Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  At another midwestern historical society, out in a pole barn, a collection was stacked twelve feet high and twenty feet wide near rows of shaft-drive bicycles and the disassembled pieces of a nineteenth-century machine shop. There were thousands of volumes of local papers and a run of The New York Times. Shawn Godwin, an employee of the society at the time, wrote me that this “cube of history” was made to disappear by order of the head archivist: the volumes were chainsawed in half and fed into the steam engine that powered a vintage sawmill exhibit. “I asked one of the more sympathetic assistant directors if it would be possible to sneak a few of the volumes away,” Godwin writes. “He indicated if I was discreet and did not make a big deal about it it might be okay.” Godwin saved a small stack and tried to avoid looking at the column of smoke rising from the sawmill.

  The cleanout continues. Since the mid-eighties, the vast U.S. Newspaper Program, a government project whose aims are to catalog as many newspapers in the country as possible (a worthy goal) and to microfilm those local papers that were passed over in earlier decades, has given libraries about forty-five million dollars in so-called preservation money—and zero dollars for storage space. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which pays for the U.S. Newspaper Program (and funds a related enterprise, the Brittle Books Program), makes no requirement that libraries actually preserve, in the physical sense of “reshelve,” their originals after they have been sent out for federally funded filming. The effect of all this NEH microfilm money has been to trigger a last huge surge of discarding, as libraries use federal preservation grants to solve their local space problems. Not since the monk-harassments of sixteenth-century England has a government tolerated, indeed stimulated, the methodical eradication of so much primary-source material.

  Surely this material is all available on the Web by now, or will be soon? In time, eighty or a hundred years of a great urban paper could well become the source for a historical database of richness and utility. But at the moment, the scanning and storing and indexing of hundreds of thousands of pages of tiny type, along with halftone photos and color illustrations, would be a fearsomely expensive job; and even if money were limitless, there would remain the formidable technical challenge of achieving acceptable levels of resolution using digital cameras for formats as large as those of a newspaper spread. Nor will high-quality digital facsimiles of our major papers ever exist unless we decide right now to do a much better job of holding on to the originals—even the mangy ones with crumbly edges. You can’t digitize something that has been sold off piecemeal or thrown away, after all; and attempts to scan the page-images of newspapers from old microfilm have not worked well—and will never work well—because the microfilm itself is often at the squint-to-make-it-out level. HarpWeek, a venture that offers a digital copy of Harper’s Weekly on the Web, spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to scan the available microfilm, but they found that thirty percent of the resultant images were bad. Now they’re working from two original sets of the journal, both of which they’ve cut out of their bindings in order to set the loose pages flat on the scanner.

  Amid the general devastation, there are some librarians of courage and foresight whose accomplishments are as yet unsung. The Boston Public Library, owing to the belief of Charles Longley—the recently retired curator of microtexts and newspapers—that his institution’s accumulated newspaper files are “part of the City’s own heritage and the Library would be remiss in not retaining them,” not only has held on to all its existing collections but has continued to lay away all the recent output of Boston and selected Massachusetts papers, wrapped in brown paper, right up through the present; and the library has taken ownership of important sets of bound Boston newspapers once owned by Harvard and other libraries in the region as well. Longley was lucky: his views were shared by the city’s longtime librarian, the late Philip McNiff; often a change of administration proves fatal to a great collection.

  At Ohio State, a librarian named Lucy Caswell, who wears quiet silk scarves and directs the Cartoon Research Library, is almost single-handedly attempting to rebuild a bound-volume collection of national scope—buying back for scholarly use material offered by dealers and collectors, most notably the lifetime harvest of Bill Blackbeard and his San Francisco Academy of Comic Art.

  Several years ago, Caswell bought some volumes of the Chicago Tribune (from a dealer, who bought them from another dealer); two of them, one from 1899 and one from 1914, were out on a trolley at the Cartoon Research Library when I visited—four-inch-thick buckram-backed bulwarks, with heavy pull-straps triple-riveted to the binding in order to assist the frowning researcher in hauling their massiveness from the shelf. Their exteriors are scuffed and battered, but they are things of beauty nonetheless; they made me think of Mickey’s book of broom-awakening spells in Fantasia. I opened the volume from 1914. The inside boards displayed the seal of Harvard University, and below it I read:

  FROM THE BEQUEST OF

  ICHABOD TUCKER

  [Class of 1791]

  OF SALEM, MASS.

  The paper wasn’t crumbling—it was easily turned and read. I called Harvard’s microform department and asked if they had the Chicago Tribune on paper from 1899 and 1914, just to be sure that the Ohio volumes weren’t from a duplicate set that they had sold. A sincere-sounding reference woman in the microforms department said, “Oh, we would never have hard copies going back that far—they just don’t keep.” They don’t keep, kiddo, if you don’t keep them.

