And yet, though Dowd acknowledges the losses to history, his project cuts up almost all the newspaper volumes they film, for the usual reason: to get the “very, very best image we can” consistent with high-speed production. Were they forbidden to cut the volume, his filmers would have to take precious time moving it around under the camera: “You’d lay it down, then you’d move it over, then you’d flip it over, then you’d move it over—that kind of thing, so the handling becomes a factor.” If the library that owns a particular run of newspapers wants them back, their loose leaves are returned; if not, they usually go in the trash. Even the ones that aren’t thrown away are the worse for filming: once disbound, newspaper pages don’t stay aligned and have less edgewise strength-in-numbers than pages within intact volumes—they are harder to keep safe.
Dennis Hardin supervised work on the U.S. Newspaper Program at the Indiana Historical Society, and he continues to film local papers. “If the library wants them back,” Hardin says, “we wrap them up in kraft paper and send them back or take them back, but in a lot of cases, if they were looking to unload them to make more space, we make an agreement with them that we will just discard them.” Of the volumes he photographs, “very, very few go back on the shelf.”
But there are still runs of interesting Indiana papers—family-owned, small-town papers—that Hardin hasn’t been able to get his hands on. “Many publishers do not want to turn over their bound volumes to us,” he said. “For one thing, one of our policies here is that we have to take the bindings off. . . . Well, a lot of publishing offices, especially men and women who are elderly who have had the paper in their family all their lives, don’t want to see their legacy just taken and torn apart that way.” Hardin keeps his eye on these remaining caches of paper. “Having been at it for eighteen years, we are fairly aware of where certain unfilmed collections still reside. I’m still more than twenty years away from retirement, so some of these elderly publishers and county recorders and so forth, we just kind of keep track, and as we are able to gently prod them into doing the right thing with their newspapers before they retire, or maybe leaving their papers to someone who will take care of that for them after they’re gone.”
I pointed out to Hardin, as I had to others, that dealers make a living buying and selling ex-library wood-pulp newspapers volumes—many seemed to hold up surprisingly well. Hardin replied: “At any given moment, there’s lots of it that’s still in pretty good shape, but that’s not to say that some day, eventually, every one of them will crumble. It is inevitable—it is inevitable. And though you may still find bound volumes of papers from the twenties or even earlier—you may find a bound volume from 1912 that still has the Titanic story in it in pretty good shape—but as inevitable as the sinking of that ship was, those papers will crumble.”
In the summer of 1999, an ex-library bound volume of the New York Sun containing issues from April 1 through June 30, 1912, sold for three thousand dollars on eBay: it was in “immaculate” condition and contained weeks of news about the Titanic disaster. The sinking of the Titanic was not, of course, inevitable—other big ships sailed safely across the Atlantic before and afterward. The reason that ship sank was that human beings in positions of trust made horrible errors of judgment.
CHAPTER 38
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In Good Faith
Which brings us back, finally, to the foreign-newspaper collection at the British Library. In August 1999, I got the list of the U.S. papers that the British Library was getting rid of. How could they be saved? In a rush, I formed the American Newspaper Repository, with my mother, my father, and my wife on the board of trustees—they were the only ones I felt I could ask to serve on such short notice. The repository’s purpose was, as a lawyer phrased it for the IRS, “to acquire, preserve, and make available to the public, original newspapers of historic and scholarly interest that would otherwise be destroyed or dispersed into private ownership.” (I took some satisfaction in seeing the word “preserve” used in its traditional sense.) Having faxed off letters of inquiry to the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Getty Foundation, I flew to London a week before the British Library’s September 30, 1999, deadline for bids. About forty volumes were set out for inspection by potential purchasers, and I was given a tour of the shelves. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. I suddenly felt, turning the pages of a beautiful Chicago Tribune volume from 1909, as if I’d stumbled on a lost, jewel-encrusted city in the jungle, and that curio dealers were waiting for a sign to begin chiseling away at it.
Edmund King, the director of the Newspaper Library, gave me tea in his office. I described to him, at the point of tears, the historical importance of Joseph Pulitzer’s World, and I asked if there was some way to convince the Library to call off its sale and keep the papers, or to act responsibly by transferring them to a non-profit entity such as the one I’d just started. I explained how the vintage-newspaper market worked in the States, and I told him that there were almost no duplicates of these papers left, and that the duplicates weren’t duplicates in any case because of editional variations. The decision to dispose of the foreign papers was made by the board several years earlier, King said. “As things stand, because we have gone to dealers, perhaps the best thing to do is to act as if you are a dealer, and place a bid for the runs.”
A few days later, on a Saturday, with the help of Nicolas Barker, editor of The Book Collector and a former head of preservation at the British Library, I got in touch with Brian Lang, the library’s director, on his cellular phone. (He was waiting in line at a supermarket when I first reached him.) I asked him to call off the sale. “I don’t have an answer for you now,” Lang said, but he seemed somewhat taken aback and willing to give the problem thought.
