing them with “some other means of access to [their] content” (at an undisclosed cost), then all libraries, considered together, will be the net beneficiaries of liberated stack space. One must assign a dollar value to that space. It costs, Hayes estimates, only $1.25 per year to store a book, but if you do some quick things with present values and interest rates, you come up with a present value of the future cost of storage of $12.50 per book. Since five books are being dumped for every one microfilmed, you can multiply that number by five: $62.50 per volume—that is, slightly more than the estimated basic cost of microfilming. To put it another way: Yes, we’ll be spending $358 million on the program, but since as a result of the program, libraries will be relieving themselves of 16.5 million books, we’re going to be saving $206 million in storage costs—3.3 million books times the present value of the storage cost for five books at $62.50 per book. The savings that result from this spectacular book blowout is a “societal benefit” rather than a local benefit, Hayes points out: “The bulk of the savings will be experienced by other libraries that replace their duplicates with the converted form.”

  Then Hayes (whose Ph.D. thesis for the UCLA math department was entitled “Iterative Methods of Solving Linear Problems on Hilbert Space”) performs a last operations-research calculation that I’m not sure I can follow. Five of the ten duplicates for every unique microfilmed title are, under Hayes’s model, going out the back door, but even so, Hayes thinks that once the shutter has stopped clicking over a given book, a library will save money on interlibrary-loan costs connected with it—$149 in present value per microfilmed original, he estimates. He gives no costs for the duplication of the microfilm that would make interlibrary loans unnecessary; he talks about various forms of alternative delivery (“online, download”), but he assigns no financial outlays to them—the high-speed digital backbones will apparently be free. Never mind—for Hayes’s purposes, the enormous “savings” on forgone interlibrary-loan costs gets us past the break-even point. The project is not a wash, it’s a profit. As a nation, we would end up richer if we spent $358 million to microfilm 3.3 million tragically doomed books and threw out sixteen million tragically doomed duplicates: we would save space, save money, and save civilization, too.

  Fremont Rider would have been proud.

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  Six Thousand Bodies a Day

  It was a national emergency. So Congressman Pat Williams of Montana believed. He and his staff had gotten the story from Warren Haas, who was using the numbers he’d gotten from Robert Hayes. On March 3, 1987, Congressman Williams’s Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education assembled a group of experts at an “Oversight Hearing on the Problem of ‘Brittle Books’ in our Nation’s Libraries.” “Today,” Williams announced, “many documents1 that represent this Nation’s cultural and intellectual heritage are literally eroding away.” Acid paper was the culprit; “librarians tell us that millions of books in America’s libraries are now in great danger.” The principal solution, in Congressman Williams’s considered opinion, was microfilm—lots of it, and soon. “It is our Nation’s very memory that is at risk.”

  The testimony that followed was vigorous and persuasive. Daniel Boorstin, accompanied by Deputy Librarian Welsh and Peter Sparks of the Preservation Directorate, tendered as fact the notion that each year at his library seventy thousand volumes were moving into a “dangerously brittle state”2—a numerical whimsy that Sparks had been passing around to reporters for years. “Across the country,”3 Boorstin said, “in libraries and learned institutions, in every State of the Union, books are becoming so brittle that their contents can only be salvaged by microfilming and then only if funds are available soon.” Vartan Gregorian, who was at the time head of the New York Public Library (and a member of Warren Haas’s Commission on Preservation and Access), told the hearing room that seventy-seven million volumes in the United States were “facing extinction”4 (Robert Hayes’s estimate, plus a million, and with an injection of endangered-species rhetoric), and he compared his staff to “French generals5 in charge of triage” who must take care of the “immediate death problem” for some books while “putting others in nursing homes, and some others in ambulatory care, while waiting for their turn.” Gregorian held up what he called “almost a dead book”6—the history of a French town during the Battle of the Marne. “We have resurrected it through microfilming,” he said. He closed by quoting the slogan of the United Negro College Fund—”A mind is a terrible thing to waste”7—and said that “we stand to waste the fruit of many minds, indeed, many cultures, if we hesitate in our response to this national crisis.”

  Lynne Cheney, the new chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, said: “Our thrust at the Endowment8 has been on intellectual content rather than on the book itself”—hence the Endowment’s predilection for microfilming over low-cost book repairing. The problem of brittle books “has only been in the forefront9 of my mind for eight or nine months now,” Cheney confessed, but still, the carnage had to stop: “As we speak, the war continues, and every day Dan Boorstin gets 6,000 more bodies brought into the Library of Congress.”

  One of the congressmen asked Cheney for some cost estimates, and she used Robert Hayes’s: “We are dependent upon people10 to whom we give grants to come up with figures for the amount of money needed to save these [volumes]. The Council on Library Resources estimates that in order to film 3 million volumes over the next 20 years, $358 million is needed, or about $15 million annually.”

  Carole Huxley, an official at the New York State Education Department (who had also participated in Haas’s brittle-books committee), offered no corpses or French generals, but she did assert that what was going on in the New York State Library was a “calamity.” Brandishing an old book, she said: “Our research houses11 are on fire.”

