Double Fold Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1 Overseas Disposal

  CHAPTER 2 Original Keepsakes

  CHAPTER 3 Destroying to Preserve

  CHAPTER 4 It Can Be Brutal

  CHAPTER 5 The Ace Comb Effect

  CHAPTER 6 Virgin Mummies

  CHAPTER 7 Already Worthless

  CHAPTER 8 A Chance to Begin Again

  CHAPTER 9 Dingy, Dreary, Dog-eared, and Dead

  CHAPTER 10 The Preservation Microfilming Office

  CHAPTER 11 Thugs and Pansies

  CHAPTER 12 Really Wicked Stuff

  CHAPTER 13 Getting the Champagne out of the Bottle

  CHAPTER 14 Bursting at the Seams

  CHAPTER 15 The Road to Avernus

  CHAPTER 16 It’s Not Working Out

  CHAPTER 17 Double Fold

  CHAPTER 18 A New Test

  CHAPTER 19 Great Magnitude

  CHAPTER 20 Special Offer

  CHAPTER 21 3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars

  CHAPTER 22 Six Thousand Bodies a Day

  CHAPTER 23 Burning Up

  CHAPTER 24 Going, Going, Gone

  CHAPTER 25 Absolute Nonsense

  CHAPTER 26 Drumbeat

  CHAPTER 27 Unparalleled Crisis

  CHAPTER 28 Microfix

  CHAPTER 29 Slash and Burn

  CHAPTER 30 A Swifter Conflagration

  CHAPTER 31 Crunch

  CHAPTER 32 A Figure We Did Not Collect

  CHAPTER 33 Leaf Masters

  CHAPTER 34 Turn the Pages Once

  CHAPTER 35 Suibtermanean Convumision

  CHAPTER 36 Honest Disagreement

  CHAPTER 37 We Just Kind of Keep Track

  CHAPTER 38 In Good Faith

  Epilogue

  Notes

  References

  About the Author

  To my son, Elias

  Preface

  * * *

  In 1993, I decided to write some essays on trifling topics—movie projectors, fingernail clippers, punctuation, and the history of the word “lumber.” Deborah Garrison, then an editor at The New Yorker, called to ask if I wanted to review a soon-to-be published history of the world. Perhaps I should have written the review; instead, I suggested a brief, cheerful piece about the appeal of card catalogs. I began talking to librarians around the country, and I found out that card catalogs were being thrown out everywhere. I grew less cheerful, and the essay grew longer.

  When it was published in 1994, I became known in the library world as a critic (and, to some, as a crank and a Luddite), and as a result, librarians at the San Francisco Public Library thought of me two years later when they wanted to tell someone what had happened in their institution: administrators had sent a few hundred thousand books to a landfill after they discovered that a new library building was too small to hold them. I gave a speech on this subject in the auditorium of the new building, and I published an article about it in The New Yorker. There was a local fuss, the head of the library eventually lost his job (over deficits, not book dumping), and I found myself described as a “library activist.”

  In the midst of the controversy, a man named Blackbeard told a reporter that he had a story for me. He wouldn’t reveal any details to the reporter (who was Nina Siegal, of the San Francisco Bay Guardian); I was supposed to call him. I didn’t make the call right away, though, because the squabble over the San Francisco Public Library was sufficiently distracting, and because my family and I were packing to spend a year in England. Some weeks later, going through some papers, I found the name, Bill Blackbeard, and his number, which I dialed. Blackbeard had a formal, slightly breathless way of talking; he was obviously intelligent, perhaps a little Ancient Marinerian in the way that lifelong collectors can be. He had edited collections of comic strips (early Popeye, Terry and the Pirates, Krazy Kat), and he ran something called the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art—a one-man curatorship, apparently—which owned, he said, a very large number of ex-library newspaper volumes, including one-of-a-kind runs of the great early Hearst papers. Some of what Blackbeard told me I couldn’t quite comprehend: that the Library of Congress, the purported library of last resort, had replaced most of its enormous collection of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers with microfilm, and that research libraries were relying on what he called “fraudulent” scientific studies when they justified the discarding of books and newspapers on the basis of diagnosed states of acidity and embrittlement. I said that it all sounded extremely interesting and that maybe he should write about it himself; I thanked him and hung up. I was tired of finding fault with libraries; in theory, I loved libraries.

