Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  piece by Eric Stange: Eric Stange, “Millions of Books Are Turning to Dust—Can They Be Saved?” The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1987. Two months later, the Chicago Tribune published an article that began: “The book is a life’s work condensed into 200 pages. It has survived for decades. The next time somebody looks at it, it will crumble to dust.” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1987, national edition, p. 3, Nexis. During a period of heavy bleaching in paper manufacture, John Murray, in 1824, instanced a Bible that was “CRUMBLING LITERALLY INTO DUST.” John Murray, Observations and Experiments on the Bad Composition of Modern Paper (London: G. and W. B. Whitaker), quoted in Roggia, “William James Barrow.”

  “the estimated number of volumes”: The Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter (June 1988). In an interview with The Bottom Line, Battin says that 3.3 million is “the estimated number of volumes that must be saved as representative of the 10 million that will turn to dust.” “Preserving Our Crumbling Collections: An Interview with Patricia Battin, President, Commission on Preservation and Access,” Betty J. Turock, interviewer, The Bottom Line 3:4 (1989).

  “Have you seen a first edition”: Michael Miller, Ideas for Preservation Fund Raising: A Support Package for Libraries and Archives (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1990). The support package is the subject of a lead article in the Commission’s Newsletter for September 1990.

  “A slow fire is burning”: Diane Ballard, “Goodness Gracious, Great Books Afire!” Torchbearer, fall 1990. The Commission distributed a typescript of the article, which omitted this title—perhaps it seemed too frivolous. The University of Oregon Library ran a money-raising ad in a house magazine that said, “Unless we act now, much of the collection in the largest research library in Oregon could disintegrate before our eyes.” Old Oregon (magazine of the University of Oregon) 66:4 (summer 1987).

  CHAPTER 25 – Absolute Nonsense

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  His experience began in Florence: These details come from Peter Waters, “From Florence to St. Petersburg: An Enlightening and Thought-Provoking Experience,” paper read at the conference “Redefining Disasters: A Decade of Counter Disaster Planning,” Library of New South Wales, September 1995.

  “If swift and drastic action”: Patricia Battin, “The Silent Books of the Future: Initiatives to Save Yesterday’s Literature for Tomorrow,” Logos (London) 2:1 (1991): 11.

  When Smithsonian was doing a piece: Williams, “Library of Congress Can’t Hold All of Man’s Knowledge.”

  old boss Frazer Poole: Poole, by the way, worked with the Barrow Laboratory before he came to the Library of Congress (on durable catalog cards), as part of the ALA/Council on Library Resources Library Technology Project. He probably learned the trick of crumpling paper to bits in order to shock people from Barrow and DuPuis.

  CHAPTER 26 – Drumbeat

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  “millions of rotting books”: Battin uses this phrase twice, once in “Crumbling Books: A Call for Strategies to Preserve Our Cultural Memory,” Change, September/October 1989, p. 56; and once in “Silent Books of the Future,” p. 16. The continuation headline (not recorded in Nexis) for Malcolm Browne’s 1990 article in The New York Times is “Nation’s Library Calls on Chemists to Preserve Rotting Books.” Carolyn Morrow, the preservation librarian at Harvard, backed Battin up, saying that her library is “literally rotting from the inside out.” Edward T. Hearn, “Self-Burning Books: Millions of Tomes Need Rescue from Their Acids,” Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1989, Tempo, p. 2, final edition. Before Carolyn Morrow went to Harvard (as the first Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian, an endowed chair), she worked for Peter Sparks; in the early eighties, Sparks hired her away from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to staff a propaganda and fund-raising team at the Library of Congress which he called the National Preservation Program Office (NPPO). On Morrow, see Abbey Newsletter 8:6 (December 1984), copied on the CoOL website, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/abbey/an/an08/an08-6/an08-603.htm.

  “will not embrittle to dust”: See also Helmut Bansa, “Selection for Conservation,” Restaurator 13:4 (1992), which offers “the scientifically correct fact that books do not ‘literally crumble to dust.’ ”

  CHAPTER 27 – Unparalleled Crisis

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  “comprehensive mass-production strategy”: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1990 Annual Report.

  “major attack”: Patricia Battin, “A Message from the President,” Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 3 (August 1988).

  big day for acid-free paper: See “An End to the Yellowing Pages,” Newsweek, March 20, 1989, p. 80, which says that about a quarter of the volumes in American research libraries are “crumbling into oblivion.”

  “35 out of the 88 miles”: New York Public Library, “Authors and Publishers Sign Landmark Declaration for Book Preservation,” news release (March 7, 1989), reprinted in Association of Research Libraries, Preserving Knowledge: The Case for Alkaline Paper (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1990).

  “There appears to be high user acceptance”: Hayes, “Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits,” p. 26.

  “Making clear to scholars”: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1992 Annual Report, www.clir.org/pubs/annual/annrpt91.htm.

  “But if these original books”: The brittle-book crisis should also be taught, Miller’s report urged: “We should also begin at once to incorporate this awareness into graduate instruction in research methods.” J. Hillis Miller, Preserving the Literary Heritage: The Final Report of the Scholarly Advisory Committee on Modern Language and Literature of the Commission on Preservation and Access (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, July 1991), www.clir.org/pubs/reports/miller/miller.htm.

