Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  In time, most of the bigger papermakers switched to alkaline-buffered output, following the lead of the S. D. Warren Company; some of the smaller ones couldn’t afford to and closed. Today, most hardcover books state on the copyright page that they are printed on acid-free paper. (The competing hope that the industry also employ recycled postconsumer fibers, the chemistry of which is difficult to control, has possibly lopped some years off the life expectancy of some “permanent” papers, however.) Vartan Gregorian’s New York Public Library placed a full-page ad in The New York Times to celebrate acid-free “pledge day,” and its public-relations office took the opportunity to issue a press release filled with some further alarming (and false) numbers—such as “35 out of the 88 miles4 of shelves in the Central Research Library contain 2½ million dying books”; “Seventy percent of all books printed in this century will be unusable in the year 2000”—followed by a deferential nod to the NYPL preservation program, which runs “one of the largest and most sophisticated microfilming laboratories in the world.”

  It always went back to dying books and microphotography. And yet Patricia Battin was well aware that, as she told me, “everybody hates microfilm.” There were two ways of alkalizing this hatred: the long-term way and the short-term way. The long-term way was to perfect digital successors to microfilm (since, as Robert Hayes wrote, “There appears to be high user acceptance5 of quality CRT display; why else would so many people watch ‘the tube’ so avidly?”) and begin converting the subsidized film scrolls as soon as electro-storage technologies had developed standards, or even sooner. The short-term way, though, was to scare “the masses” (to use Ellen McCrady’s word) into thinking that big-money microfilm was, for now at least, a necessary evil. In the world of research libraries, the masses are the faculty and students who use the collections. Over several decades, these groups had successfully been eased into the conviction that the replacement of original newspapers with rolls of transparent plastic was a historical inevitability; now they had to be persuaded, as well, that a planet’s worth of old books was at death’s door. That’s where the Scholarly Advisory Committees, or SACs, came in.

  With the help of money from the Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Commission on Preservation and Access invited dozens of academics to spend some time in restful settings outside Washington (at the Belmont Conference Center in Elkridge, Maryland, or in Bellagio, Italy), where they would sit through presentations by Battin and others, read handouts, hear more presentations, talk earnestly about the task they faced, read more handouts, and return to their home campuses in a state of double-folded enlightenment. There was the Scholarly Advisory Committee on Art History, the Medieval Studies SAC, the Text and Image SAC, and the Modern Language and Literature SAC. “Making clear to scholars6 that their own perhaps narrow specialty is far from the only area affected is an early task in the development of a scholarly advisory committee,” the Commission’s annual report stated in 1992. “This awareness usually leads to the desire to spread the word—to inform colleagues of the impending disaster and to rouse them to action.” Eventually, the Commission’s various committees were expected to produce reports and (since two thirds of the brittle books would be allowed to die spontaneously) “help plan strategies for making the hard choices as to what and how to preserve.”

  There were scholars who were somewhat puzzled by the proceedings. My father-in-law, Robert Brentano, a medievalist at Berkeley who was invited to participate in the Text and Image SAC, found himself explaining the usefulness to historians (and their students) of seeing the actual books and documents from a certain period, rather than many separate pictures of them. Others were completely taken in, used by the Commission to spread panic. Larry Silver, a member of the Art History SAC, delivered an addled talk at the annual conference of the College Art Association. He said that being asked to select what to preserve was “like playing God, or at least Solomon.” One had to play Solomon, said Silver, because wood-pulp paper was “filled with acid that literally causes it to self-destruct, like the tapes on the old television show, Mission Impossible.” J. Hillis Miller, famed deconstructionist from the University of California at Irvine, wrote the final report for the Modern Language and Literature SAC. The Commission passed out copies of Miller’s report at its brand-new “modular brittle books display” at the Modern Language Association meeting in 1992: “Large resources need to be deployed to preserve as many books as possible,” Miller announced (that must have pleased the Commission!), and he said that “every possible action should be taken to educate our colleague[s] and our libraries in the magnitude of the problem.” Members of the committee were of course mindful of the value of “actual physical books,” Miller wrote,

  But if these original books8 in all their copies and editions, along with all the papers in archives, printed or written on paper from the 1850’s to the recent past, are slowly burning up, then microfilmed or digitalized preservation is obviously demanded.

