Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  We could save more books for less right now if we destroyed more books right now, and we had to act right now because it was a “disaster of major proportions,” and we knew it was a disaster of major proportions because corners were breaking when space-craving preservation administrators running microfilm labs folded and pinched them. George Farr, the NEH’s preservation person, was on board5 with this cross-eyed logic; and in the early years of NEH funding, with the Slow Fires panic and Battin’s cost-saving mass-production strategy uppermost in participants’ minds, filming activity often took a “vacuum-cleaner approach,” as it came to be called. Operators bundled off whole stack-ranges that were determined to be at risk, rather than going through the shelves book by book to figure out what physically ought to happen to individual items: it takes time and therefore money to sort a shelf-full of books into “basket cases” (a widely used and wonderfully elastic term for books in bad shape), books that may need minor repair, and books that were merely published in the acid-paper era and are otherwise okay. “Yes, I’m sure there are books that were microfilmed that probably were not that brittle,” Battin says now. “We had great debates among the populace as to whether you took the collection approach or the individual-copy approach, and decided for the initial filming grants that the collection approach made the most sense.” To me she quoted the French adage, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Of course, the bad can be the enemy of the good, too.

  Yale was one of the big libraries that took the collection approach. In a paper about a microfilm-to-digital experiment at Yale called Project Open Book, Paul Conway described one of the challenges the conversion team faced. “Slash and burn preservation,”6 he named it: “For some key collections in a single library, most of the brittle books are now gone.” Determining the dimensions of an original page or the fidelity of its microfilmed reproduction is “severely hampered,” wrote Conway, “if the original volume is in a landfill.”

  “We had to slash our way through these collections in order to save them”—that was the thinking in the eighties and early nineties, Conway said when I reached him. The sense was that “these books were on their last legs, if not already dead: ‘Put them out of their misery and move on to a better technology.’ The first seven or eight years of large-scale microfilming had that mentality.” (Conway was not director of preservation at Yale during that period.)

  I asked him if the sudden surge of NEH money had perhaps seduced libraries into destroying the very things we meant them to preserve. “Yes, we were seduced,” Conway said. Yale’s American history collection, for example, took a hit early on. “Half of what was there is now filmed and not on the shelf anymore. And everyone was seduced. But at some point we started waking up and saying ‘Wait a minute, this is crazy.’ ” In a recent NEH-funded project, Yale filmed twenty-one thousand books, and they threw “maybe two hundred” away, he said. Like Ohio State, Yale now has a new remote-storage warehouse, where books are sorted by size rather than by subject, and shelved in arbitrary order in computer-indexed cardboard boxes on thirty-foot-high shelves that you reach on a cherry picker. “There’s a lot of criticism about them because they’re not browsable,” said Conway, “but what those buildings have effectively done is make space a non-issue.”

  Libraries everywhere, one is told and wants to believe, are now dispatching many fewer books than they were ten years ago, in the heyday of Battin’s hatchet fever. Jan Merrill-Oldham, Preservation Librarian at Harvard, wrote me that Harvard is currently filming nine to ten thousand “brittle volumes” per year, of which only one or two a month are completely disbound and guillotined. (In a partial disbind, the prep person cuts some of the threads, loosening the book so that it can open flatter under the glass pressure plate.) One of Harvard’s recent NEH grant proposals states that “approximately 7%7 of all volumes filmed as part of this project will require disbinding or removal of folded pages prior to microfilming. Disbinding is a strategy of last resort.” But Merrill-Oldham insisted that even the seven-percent figure was “an artifact” (numbers, like lucky books, can sometimes attain artifactual status), produced by cutting and pasting the language from older grant proposals. “There are very few libraries these days that do the kind of discarding that went on right at the beginning,” she says. “We just hadn’t pulled it all together, I don’t think, right at the beginning. And I’m not sure that libraries should be faulted for feeling their way to some kind of solution. It’s not like there was tons of help all over the place.”

  At Columbia, when I called (December 1998), David Lowe’s NEH-funded technicians were working methodically through the business and economics stacks, classifying books as Brittle or Not-Brittle by using their variant of the double-fold test. If the book was brittle, they checked the binding. If the binding was damaged, they designated the book as a “BD”—Brittle and Damaged. If it was a BD, and it was published after 1850, they segregated it for “selector review,” the selector being a librarian with expertise in the book’s subject area. He or she was to decide whether the book merited microfilming (if no film existed somewhere already) and whether or not to reshelve it. “If it’s a ‘Reshelve No,’ it’s basically a withdraw,” Lowe explained. The selector took circulation into account. “I think I said, ‘If it’s circulated in the last ten years I think you should consider reshelving it,’ and the selector said, ‘Maybe twice in the last ten years.’ So that’s the sort of thing we get involved in.”