  Eventually, it was Warren Haas’s turn. The time had come, said Haas, for the federal government to “join in the task12 as a constructive partner and to do its share.” Lots had been accomplished already, “but a kind of giant step13 is needed. . . . I have just no question that the time is right.” In recent years, the general public has begun protecting historical buildings, Haas observed; now, as a mature society, we must do the same for our documentary past:

  The purpose of the work14 we have set for ourselves is to protect the human record as it is and has been. In this cause, we have the advantage of starting with collections that have been assembled by librarians and scholars over more than a century; we already have what has been judged important at many points in time.

  Let’s think for a second about what Warren Haas has just said. He is quite right. It is a marvel, for which we should all be thankful, that libraries have such breadth and multifariousness. It is no easy thing to make a great library. It doesn’t just happen—it is something that nineteenth- and twentieth-century librarians (and legislators, university presidents, boards of directors, faculty members, and rich people, too) decided was worth doing, for themselves and for us. It took three hundred million discret
e acts of inclusive judgment to build the empires of locally available paper that we inherit and use, and we would like to be able to pass on this congregated boon to those who follow, trusting them to do the same. Trust makes it work. Now, imagine if the National Trust for Historic Preservation asked Congress to devote fifteen million dollars a year to the making of measured architectural drawings and floor-by-floor blueprints of thousands of old buildings in need of repair, and then, once they had “intellectually preserved” the ogives and molding profiles and pediments and interior vistas of these buildings, tore half of them down. “The books themselves,15 as items, cannot be saved,” Haas declared, “but their contents can.”

  The crisis offered a major opportunity, as well. Once a library has saved the “contents” of a book, Haas told the assembly, “new technology suggests that there may be additional ways to use the item”:

  It is not unlikely,16 I think, that the wealth of film that we are building up as a national archive can be used to convert to digital form for reading on a computer terminal, for using it as a base for printing a new edition in small numbers.

  Haas doesn’t stress the point: it wouldn’t do to give the impression that the government was being asked to provide venture capital for a prodigious electronic-publishing venture. But in fact that was the plan: get money now to have a whole lot of “endangered” (and incidentally out of copyright) material shot on film, then digitize from the film later, for ease of access.

  At no point during that morning in Washington did anyone mention the documented vulnerabilities of “archival” silver-halide microfilm, although the Council on Library Resources’s own program officer had pointed them out in print a decade earlier. Nobody explained that the word “brittle” as used in their statistics had a narrow, technical definition. Nobody felt the need to suggest to those present that just because you take pictures of something doesn’t mean you must throw it away, and that in fact the low-cost storage of the source originals ought to be a part of any prudent effort to “protect the human record.”

  And, most interestingly, none of the expert witnesses uttered a syllable about space.

  Had these seasoned library leaders—Welsh, Haas, Gregorian, and others—all suddenly forgotten the shelving squabbles that they’d had to adjudicate in their own institutions? Were they entirely unconscious of the fact that if you cut up and “save” three million books on film you have three million fewer books to store, and that the creation of a databased union list of what has been filmed may well have a fivefold effect on discarding, just as Robert Hayes had suggested in the very report on which they were basing their twenty-year action plan? (“The great argument in favor of microfilm is space saving,” Hayes wrote in the expanded 1987 version of his report.) Had they blanked on fifty years of pro-condensational oratory? Of course they hadn’t. Space assuagement was what they longed for, and yet, as if by prior agreement, they mentioned it not.

  Since the perfection of the Xerox machine, microfilming has been unnecessary to any book-preservational act. If I were a preservation administrator, and I were absolutely sure, because I had an infallible accelerated-aging test for paper, that all surviving copies of Edmund Gosse’s Questions at Issue at my library and everywhere else were going to disintegrate into illegibility tomorrow at 3:30 P.M., and if I were determined to preserve the contents of that book for the human record, and if I had no secret craving to make use of the shelf space that Gosse’s book occupied, would I have the book microfilmed? Certainly not. I would instead make two full-sized eye-readable photocopies, one bound and one unbound. The bound copy would go on the shelf tomorrow, and the unbound one would become the master, and go into storage in order to make copies for other libraries as they wanted them. Preservation photocopying, as it is called, is faster and cheaper than microfilming, and much easier to check for errors and to correct when errors are found than film is (the film technician must splice retakes into the frame sequence, and there is a stipulated limit of three splices per roll), and the image is cleaner on a paper copy, and you don’t need to read it on a screen in a windowless hellhole—and you will get a better digital scan and searchable OCR text from it as well, when or if that time comes.

  Savage, ungovernable space yearnings, in concert with an ill-conceived long-term plan to stock the sparkling digital pond with film-hatchery trout—these, and not groundwood pulp or alum-rosin sizing, were the real root causes of the brittle-books crisis.