  Aside from what Lucy Caswell and Charles Longley have been able to save, the annihilation of once accessible collections of major daily papers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is pretty close to total. Some state libraries—Pennsylvania’s, for instance, in Harrisburg—reached back further than the 1870s or 1880s as they designed their disposal programs, and used 1850 as a draconian dump-after date. “Pennsylvania was the first state to undertake statewide microfilming and destruction of its newspaper files,” Bill Blackbeard told me. “They did an extraordinarily, brutally thorough job of it. Unfortunately, some of the earliest color Sunday comic strips were printed in Philadelphia newspapers. So I never have gotten to see very many of those.” The State Library of Pennsylvania did not keep its original bound set of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and neither did the Free Library of Philadelphia—a librarian there wrote me that wood-pulp newsprint “falls apart.” Bell and Howell Information and Learning (formerly University Microfilms) will, however, sell the whole Inquirer to you on spools of archival polyester, encased in little white cardboard boxes, for $621,515.

  Bell and Howell/UMI now owns microfilm negatives for most of the big papers in the country; and, to the extent that there are no originals left to scan when scanning resolution improves, its “master” microfilm (some of it inherited from now defunct filming labs and of poor quality) will perforce become the basis for any future digital versions of old newspapers, access to which the company will also control. Bell and Howell has successfully privatized our past: whether we like it or not, they possess a near monopoly on the reproduction rights for the chief primary sources of twentieth-century history.

  Where did all the spurned papers go? Many were thrown out—and continue to be thrown out as statewide filming projects progress—but a colossal residue rests at a company called Historic Newspaper Archives, Inc., the biggest name in the birth-date business. If you call Hammacher Schlemmer, say, or Potpourri, or the Miles Kimball catalog, to order an “original keepsake newspaper” from the day a loved one was born, Historic Newspaper Archives will fill your order. In the company’s twenty-five thousand square feet of warehouse space in Rahway, New Jersey, innumerable partially gutted volumes wait in lugubrious disorder on tall industrial shelves and stacked in four-foot piles and on pallets. I paid a visit one winter afternoon. The Christmas rush was over, and the place was very quiet. Torn sheets, sticking out from damaged volumes overhead, slapped and fluttered in a warm breeze that came from refrigerator-sized heater
s mounted on the ceiling. When an order came in for a particular date, a worker would pull out a volume of the Lewiston Evening Journal, say (once of Bowdoin College), slice out the issue, neaten the rough edges using a large electric machine called a guillotine (adorned on one side with photos of swimsuit models), and slip it in a clear vinyl sleeve for shipping. Every order comes with a “certificate of authenticity” printed in florid script.

  Not everything was on shelves—some were piled three pallets high against the wall; and the University of Maryland’s large collection, a recent arrival, occupied about a thousand square feet of floor near the loading dock. The Herald Tribune set that the Historic Newspaper Archive is gradually dismembering is bound in pale-blue cloth and is in very good condition (where it hasn’t gone under the knife, that is); its bookplates announce that it was the gift of Mrs. Ogden Reid, who owned and ran the Tribune, more or less, in the forties and fifties. It is a multi-edition file: five editions for each day are separately bound. I would guess that this was at one time the Herald Tribune’s own corporate-historical set; Mrs. Reid no doubt believed that she was ensuring its careful continuance by donating it to a library. Hy Gordon, the no-nonsense general manager of the archives, told me that he believes he got his Herald Tribunes from the New York Public Library. Gordon sold me one volume from the set, for February 1–15, 1934 (including rotogravure sections and color cartoons by Rea Irwin) at a discounted price of three hundred dollars plus shipping.

  (The NYPL divested themselves of their Tribune run, but it must be commended for keeping a huge cobbled-together set of The New York Times, from 1851 right up through 1985, several decades of which exist in a special rag-paper library edition. They will let you read from it in room 315, where they serve “semi-rare” material under supervision. The run has some gaping holes—for instance, there are no volumes at all for the years from 1915 through 1925. And no research library, I believe, has saved the Times in paper over the past decade: the paper now prints thousands of color photographs a year, but you wouldn’t know that from the film.)

  I told Hy Gordon that I thought some librarians had exaggerated the severity of newsprint’s deterioration. “Oh yeah, yeah, it doesn’t fall apart,” he agreed. “The ends might crack, but that’s all. The newspaper’s still fine.”

  I said I was distressed that so many libraries were getting rid of their bound newspapers.

  “Don’t be distressed,” he said. “There are a lot of things more important in life.”

  Are there really? More important than the fact that this country has strip-mined a hundred and twenty years of its history? I’m not so sure. The Historic Newspaper Archives owns what is now probably the largest “collection” of post-1880 U.S. papers anywhere in the country, or the world, for that matter—a ghastly anti-library. They own it in order to destroy it. “Here are rare and original newspapers with assured value many from the Library of Congress,” says the Archives’ sales brochure—all for sale for $39.50 an issue. I saw identifying bookplates or spine-markings from the New York State Library, the New York Public Library, Brown University, the San Francisco Public Library, Yale, the Wisconsin Historical Society Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and many others. A now mutilated run of the New York World has this bookplate:

  Presented to

  THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  by

  THOMAS W. DEWART

  former President of The Sun

  and by

  ROY W. HOWARD

  President and Editor of the

  New York World-Telegram and The Sun

  And there was a shelf of volumes bearing this warning:

  THESE FILES ARE FOR

  PERMANENT RECORD OF

  The St. Louis Republic

  HANDLE WITH CARE

  Positively Must Not be Cut

  or Clipped

  The warning has not been heeded.