  By then, Patricia Battin’s planful indefatigability—the articles, the newsletters, the roving exhibits, the scholarly committee meetings, the grueling international tours—had paid off substantially. The word “dust” had been singularly helpful, and the word “crisis” had been given a walk on the wild side, as well. Warren Haas, recall, had staidly said there was a “brittle books problem”; then Margaret Child said that there was “indeed a crisis”; then Vartan Gregorian told the congressional subcommittee that it was a “national crisis”; then Slow Fires called it a “universal crisis.” But in 1988, before Congress, Patricia Battin, never to be outdone, held up the shining orb of the National Endowment of the Humanities, which she says constitutes an “unparalleled resource to solve an unparalleled crisis.” Congress, marshaled by Sidney Yates and abuzz with the novelty of the disaster they were being called upon to relieve, nearly tripled the budget for the NEH’s Office of Preservation—soon to be renamed the Division of Preservation and Access, mirroring Battin’s Commission. A year later, Battin told Congress that embrittlement was “an unprecedented crisis”—no, wait, it was a “crisis of alarming proportions.” Congress scaled up the budget even more. Suddenly George F. Farr, Jr., a polite, plummy man who was then and is still the director of the NEH’s preservation program, had many millions to give away for filming projects. “The Endowment could not have advanced9 its current plan for brittle books without the groundwork laid by the Commission and, at an earlier date, by the Council on Library Resources,” Farr wrote. Hefty applications and testimonial letters came in from libraries, each describing a particular collection10 (a thematic subcomponent of American history, say) that especially deserved to have its pictures taken, page by page, before it succumbed. The review panels met; the winners were announced; the disbinding began. The Library of Congress’s Preservation Microfilming Office got a congressional budget-boost as well, so that its squad of camera operators could keep pace with the national effort. The civilization-saving plan to microfilm over three million books was under way.

  In the first few years, the wave of soft money went mostly to libraries with existing photoduplication programs—Columbia, NYPL, Harvard, Yale, Chicago—but that changed as more universities created preservation departments of their own, hiring full-time preservation administrators to run them. The preservation administrator could perform a local deterioration survey that would produce some shocking percentages, choose an enticing subset of the collection to present to the NEH in a grant proposal, negotiate contracts with nonprofit or commercial microfilming shops, and convince the subject specialists in charge of that piece of the collection to come up with five or ten thousand brittle books. The institutionalization of the preservationist’s profession was one of Patricia Battin’s cherished dreams—indeed, just before she left Columbia, she had secured for its library school nearly half a million dollars from the NEH to train more fresh, green P.A.s. “We didn’t have a manufacturing infrastructure,” Battin explained to me. “I mea
n, how are we going to film all this stuff?”

  There is a direct correlation between the spread of preservation administration as a career and the widening toll on old books. Battin wrote in 1988 that the “number of preservation operations11 in American research libraries has increased from about 5 in 1978 to more than 50 in 1988, as universities have acted to institutionalize the activities necessary for the preservation of scholarly collections printed on acid paper.” She adds: “And we haven’t yet begun to fight!”

  There are about eighty preservation administrators at work now. The only major research library in the country that still has no full-time or part-time preservation administrator is the Boston Public Library. It is also the only large library in the country that has kept all of its post-1870 bound newspaper collection.

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  Microfix

  Not all preservation administrators approved of what the Commission on Preservation and Access was up to, though. “I just saw Pat as leading the whole profession down a tube,” says Randy Silverman, the director of preservation at the University of Utah’s library. Utah has a dry climate, and Silverman, a practicing bookbinder and conservator, knew that there wasn’t a brittle-paper crisis in his library. In fact, he wasn’t running into many brittle books at all, and in the ones he did see “gutter-snap,” as he called it, was often the problem: the pages broke at the perforations of an oversewn binding. He and Matthew Nickerson,1 a graduate student, replicated the standard double-fold survey procedures on a random sample of books from the university’s collections and found, as they expected, brittleness rates at about two percent—their point being that storing books at lower humidity was possibly a better (and far cheaper) way of extending their lives than cutting them up to take pictures of them.

  Silverman’s main objection to Battin’s NEH-funded program, however, was that in the first several years there was no money for book repair. “The profession was steered by this great fear,” he told me, and the fear led to mass microfilming, which “took the focus away from other activities. My hobbyhorse is trying to repair books—you know, fix them—and there was no money left for conservation. All the money was going to film. And every time you got done filming, you were able, in some people’s minds, to simply throw the books away.” There were plenty of things, Silverman knew, that an experienced book-repair person could do for a population of damaged or fragile books2 to keep them on the shelf and available for use—and the repairs wouldn’t cost nearly as much as would microfilming them or giving them high-end conservation treatment. Detached pages, flapping spines, a broken text-block—many troubles were fixable if you knew what you were doing. But most preservation administrators were trained as reformatters and managers and not as practitioners of a traditional craft; having no personal experience doing repair, they sent things to the microfilmers that would have required only a little thread, some paste and Japanese paper, and some close attention.

  Early on, Silverman began writing a polemic against the Commission and its selling of “microfix” (his word) as the sole solution, but he buried it. “It was really loaded ten years ago. I would shoot off my mouth in private. It was too dangerous to say stuff, because in fact you couldn’t change it.” Some of his colleagues had private misgivings,3 as well; but, as Silverman wrote me after we talked, “the reality was nobody could stand up to Ms. Battin because they all had their hand in the NEH till that she was stockpiling.”