Heartened, I got back to the States and faxed Lang a long follow-up letter that I thought would clinch it. “The very best thing for these papers would be for the Newspaper Library to reshelve them carefully, tightly control their use, and keep them safe,” I wrote. I acknowledged the library’s space difficulties—but perhaps there was a way to turn that problem around, I suggested, and use the present disposal emergency to inspire a major donor to endow a new rare-newspaper storage facility in Colindale. If the library’s decision to dispose of the listed papers was firm, then I hoped they would consider donating the papers to the American Newspaper Repository. I listed the members of the repository’s advisory board, thinking that some impressive names might help sway him. (Two of the advisers, who have since become trustees, are William Hart, Chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Thomas Tanselle, an obvious choice.) I closed the letter by asking Lang again to suspend the September 30 sale, and to “take steps to ensure that this great surviving collection is kept intact for future scholarship.”
Lang got the letter, cc’d to Edmund King, on Monday afternoon; Thursday was the deadline for bids. I heard nothing on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning I started to get nervous. I called Lang’s office, and then I faxed a letter to King requesting “that no irrevocable sales or other dispersals of any of the foreign newspapers listed take place at least until I have gotten a response to my letter to Brian Lang.” At 5:30 P.M. British time, on the very eve of the deadline, Mike Crump, Director of Reader Services and Collection Development, e-mailed me. Brian Lang was in Estonia, he wrote. “We believe that at this stage we cannot stop the sale of material to dealers who have been examining it in good faith.”
There was also the good faith of international (and inter-generational) scholarship to consider, but no matter. By then it was too late to lodge protests with upper-level luminaries. The only thing to do, I realized, if I wanted to save at least some of the papers, was, as Edmund King had suggested, to bid on them myself, on behalf of the American Newspaper Repository. At 1:30 A.M. on September 30, 1999, I faxed in over $50,000 worth of blind bids, distributing the money unequally over every lot that was for sale. (I kept it to around $50,000, because that’s how much my wife an
d I figured we would clear if we liquidated one retirement account and paid taxes and early-withdrawal penalties. If no grant money came through, we planned to buy the papers with that money, and then pay for the shipping and storage of the collection by cashing out the other retirement account.) I bid £9,200 (about $15,000) for the Herald Tribune and the same amount for Pulitzer’s World; £4,875 (about $8,000) for the Chicago Tribune; £300 apiece for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the short run of Hearst’s American; £2,875 for The New York Times; and £2,440 for the San Francisco Chronicle. And I bid three pounds each for a hundred or so other titles. I stressed that the bids didn’t constitute a withdrawal of my plea that the British Library keep the collection or donate it as a whole to the repository, and I asked them to keep in mind, in the event that my bids were below what others offered, that the repository was committed, as dealers were not, to keeping the volumes whole. A day later, on the advice of William Hart, I submitted a second global “preservation bid” equal to the sum of all outstanding high bids received by the deadline plus one thousand pounds.
Mike Crump acknowledged my first bid letter as received, and then there was silence. I wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair, and to Chris Smith, Britain’s Heritage Secretary, and to John Ashworth, the chairman of the British Library’s board, and again to Brian Lang. Thomas Tanselle wrote a letter urging the library to reverse its position. Nicolas Barker wrote John Ashworth to say that the sale of the newspapers, under conditions of secrecy, would cause an “international scandal.” Barker observed that “no good has ever come from previous dispersals from the Library.” (The last significant dispersals came early in the nineteenth century, Barker said: “The gain was temporary and soon forgotten; the loss is permanent and irremediable.”) Lucy Caswell introduced a resolution at the annual meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association entreating the British Library to act responsibly; it passed unanimously and was sent by the association’s president to Brian Lang.
These efforts got nowhere. Alan Howarth, the Minister of Culture, Media, and Sport, wrote me that he was “assured that the procedures for disposal were rigorously followed in this case,” and he added that he had “no power to intervene in the Library’s decision.” Two weeks after the sale deadline, the library sent out its official notification: everything on the list was going to the highest bidder; no allowances were made for nondestructive intent. (The “preservation bid” was disallowed, as coming after the deadline.) My offers prevailed for the World and the Herald Tribune, and for ninety other titles, but failed for the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Motion Picture Daily, The Christian Science Monitor, and about thirty others. The library required payment by March 31, 2000, which was, thankfully, five months away and allowed time for fund-raising. Their invoice said, “Deselection (Newspapers) £19,282.00.”
Most or all of the titles I failed to get went to Timothy Hughes, the dealer in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I was especially unhappy over the Chicago Tribune (my great-grandfather was a Chicago newspaperman), and I called around to libraries in Chicago to see how serious a loss the destruction of that title would be. A helpful cataloger at the Chicago Historical Society wrote: “I went through the online database that contains the holdings records of the U.S. Newspaper Program and found that no one has a good run of the Trib on paper. Many institutions have the full run on microfilm, but the hardcopy issues that exist are mostly scattered issues and short (under 5 year) runs.”