  Chapter Five

  from A BOX OF MATCHES

  Good morning, it’s 4:20 a.m.—You know, I used to have trouble sleeping, but now I have much less trouble because I’m getting up at four in the morning. Before five, anyway. I’m so sleepy that I sleep well. For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me go to sleep. By day I’m not a particularly morbid person, but at night I would lie in bed imagining that I was hammering a knitting needle into my ear, or swan-diving off a ledge into a black void at the bottom of which were a dozen sharp, slippery stalagmites. Wearing a helmet and pilot’s gear, I would miniaturize myself, and wait for a giant screwdriver to unscrew the hatch at the nose of a bullet. I would be lowered into the control room of the bullet, whereupon the hatch would be screwed tight over me. At a certain moment, I would flick a switch and the gun would fire, throwing me back in my seat. I would shoot out the muzzle and over the sleeping city, following a path towards my own house; I would crash through the window and plunge toward my own head, and when the bullet dove into my brain I would fall asleep.

  Now I lie in bed and think a few random things about soil erosion or painting a long yellow strip on the side of a black ship, and because I’ve gotten up so early, I just fall asleep. The soporific suicidalism peaked several years ago, when we were staying for a few months in San Diego, so that I could “encourage” a group of doctors who were supposed to be revising their textbook. My brain was alive with the night-crawlerly unfinishedness of the project, and there were four palm trees that I could see from the window of the room that I was using as a temporary office. The palms were beautiful trees in their way, especially as part of a quartet, but there is an intrinsic scrawniness to the palm, which grows like a flaring match, with a little fizzle of green at the top. It is doing only what is absolutely necessary to do to be a tree; and it has big, coarse leaves—intemperate leaves—and the bark shows its years on the outside, so that the tree has no secrets: it doesn’t have to die and be cut down before you can date its birth. I would look up at those four trees as I worked, and then at night I would imagine digging my own grave, because it just seemed that it would be so much easier to die than to get those three contentious doctors to contribute their material for the new and heavily revised edition of Spinal Cord Trauma. Claire and the children would be fully provided for as long as I was able to craft a way of dying that didn’t seem like suicide. But eventually the new edition was written, and then it was copyedited and indexed and published and distributed, and now medical-school students are buying it and underlining things in it, and all is as it should be.

  At around four thirty, sometimes later, the freight-train whistle goes off. At seven I have to get dressed and drop my daughter Phoebe off at school and drive to work. I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty. A hundred years ago, a trolley line and two passenger trains came through this town; Rudyard Kipling reportedly stayed here for a week on his way inland to his house in Vermont, where he wrote the Just So Stories. “How the Leopard Got His Spots” is a good one. My mother read it to my brother and me, and it changed the way I thought about shadows. There were several places in our yard that offered Kipling’s kind of jigsawed shade. The euonymus tree that grew near the edge of our property worked best. Euonymus bark has beautiful fins, and under this low tree I could sit and watch the sunlight break into pieces.

  I like deciduous trees, frankly, especially trees with lichen growing on them. I like living in the east, I like old brass boxes with scratches, I like the way fireplaces look when they’ve held thousands of fires. The fireplace that I’m sitting in front of was built, supposedly, in 1780. How many fires has it held? Two hundred a year times two hundred years: forty thousand fires? I like to burn wood. I’ve only discovered this recently. Last
year, Claire gave me an ax for my birthday, and I began using it to chop up the scrap wood that the contractors piled up where they were reconstructing our slumped barn. If you bring the ax down really hard, right in the middle of a six-inch board, the board will break in two longways, and the grain of the breakage will sometimes detour nicely around a knothole. Then you can chop across the grain. Apple boughs are very hard to chop, even the old gray ones that have lost their bark. You slam away at them for five minutes and then suddenly, if you hit them just right, they leap up at you and whack you in the face. Contractor’s scraps burn with many little explosions and whistling sighs.

  When we had burned through most of the scraps, I called up a wood man and ordered a cord. A cord is a unit of measure that means “a goodly amount.” The wood man used a large pincering hook to snag the quartered logs off his truck. He drove off with a pale blue check in his hand, leaving us with a heap of logs. This heap Claire and I, over the next week, built into a long, neat edifice against the barn. You crisscross the logs: three one way, and then three over those going the other way, and you put each crisscrossing pile next to the other, and you have to choose the logs so that the pile will remain stable and not topple; and you surmount the whole architecture with a roof made of stray pieces of bark. It takes on an air of permanency, like a stone wall—so finished seeming that you hesitate before pulling from it the first few logs for burning.