  Once, however, Silverman challenged Battin publicly. It happened at an American Library Association convention, circa 1991; Battin was giving an update on the national microfilming campaign. “She made it clear that people really needed to participate in the brittle book program by writing grant proposals,” Silverman says. There was a lot of money that year for microfilming, and it was in danger of not being spent: “If it wasn’t used she feared that Congress would determine that the brittle-book crisis (as she had promoted it to them) would appear not to require funding and once the critical momentum was gone she feared it would never be reestablished.” Silverman spoke up during the question-and-answer period. “I tried to make a point that the exclusive focus on microfilming equaling ‘preservation’ was leaving the repair of the physical collections unaddressed. She told me that book repair was a local maintenance issue and did not qualify for national funding because it was each library’s responsibility to maintain its own collection.”

  Battin wrote authoritatively in 1990: “The issue of repair as an alternative to microfilm was not considered as a federal responsibility in the initial legislation.” Later, apparently in response to protests from some grantees, the NEH changed the rules somewhat; George Farr was at pains to point out several times to me that the NEH has “provided support” for the repair and reboxing of more than fifty thousand books (out of more than eight hundred thousand that were filmed), but when I repeated Farr’s claim to one preservation manager, this manager (who asked for anonymity) said, “Whoa, whoa, first, the assertion is wrong. He hasn’t paid for fifty thousand books. He has allowed us to pay for the repair of books as part of our cost share. Do you know how these grants work? We write a grant to NEH, NEH gives us two dollars, and we have to add in a dollar of our own. It’s two to one. The NEH guidelines allow us to repair books that have gone through the process, as part of our contribution. In the ultimate bottom line, which is the total of what we’ve contributed, [along] with what NEH provides, he’s technically correct. But there is no money in the federal budget to support the repair of collections.”

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  Slash and Burn

  Patricia Battin gave me a brittle book when we met one afternoon in Washington, at the offices of the Council on Library and Information Resources on Massachusetts Avenue. The book is a play by Robert de Flers1 and Francis de Croisset, in French, accompanied by a memoir and a frontispiece photograph of de Flers in profile (he’s reading a sheet of manuscript) and a facsimile of his handwriting. It is a charming little book, published in Paris in 1929 and library-bound in pink, black, and red marbled boards soon thereafter (since it originally came out in paperback), and now tied with a soft, salmon-colored shoestring. The bookplate says “Columbia University in the City of New York” in Gothic letters, and bears the seal of the university, in which Wisdom, or some nobly enthroned woman, says something in Hebrew while holding up a book to three naked children. There is a scriptural reference at the feet of the children, citing a passage in Peter: “Laying aside all malice2 and guile and as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby.”

  In 1986, as part of a “Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project”3 organized by the Research Libraries Group (which Patricia Battin had run for a time), Columbia stamped the book WITHDRAWN and sent it to Micrographic Systems of Connecticut, where it was neatly guillotined and then filmed, with financial support from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation—whereupon Patricia Battin took it with her to Washington as a sample. The paper is brown around the edges and has the Necco-wafer smell of acidic paper, but it is otherwise intact; somebody has apparently performed a fold test on the lower corner of page 115. Fifteen years ago, Columbia’s preservation administrators decided that this book was at risk for immediate disintegration and deserved emergency filming with our tax money; today, though a photographer reduced it to a stack of loose leaves, nothing remotely decompositional has occurred. On a hot day recently, I untied its string and held up some of its pages; they did not tear or shatter or do anything except move air and make interesting soft flapping noises. Columbia University has a reel of master microfilm now and no book.

  Guillotining was de rigueur in the 1988 Brittle Books plan. Not every book was cut, but most were. “I’ll try to explain this in a way that I don’t get misunderstood,” Battin said to me, when I asked her why the books couldn’t simply have gone back on the shelf after they were microfilmed. “Here we have a disaster of major proportions, and I do belie
ve that. We have limited amounts of money. If you do it in a cottage-industry way, in which you try not to disbind the book, it’s going to cost you a lot more than if you say, okay, we have to make this economic decision, and we can save the knowledge in more books if we do it on this kind of mass—”4 Battin hesitated for an instant and then continued, “which means disbinding.”

  Battin went on to tell me that a German company, Herrmann & Kraemer, has developed advanced book cradles “which allow you to do a good job of filming without disbinding the book. We didn’t have those at that time.” Battin is correct that such cradles exist. But the best U.S. microfilming establishments—Preservation Resources and NEDCC—do not use them. It is possible to film all but the most tightly bound books well with a traditional cradle, it just takes longer: almost all programs do less disbinding now than they did at the height of the craze in the early nineties, even though they have traditional cradles to work with. The desire to disbind, then, was independent of what was technologically possible. “I think by and large if we were going to do as much as we thought the majority of the scholarly world wanted, we had to disbind,” Battin told me, “and then the book wouldn’t go back on the shelf.”