  “The Endowment could not have advanced”: George F. Farr, Jr., “Preservation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,” in Luner, Paper Preservation.

  particular collection: Here is a representative brittle-books grant to Columbia University from the 1993 annual report of the NEH: “$2,298,320 To support preservation microfilming of 15,000 embrittled volumes on the development of the world’s economy over the last two centuries and its impact on the formation of political and social institutions.” $2.3 million divided by 15,000 is about $150 per volume.

  “number of preservation operations”: Battin, “Message from the President.”

  CHAPTER 28 – Microfix

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  He and Matthew Nickerson: Matthew Nickerson, “pH: Only a Piece of the Preservation Puzzle: A Comparison of the Preservation Studies at Brigham Young, Yale, and Syracuse Universities,” Library Resources and Technical Services 36:1 (1992).

  population of damaged or fragile books: Silverman tried to convince a former employer to accept several thousand post-microfilming discards that John Baker, head of preservation at the New York Public Library, was off-loading. (Baker is the one who in a voice of sorrow says, in Slow Fires, that many of the books “simply fall apart in your hands.”) The NYPL was delighted by the idea that somebody wanted the books, but the administration at Silverman’s library decided that there wasn’t space.

  Some of his colleagues had private misgivings: Critical voices are faintly audible in the report of a Review and Assessment Committee, chaired by David H. Stam, that evaluated the work of the Commission on Preservation and Access in 1991: “Some saw the microfilming program as ‘anti-paper,’ its hidden agenda designed to foster the eventuality of the electronic library, with digitized materials coming from microfilm or other sources. Some saw a lack of interest in preserving rare books or in preserving the original documents, regardless of condition or perceived importance, after filming has been completed.” David H. Stam et al., Review and Assessment Committee, Final Report (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1991), p. 18.

  CHAPTER 29 – Slash and Burn

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  play by Robert de Flers: Francis de Croisset, Le Souvenir de Robert d
e Flers, suivi de les précieuses de Genève par Robert de Flers et Francis de Croisset (Paris: Editions des Portiques, 1929).

  “Laying aside all malice”: See the translation and explication of Columbia’s seal in “The Mission of the University,” Columbia University Fact Book 1995–96, www.columbia.edu/cu/udar/factbook/12.htm.

  “Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project”: For a history of the Research Library Group’s microfilming projects, see Nancy Elkington, ed., RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook (Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, 1992), appendix 21.

  “this kind of mass—“: In 1992, Battin wrote that we must “change our focus from single-item salvation to a mass production process.” “Substitution: The American Experience,” typescript of lecture in Oxford Library Seminars, “Preserving Our Library Heritage,” February 25, 1992, quoted in Abby Smith, “The Future of the Past: Preservation in American Research Libraries” (draft), Council on Library and Information Resources, January 1999.

  George Farr . . .was on board: “The Endowment,” Farr wrote in 1988, supports “the reformatting of knowledge on to a more stable medium, which at this time means microfilm produced and stored to national archival standards, in the absense of similar national standards for other media. The scale of the preservation problem, coupled with the fragility of most of these materials and the expense of item-by-item conservation, makes any other course of action impractical.” Farr, “Preservation.”

  “Slash and burn preservation”: Paul Conway, “Yale University Library’s Project Open Book: Preliminary Research Findings,” D-Lib Magazine, February 1996, www.dlib.org/dlib/february96/yale/02conway.htm.

  “approximately 7%”: Harvard University, “History of Science: Preserving Collections for the Study of Culture and Society,” proposal submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1998), p. 27.

  several thousand “pams”: “Columbia University used $696,000 to microfilm 9,797 embrittled pamphlets on social and economic history published from 1880 to 1950,” according to the NEH’s website—$71.04 per pamphlet. National Endowment for the Humanities, “Brittle Books,” www.neh.gov/preservation/brittlebooks.htm (viewed October 4, 2000). (The page includes a picture—“Example of a brittle book”—of a book whose binding has failed, over which one of its pages has apparently been crumpled and sprinkled.) The New York Public Library’s discard of approximately one hundred thousand pamphlets so troubled collector Michael Zinman that he distributed a poster in 1997 that reproduced some of the accessions stamps and gift bookplates from these lost collections; the headline was it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it—the words of an American officer who attacked a Vietnamese town in 1968. See Mark Singer’s Talk of the Town article on Zinman and the pamphlets (which were microfilmed), The New Yorker, January 12, 1998.

  CHAPTER 30 – A Swifter Conflagration

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  “Scarcely a day now passes”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” in his Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1998), p. 14.

  “placed in the charge”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Statement on the Role of Books and Manuscripts in the Electronic Age,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 334.

  “The term ‘preservation’ ”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Latest Forms of Book-Burning,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 90.