  I said to Lowe that I wished that the classification of an item as brittle wouldn’t act to seal its doom. “Well,” Lowe replied, “when you’re pressed for space and you’re only given so much money to build new places for books, you start thinking, ‘Hmm, microfilming, and then get rid of them, that makes a lot of sense.’ It’s administrator-think, and it’s convenience, and most of the stuff isn’t circulating that much.” (Circulation is, however, a meritless measure of a book’s interest or usefulness in a research library; interests change from one generation to the next.) Lowe couldn’t offer any estimates of the percentage of books disbound; he did say, though, that they had just finished filming several thousand “pams”8 (pamphlets), and most of those were cut apart in the process and thrown away. “I mean, they don’t have much of a binding to begin with,” he said.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  A Swifter Conflagration

  That some librarians realized that what they were doing was crazy, as Paul Conway says they did, and that the guillotinage got no worse than it got, is due in large part to the abolitional insistence of one scholar, G. Thomas Tanselle. Tanselle, an editor of Melville, is vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a former president of the Grolier Club; he teaches classes on bibliographical analysis and scholarly editing at Columbia, and he owns a large collection of books produced by several dozen American publishers between 1890 and 1930. (Nothing in his collection has crumbled, by the way.) In December 1990, at Columbia’s library school (now disbanded), and a month later at the New York Public Library, Tanselle delivered a pointed but civil speech, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading”:

  Scarcely a day now passes1 that the microfilming epidemic does not thrust itself on my attention in some way, either through my discovering that certain materials are no longer available in original form in a particular library or my being asked to join an appeal aimed at rescuing a category of material scheduled for destruction.

  Tanselle mentions seeing, at the New York Public Library’s annex, “a whole range of shelves of nineteenth-century newspapers marked with signs that read ‘Microfilmed. To be discarded.’ ” He says: “One makes do, of course, with whatever survives, for there is no alternative. But when we are confronted with such recent loss of evidence, loss produced intentionally in the name of preservation, we have yet another reason to remark on the pervasiveness of human folly.”

  As the human folly continued, Tanselle in 1992 gave an address at Harvard’s Houghton Library (published in the Harv
ard Library Bulletin) in which he said that all library books should be “placed in the charge2 of those who are experienced in the care of artifacts,” and he quoted a nineteenth-century bibliographer: “The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation.” (A wish to keep what is physically on the shelf does not, however, have to “stand in the way,” Tanselle observed, “of an enthusiastic acceptance of the developing technology for the electronic dissemination of texts.”) In 1993, with mass-microfix still at large, he produced a strongly worded but still remarkably gentlemanly screed for Common Knowledge, which began, “The present time will be regarded in the future as an age of book destruction.” Its title, “The Latest Forms of Book-Burning,” proves to be a direct reference to Slow Fires and its sponsor:

  The term “preservation”3 in the title of the Commission on Preservation and Access was never intended to refer to preservation of physical objects containing texts, but only to texts abstracted from objects; and in practice this “preservation” has been an agent of destruction for the objects. Slow Fires is the title of the Commission’s widely publicized film about the self-destruction of books containing acidic paper; the copies used in the Commission’s program of microfilming, however, are doomed to a much swifter conflagration.

  That piece turned some heads, and then in 1995 Tanselle wrote, for a Modern Language Association committee, a “Statement on the Significance of Primary Records” that was adopted by the MLA’s executive council. Tanselle again praises organized efforts to film and to scan, but he says that regardless of how texts may travel among minds in the future, we have decisions to make about the tangible objects that are in libraries now. Unless the public grasps the value of these primary records, he writes, “sizable portions4 of certain classes of textual artifacts face destruction.”

  Tanselle’s tenets, though they were ridiculed by some as being impractical or self-marginalizingly extreme, are really quite simple and helpful. One is that we shouldn’t spend lots of time trying to determine which books have artifactual value (or “intrinsic value”) and which don’t. According to standard library theory, your rank-and-file book is assumed to have no intrinsic value; it is a dented and tarnished word canteen whose contents may be poured off at will into other, often smaller receptacles. A relatively few books—ones that bear a famous person’s signature or marginalia, for example—may qualify as objects5 of artifactual value, and these objects often live in rare-book departments. In practice, writes Tanselle, this categorization is influenced mainly by book dealers’ price lists: “Books of high market value6 will receive expensive conservation treatment, and other books will be microfilmed or photocopied and then thrown out. Such a policy is not worthy of a research library.” The distinction between rare books and utilitarian word-ware is not only impossible to make—because the degree of future rare-bookishness is unforeseeable now, as is the degree of informational interest—but harmful, as well: “I think it is undeniable7 that the common attitude of disregard for the physical evidence in books has produced an insensitivity to the destruction of books that would not be condoned by professionals dealing with any other category of artifact,” Tanselle writes.