Reading that, I found I couldn’t tolerate the idea that the British Library’s Tribune would be broken down. I asked Timothy Hughes to quote me a price. He wrote back that “its value to me is in selling the individual historic issues as well as the potential for birthday sales as I currently don’t have any runs from the mid-West. Exploring its potential to me over the years I’ve decided that the very least I would have to sell the run for would be $63,000. Otherwise I will just keep the run as it would be more profitable to me in the long run.” I told him he had a deal. The MacArthur Foundation came up with a grant of fifty thousand dollars, which covered much of the purchase price, and my mother and mother-in-law made contributions, as did Viscountess Eccles, a scholar-collector of Boswell and Johnson who with her late husband endowed the British Library’s David and Mary Eccles Centre for American Studies. Later, the Knight Foundation made a one-hundred-thousand-dollar grant.
Sixty-three thousand dollars, or about fifty dollars a volume, may seem like a lot of money to pay for old news, but it’s actually a bargain. To buy the equivalent microfilm run from Bell and Howell would cost about $177,000. We’re at a bizarre moment in history, when you can have the real thing for considerably less than it would cost to buy a set of crummy black-and-white snapshots of it which you can’t read without the help of machine.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s fate also bothered me, so I got in touch with Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco, who uses old newspapers a lot in his historical work; he and I made a case to the California State Library for buying the Chronicle directly from Timothy Hughes, which they did (seventy years for sixty thousand dollars), with the help of the Wells Fargo Foundation. “We’re trying to keep a library here that doesn’t go goofy—that pays attention to the immemorial challenges and trusts of libraries,” Kevin Starr, the state librarian of California, told me.
And then there was The New York Times from 1915 to 1958. At first, Hughes was hesitant to sell it as a whole (“It sort of defeats my purpose,” he said), but eventually we were able to agree on a price of fifty-six thousand dollars, which is, at a guess, five times more than he paid for it, but still a fair price. With the money he’s making, Hughes plans to buy an electric lift to speed the retrieval of volumes on high shelves, and he is thinking of building another warehouse.
In February 2000, shortly after the lots, amounting to approximately 6,400 volumes, arrived at Hughes’s warehouse from England—each volume dutifully stamped BRITISH LIBRARY DISCARD—I drove to Williamsport to make sure the Chicago Tribune volumes were properly wrapped and labeled, and I handed Hughes a certified check. Sixteen pallets, ten tons of major metropolitan history, were forklifted onto a truck which took them to a warehouse in New Hampshire, near where I live. On June 29, forty-seven hundred or so more volumes arrived direct from the British Library, in two large Hyundai shipping containers. I cut the bands of a five-foot-high pallet and tore away some of the transatlantic shipper’s black plastic: there were the words THE WORLD repeated over and over on the stack of spines. Pulitzer’s originals were safe. What I have to do now is buy shelves and put the collection in order.
Maybe someday a research library will want to take responsibility for these things, or maybe not—whatever happens, at least they aren’t going to be cut up and sold as birthday presents. Sometimes I’m a little stunned to think that I’ve become a newspaper librarian, more or less, and have the job of watching over this majestic, pulp-begotten ancestral stockpile. And of course I worry about running out of money, and about devoting months and years of my life, and my wife’s life, to this effort. But at the moment nobody else seems to want to do what must be done. Six thousand square feet of space near where I live, with room to shelve all the papers and to hold a small reading room, costs about twenty-six thousand dollars a year to rent—about the salary of one microfilm technician. That seems cheap to preserve more than a century’s worth of inherent vice, and virtue.
EPILOGUE
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Four Recommendations
Libraries that receive public money should as a condition of funding be required to publish monthly lists of discards on their websites, so that the public has some way of determining which of them are acting responsibly on behalf of their collections.
The Library of Congress should lease or build a large building near Washington, and in it they should put, in call-number order, everything that they are sent by publishers and can’t
or don’t want to hold on site. If the library is unwilling to perform this basic function of a national repository, then Congress should designate and fund some other archive to do the job.
Several libraries around the country should begin to save the country’s current newspaper output in bound form.
The National Endowment for the Humanities should either abolish the U.S. Newspaper Program and the Brittle Books Program entirely, or require as a condition of funding that (1) all microfilming and digital scanning be nondestructive and (2) all originals be saved afterward.
Notes
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CHAPTER 1 – Overseas Disposal
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1. Ten thousand volumes: British Library Newspaper Library, History: The British Library Newspaper Library, www.bl.uk/collections/newspaper/history.htm (viewed August 15, 2000). Edward Miller says that “30,000 volumes, mostly of nineteenth-century British provincial newspapers” were “lost irretrievably.” Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974). The British Library became an entity separate from the British Museum in 1973; several years ago, over much protest, the library moved its main quarters from the domed reading room in Bloomsbury (where Swinburne, Virginia Woolf, Karl Marx, and many others worked) to a building near St. Pancras station.
2. Pulitzer discovered that illustrations: “The World’s achievement consisted in using illustration not only as a marvel to be admired for its own sake, as in the case of the Daily Graphic, nor as an occasional fillip for an otherwise dull page, as in the case of the Herald, but rather as a major tool in the art of reporting the news.” George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 96–97.
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