  Almost two years later, I thought of Blackbeard again, and I decided to pay him a visit. He had by this time sold his newspaper collection, which filled six tractor trailers, to Ohio State University, and he had moved to Santa Cruz, where his wife liked to surf. He was in his early seventies, fit, clean shaven, wearing a nubbly gold sweater and a baseball hat turned backward. One room of his very small house was filled with dime novels and old science-fiction magazines in white boxes. In his youth, he’d written for Weird Tales; he’d driven armored vehicles in the Eighty-ninth Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in the Second World War; and in 1967, filled with an ambition to write a history of the American comic strip, he’d discovered that libraries were getting rid of their newspaper collections. The San Francisco Public Library had, Blackbeard said, an “incredible treasure trove.” Staff members told him that they would love to have him take it away, but unfortunately he was a private citizen—the library’s charter permitted the transfer of material only to a non-profit organization. “I became a non-profit organization so fast you couldn’t believe it,” Blackbeard told me. Soon he had acquired a bound run of William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, which the Hearst Corporation had donated to the Los Angeles Public Library (the library kept the custom-made burnished mahogany shelves), and another American run from the Stanford University Libraries. He went around the country picking up newspaper volumes, which he called “files,” a usage that confused me at first. Sometimes he cut the comic strips or Sunday sections out and sold the remains to dealers; sometimes he kept the volumes whole. “When I suddenly discovered that I could have any of them that I wanted, I just went off my rocker. It was the most wonderful thing in the world.” Blackbeard also told me about a test that librarians were using on paper, in which they folded the corner of a page back and forth until it broke.

  Not long after I visited Blackbeard, I moved with my family from California to southern Maine. I sat in my new office, surrounded by boxes of books, staring out the window at a valley filled with young trees. There were several off-white nests of webworms clinging like the ends of Q-tips to some of the trees’ upper branches. I looked at the webworm nests, and I thought, Why not find out what’s happened to the newspapers? Why not learn more about the fold test? I called The New Yorker and asked Deborah Garrison if she could stand another article about libraries. She said yes, and I went to work. I learned about pyrophoric compounds, mummy wrappings, oversewing, artificial-aging ovens, redox blemishes, and a group called the Council on Library Resources, founded by Verner Clapp. I became familiar with the efforts of a woman named Patricia Battin, and I watched a movie, Slow Fires. I began moaning and typing things like “Oh, my friends, it’s worse than you think.” I realized that I had something that was longer than a magazine article.

  Then, four fifths of the way through writing this book, I found out that one of the last remaining collections of American wood-pulp newspapers would be cut to pieces unless I started a non-profit corporation—just as Blackbeard had—and raised the money to save it. I sent out letters and grant applications; then I resumed work on t
he manuscript. And that’s how Double Fold—so named in honor of the brittleness test that Bill Blackbeard first told me about—came to be written.

  This isn’t an impartial piece of reporting. I’ve tried not to misrepresent those whose views differ from my own, but I make no secret of my disagreement; at times, a dormant prosecutorial urge awoke in me, for we have lost things that we can never get back. I must also say, though, that the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the other illustrious institutions herein held up for criticism, employ a great many book-respecting people who may not know of, or approve of, what their superiors or their forebears have done.

  The following people read the manuscript, or parts of it, and made useful suggestions: Nicolas Barker, Viscountess Eccles, David McKitterick, Paul Needham, Randy Silverman, Thomas Tanselle, and Peter Waters—which is not to imply that they agree with everything I say. Many others were helpful in various ways, including Marty Asher, Ann Godoff, Melanie Jackson, Cressida Leyshon, Timothy Mennel, Charline Parsons, Susanna Porter, David Remnick, and Sasha Smith. I’m grateful to my parents and my parents-in-law, and, most of all, to my beloved wife, Margaret.

  DOUBLE FOLD

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Overseas Disposal

  The British Library’s newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane—possibly mistaking the library complex for an aircraft-manufacturing plant—dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes1 of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however, was a very large foreign-newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick-thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum’s crown-and-lion symbol of curatorial responsibility.

  Bombs spared the American papers, but recent managerial policy has not—most were sold off in a blind auction in the fall of 1999. One of the library’s treasures was a seventy-year run, in about eight hundred volumes, of Joseph Pulitzer’s exuberantly polychromatic newspaper, the New York World. Pulitzer discovered that illustrations2 sold the news; in the 1890s, he began printing four-color Sunday supplements and splash-panel cartoons. The more maps, murder-scene diagrams, ultra-wide front-page political cartoons, fashion sketches, needlepoint patterns, children’s puzzles, and comics that Pulitzer published, the higher the World’s sales climbed; by the mid-nineties, its circulation was the largest of any paper in the country. William Randolph Hearst moved to New York in 1895 and copied Pulitzer’s innovations and poached his staff, and the war between the two men created modern privacy-probing, muckraking, glamour-smitten journalism. A million people a day once read Pulitzer’s World; now an original set is a good deal rarer than a Shakespeare First Folio or the Gutenberg Bible.

  Besides the World, the British Library also possessed one of the last sweeping runs of the sumptuous Chicago Tribune—about 1,300 volumes, reaching from 1888 to 1958, complete with bonus four-color art supplements on heavy stock from the 1890s (“This Paper is Not Complete Without the Color Illustration” says the box on the masthead); extravagant layouts of illustrated fiction; elaborately hand-lettered ornamental headlines; and decades of page-one political cartoons by John T. McCutcheon. The British Library owned, as well, an enormous set of the San Francisco Chronicle (one of perhaps two that are left, the second owned by the Chronicle Publishing Company itself and inaccessible to scholars), which in its heyday was filled with gorgeously drippy art-nouveau graphics. And the library owned a monster accumulation of what one could argue is the best newspaper in U.S. history, the New York Herald Tribune, along with its two tributaries, Horace Greeley’s anti-slavery Tribune and James Gordon Bennett’s initially pro-slavery Herald. The Herald Tribune set carries all the way through to 1966, when the paper itself died—it, too, may be the last surviving long run anywhere. And there was a goodly stretch of The New York Times on the British Library’s shelves (1915 through 1958), with Al Hirschfeld drawings and hundreds of luminously fine-grained, sepia-tinted “Rotogravure Picture Sections” bound in place.