  The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas. They are things and utterances both. And libraries, Tanselle believes, since they own, whether they like it or not, collections of physical artifacts, must aspire to the condition of museums. All their books are treasures, in a sense; the general stacks become a sort of comprehensive rare-book room—not staffed and serviced as rare-book rooms are, obviously, but understood as occupying the same kind of unreformattable sensorium. Only by “approaching books as museum objects8 do we most fully and productively read them,” Tanselle provocatively writes. Once a large research library makes the decision to add a particular book to its collection, it has a responsibility to try to keep that physical book in its collection forever. That duty continues in force even if publishing undergoes revolutionary changes and libraries buy only electronic texts from some moment forth. The keeping needn’t involve expensive measures, however: “Most books are not frequently used,9 and neglect can sometimes be an artifact’s best friend.”

  There are plenty of vicissitudes of the flesh, to be sure, and libraries, like museums, will inevitably get rid of things, but if they can at least try to begin to understand, as museums generally do, that everything they own is a piece of human handiwork as well as a bitmappable or re-keyable or filmable sequence of words, then we have a better chance of avoiding some of the damage that will otherwise accompany the ongoing shrinkathon.

  Once the Modern Language Association came out in favor of primary records, feelings began to shift a little. The indiscriminate spine-shearers and the upper-tier administrators who approved their work began to get the sense that they’d gone a little overboard. Patricia Battin retired from the Commission on Preservation and Access in 1994—succeeded for a brief period by an equally radical futurist from Cornell named Stuart Lynn, and then eventually, mercifully, as the Commission was folded back into the renamed Council on Library and Information Resources, by a moderate, historically minded humanist, Deanna Marcum. And there is now a new book category in some libraries: “semi-rare,” as at the New York Public Library, or “medium rare.” The medium-rare book is defined as possessing more intrinsic value than the common book, but not so much as a rare book. Tanselle would rightly question the taxonomic confusion in these distinctions, but at least they indicate improvement. Possibly you won’t be allowed to copy a medium-rare book facedown on a library’s copying machine (which can be rough on spines and pages); on the other hand, you won’t necessarily need to read it in a special room with white gloves on.

  Nobody has yet tried to do what Tanselle repeatedly recommended, though: he suggested that we store somewhere all the casualties—books, journals, or newspapers; bound, disbound, or never bound in the first place—of mass-microfilming or preservation photocopying. “A central repository10 could be established for receiving the books, if the libraries that possessed them before microfilming did not wish to keep them,” he wrote in 1989; and four years later, “Although it is a pity11 that the Commission did not make such a repository a part of its plan, it is not too late to establish one now.” As the amount of digital scanning increases, the repository would hold those paper remains as well. The cost of this salon des refusés would be a tithe of the total cost of copying.

  The NEH requires many expensive things of its grantees—among them the storage of microfilm master negatives at low humidity and temperature (often in commercial storage vaults at a cost of a dollar per year per roll) and the creation of a second-generation negative from which to make positive “service copies” of film as needed—but the NEH never required, should so manifestly have required, should this instant begin requiring, that any microfilming or digital scanning that it pays for will without exception result in the physical storage somewhere (either in the host library or, if the host library was enticed into applying for the NEH grant partly to be rid of the incremental bulk of the book, in a low-cost book-refugee ziggurat) of every original “master-positive” book or bound newspaper.

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  Crunch

  Despite Tanselle’s influence, the basic outlook of the reformatters has not changed that much. Steve Dalton began his 1998 seminar at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, “To Film or to Scan,” with a paper-demonization demo. “Chemical deterioration takes place because paper has what we can call inherent vice. Inherent vice, I like to say, is the original sin of paper. It’s born to a goodness, with high ideals, to live a long and prosperous life. But it has this tendency to go wrong.” Dalton crumpled up a piece of blank, eighteenth-century rag stock and demonstrated that it could be flattened out again without damage. “It almost feels like a fabric, rather than a paper,” he said. While we students handed around the artifact, Dalton crisply summarized the dec
line in nineteenth-century papermaking—the bleaches, the sizings, the lignins, the tannins.

  Then, from a shelf in his podium, he took out a small blue book in an old library binding, its serifed title stamped in gold. “This is a book from 1903,” he said, “and that paper that we passed around is from roughly 1785 or ’90.” He pulled out a page from the book, crumpled it in both hands, and let the manufactured confetti fall onto the wood-grain vinyl veneer of a conference table. “I think librarians secretly have the urge to do this once in a while,” Dalton volunteered; there was some light laughter. “So if you feel the urge, I’ll leave this book up here. But one page per person, please.” He repeated the old estimates from Robert Hayes: “So we’re talking probably over three hundred million volumes in research collections in the United States that have this terrible inherent vice to self-destruct.”

  Soon we were hearing some blunt talk about a primary advantage to preservation microfilming. “A lot of times institutions that we deal with, when we do preservation planning surveys, are wrestling with significant storage problems,” Dalton said. “Does anyone here have a storage problem in your institution?” Hands went up around the room. “Space is really—it’s a big factor.” If you merely photocopy a brittle book in order to preserve it, you’ve done nothing to, as Dalton put it, “crunch space,” whereas with microfilm, “if you’re discarding materials after filming, then you can take a large volume of material, and crunch it into a one-hundred-foot roll of film.”