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  Burning Up

  At several points during their congressional testimony, Vartan Gregorian, Lynne Cheney, and others referred admiringly to a brand-new movie called Slow Fires. This documentary, conceived and commissioned by Warren Haas, paid for by money given to the Council on Library Resources from the Exxon and Mellon Foundations, with further infusions from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is the most successful piece of library propaganda ever created. Haas chose Terry Sanders, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, to produce and direct; Haas had heard good things about Sanders on a visit to UCLA, and during their interview Sanders struck Haas as a person who was willing to listen. At the outset, Sanders was a blank slate—“Basically, it’s not a subject that I know the slightest bit about,” Sanders told me—but he was, Haas recalls, a “quick study.” Sanders got Haas, Welsh, Sparks, and a few others to come up with a wish list of what they wanted the film to do and say, and he read the packets of material he was sent. He felt that he could use some help with the writing: “I’m not particularly a wordsmith—this needed some poetry to it.” So he asked Ben Maddow, whose Asphalt Jungle had been nominated for an Oscar in 1951, to come up with the screenplay.

  Still, Sanders was worried. “When I would tell people about the film that I was doing, about the paper and books turning to dust and the acid eating away—as I told them, their eyes would literally glaze over. It was not an exciting topic to anyone. So that was a good early warning signal that [we’d] better do everything possible to make it an interesting film. We were running scared the whole way.” They spent months trying to think of a title; finally, Ben Maddow came up with a real grabber: Slow Fires.

  Haas himself (blue shirt,1 wise-looking eyebrows) begins the movie quietly, saying something innocuous about how we can’t get carried away by electronic fads; but soon we are in a lushly photographed, somberly sound-tracked world, visiting the Austrian National Library in Vienna, where expressionless international preservationists have convened to discuss (at a meeting funded by the Council on Library Resources) the world’s paper crisis; and then we’re at Harvard’s Widener Library, in a gorgeous slow dolly shot of bookshelves accompanied by narrator Robert MacNeil’s voice of literate probity: “Here Nobel Prize winners roam the open stacks—historians reevaluating the past, scientists looking to see what other scientists have already done.” Then MacNeil’s voice drops slightly: “Yet month by month, year by year, these precious volumes are burning away with insidious slow fires.”

  Lap-dissolve to a pair of stone lions: at the New York Public Library, we learn, “millions of books are victims of a chemical disease.” The NYPL’s chief of conservation, John Baker, says that the books may not look so bad (he’s right, they don’t): “But when you open them, many, many of them are so brittle and deteriorated that they simply fall apart in your hands.” (We never see such an outcome in the film, however.) Then we’re off to the Library of Congress, containing, MacNeil narrates, “the cumulative daily life of the nation, invaluable and irreplaceable.”

  Yet even here, inside this shell of splendid masonry, millions of volumes are falling apart, inside their covers, and within the very fortress meant to preserve them.

  At this, there is a stare-shot of a worn and tattered book and a sudden (but soft) violin-tremolo of fear on the sound track. Vartan Gregorian comes on, a jolly charmer, but serious now, announcing that there are “seven million disintegrating books” in the Library of Congress.

&n
bsp; The film’s kidney-punch is delivered in William Welsh’s office. Welsh, who from some angles looks a bit like Kirk Douglas, or maybe I’m thinking of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler in the TV version of Batman, holds a small old book while he describes the library’s 1984 deterioration survey. “So we had a survey made of our collections,” he says, “and we discovered, much to my horror, that twenty-five percent of our book collections of thirteen million books—twenty-five percent—were embrittled. That means they would crumble.” Welsh does not describe the MIT Fold Test that was the basis of this embrittlement percentage, but he does vividly demonstrate what he means by the temporally indeterminate phrase “would crumble.” He opens the book he is holding. It has a loose binding, but its pages are not falling apart; indeed, they appear abundantly readable. Nothing breaks off or crumbles away as Welsh flips through it.

  “This is a book taken from our collections that shows the condition that I’ve described, embrittlement,” he says, and he pulls a page out and crumples it in his fist. Working his fingers, he allows the illegible confetti that he has just created to flutter onto his lap. He looks meaningfully at the camera, as if what he has done is devastating in its irrefutability. “You see what happens when you do that to it,” he says.

  Slow Fires has a sequel, Into the Future (1997), about the novel burdens of keeping digital media alive. Into the Future is very good, but Slow Fires has moments of trying tendentiousness.2 It would be a better film if what it was saying happened to be truth and not head-slapping exaggeration—then its use of crisis language borrowed from struggles over DDT, AIDS, and acid rain, and its footage of murmuring papyrologists attempting to reassemble fragments of ruined Egyptian texts (“within a generation or two our own books in our own libraries will look like this unless we take heed”), and its pity-inducing pans over shots of charred library interiors and of the Florence flood, would have some justification. But one mustn’t chide the director of a made-to-order film for doing his best to tell the story that the people who hired him asked him to tell. “I’m not the expert at all,” Terry Sanders told me. No prominent paper scientists—not William Wilson, or Chandru Shahani, or Klaus Hendriks—were interviewed in the film or asked to review the script for accuracy. Nonetheless, the film won Grand Prize3 in the science category of the 1989 Salerno Film Festival.