  “sizable portions”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Statement on the Significance of Primary Records,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 335.

  may qualify as objects: See, for instance, appendix 1 of Elkington, RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook, “Considerations for Retaining Items in Original Format.” Items that contain illustrations “not easily reproduced or meaningful only in the original color or original woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, etc.” are possible candidates for retention, as is “ephemeral material likely to be scarce, such as a lettersheet, poster, songster, or broadside.” Newspapers qualify under both these categories, but that hasn’t helped them.

  “Books of high market value”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Reproductions and Scholarship,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 83.

  “I think it is undeniable”: Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” p. 17.

  “approaching books as museum objects”: Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” p. 5.

  “Most books are not frequently used”: Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” p. 16.

  “A central repository”: Tanselle, “Reproductions and Scholarship,” p. 88.

  “Although it is a pity”: Tanselle, “Latest Forms of Book-Burning,” p. 95.

  CHAPTER 32 – A Figure We Did Not Collect

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  “We have not done so”: George Farr, letter to the author, April 5, 1999.

  “Analysis of 15 years”: Montori, “Re: electronic/paper format & weeding.”

  staple-bound purple booklet: Martha Kyrillidou, Michael O’Connor, and Julia C. Blixrud, ARL Preservation Statistics, 1996–97 (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1998).

  “dramatic reduction”: Jutta R. Reed, “Cost Comparison of Periodicals in Hard Copy and on Microform,” Microform Review 5:3 (July 1976).

  as determined by the formulas: The formulas, Reed-Scott notes, are adapted from UMI founder Eugene Power’s 1951 article “Microfilm as a Substitute for Binding”; Power was one of Verner Clapp’s and Luther Evans’s colleagues on the board of the microphilic American Documentation Institute, now the American Society for Information Science (ASIS).

  save over $145: Ann Niles questions these figures in “Conversion of Serials from Paper to Microfilm,” Microform Review 9:2 (spring 1980). She calculates that the cost of buying microfilm replacements of a collection of periodicals would be almost twice the cost of building new on-site space to house them, and to that must be added the maintenance and replacement of the microfilm readers, which have a life-span of five to ten years.

  CHAPTER 33 – Leaf Masters

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  “a heavy proportion”: Stam, “Questions of Preservation.”

  “Based on a non-scientific survey”: Gay Walker, “One Step Beyond: The Future of Preservation Microfilming,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production.

  “Of all responding libraries”: Jan Merrill-Oldham and Gay Walker, Brittle Books Programs (Washington, D.C.: Systems and Procedures Exchange Center [SPEC] Kit 152, Office of Management Services, Association of Research Libraries, 1989), introductory flyer and p. vi.

  “have all ownership marks removed”: Gay Walker, “Preservation Decision Making: A Descriptive Model,” in Merrill-Oldham and Walker, Brittle Books Programs, p. 35.

  “In the great majority of cases”: Gay Walker, “Preservation Decision-Making and Archival Photocopying,” Restaurator 8 (1987).

  filmed another 150,000: At the congressional hearing in March 1987, William Welsh told committee members that the library had microfilmed four hundred thousand volumes between 1968 and 1987—about twenty thousand per year (Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 123). The number may be lower than this, however; the Office of Technology Assessment’s Book Preservation Technologies said in 1988 that the Library of Congress “microfilms between 10,000 and 20,000 brittle monographs and serials per year at a cost of about $40 per volume” (p. 14). On the other hand, in March 1983, Peter Sparks told a reporter from Discover magazine: “I can’t microfilm them fast enough. We can manage about 23,000 books a year—and there are millions of them out there.”

  “A major concern about filming”: Walker, “One Step Beyond,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production.

  “the highest quality film”: Vickie Lockhart and Ann Swartzell, “Evaluation of Microfilm Vendors,” Microform Review 19:3 (summer 1990). In the study, the company that missed pages is given as “RP,” which I assume stands for Research Publications.


  “did not resolve to”: Whitney S. Minkler, Audit Procedures and Inspection Results from 1% of Microfilm Samples from Ohio State, Yale, and Harvard Universities (Fairfax, Va.: MSTC, March 30, 1993). As part of her “NEH Medieval Institute Microfilming Project,” Sophia Jordan, head of preservation at Notre Dame, made a database of microfilm vendors. Out of the available titles that her group checked, she recorded the percentage that did not “meet preservation standards,” according to a somewhat stringent list of criteria (no master negative exists, etc.). Ninety-four percent of the titles available from University Microfilms did not meet preservation standards, fourteen percent of Columbia’s titles did not, all of Cornell’s did not, a quarter of Harvard’s did not, forty-two percent of New York Public Library’s did not, sixty percent of UC Berkeley’s did not, and so on. Sophia Jordan and Dorothy Paul, NEH Medieval Institute Microfilming Project: Database Report of Previously Filmed Titles Queried (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Libraries, undated [circa 1990]). In providing this report, George Farr of the NEH wrote: “I would observe that the highly developed national standards and expectations for preservation filming that have been followed in NEH-funded projects might not have been in place when the volumes that were the focus of the Notre Dame survey were initially microfilmed.” George Farr, letter to author, April 5, 1999.

  CHAPTER 34 – Turn the Pages Once