  All these newspapers have been very well cared for over the years—the volumes I was allowed to examine in September 1999 were in lovely shape. The pictorial sections, but for their unfamiliar turn-of-the-century artwork, looked and felt as if they had peeled off a Hoe cylinder press day before yesterday.

  But then, wood-pulp newspapers of fifty and a hundred years ago are, contrary to incessant library propaganda, often surprisingly well preserved. Everyone knows that newsprint, if left in the sun, quickly turns yellow and brittle (a connective wood ingredient called lignin, which newsprint contains in abundance, reacts with sunlight), but rolls of microfilm—and floppies and DVDs—don’t do well in the sun, either; so far, many of the old volumes seem to be doing a better job of holding their original images than the miniature plastic reproductions of them that libraries have seen fit to put in their places over the years. Binding is very important. The stitching together of fifteen (or thirty or sixty) single issues of a paper into one large, heavy book does much to keep the sheets sound; the margins often become brown and flaky, since moist, warm air reacts with the acidic compounds in the paper and weakens it, and the binding glues can stop working; but a little deeper inside the flatland of the tightly closed folio, the sheer weight of the text-block squeezes out most of the air. The effect is roughly equivalent to vacuum-sealing the inner expanses of the pages: the paper suffers much less impairment as a result.

  Many librarians, however, have managed to convince themselves, and us, that if a newspaper was printed after 1870 or so, it will inevitably self-destruct or “turn to dust” any minute, soon, in a matter of a few years—1870 being the all-important date after which, in American newsprint mills, papermaking pulps consisting of cooked rags gradually began to give way to pulps made of stone-ground wood. But “soon” is a meaningless word in the context of a substance with a life as long as that of the printed page—indeed, it is a word that allows for all sorts of abuses. Early on, fledgling microfilm companies fed the fear of impermanence with confident mispredictions. Charles Z. Case, an executive at Recordak, Kodak’s microfilm subsidiary, wrote in 1936: “Since the adoption3 of wood-sulphite paper for newspaper printing, a newspaper file has had a life of from 5 to 40 years depending on the quality of the paper, the conditions of storage, and the degree of use.” Had Case’s forecast held true, the volume of the Chicago Tribune for July 1911 that lies open before me as I type (to an influenza-inspired illustrated section on “A New Theory of Baby Rearing”) would have expired at least half a century ago. Thomas Martin, chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress in the thirties, agreed with the Recordak salesman: “Old wood-pulp files4 which have only a few years’ duration remaining in them should be photographed on film as soon as satisfactory results can be obtained. In such cases we really have no choice but to make or take film copies, the original will soon crumble into dust.”

  But the originals didn’t crumble into dust. Keyes Metcalf, a microfilm pioneer and the director of the libraries at Harvard, in 1941 predicted that the “total space requirements”5 of research libraries “will be reduced by paper disintegration.” Then five, ten, twenty years went by, and the paper—even the supposedly ephemeral newsprint—was still there. So librarians began getting rid of it anyway. If you destroy the physical evidence, nobody will know how skewed your predictions were.

  Vilified though it may be, ground-wood pulp is one of the great inventions of the late nineteenth century: it gave us cheap paper, and cheap paper transformed the news. “All that it is necessary6 for a man to do on going into a paper-mill is to take off his shirt, hand it to the devil who officiates at one extremity, and have it come out ‘Robinson Crusoe’ at the other,” wrote the founder of the New York Sun in 1837. But there were never enough shirts, and in 1854 rag sh
ortages lifted the price of newsprint to alarming heights. The arrival of the brothers Pagenstecher, who in the eighteen-sixties imported a German machine that shredded logs to pulp by jamming their ends against a circular, water-cooled grinding stone, brought prices way down7—from twelve cents a pound in 1870, to seven cents a pound in 1880, to less than two cents a pound in 1900. The drop gave Pulitzer and Hearst the plentiful page space to sell big ads, and allowed their creations to flower into the gaudy painted ladies they had become by the first decade of the twentieth century.

  There’s no question that wood pulps are in general weaker than rag pulps; and old newsprint, especially, tears easily, and it can become exceedingly fragile if it is stored, say, on the cement floor of a library basement, near heating pipes, for a few decades. But the degree of fragility varies from title to title and run to run, and many fragile things (old quilts, old clocks, astrolabes, dried botanical specimens, Egyptian glass, daguerreotypes, early computers) are deemed worth preserving despite, or even because of, their fragility. The most delicate volume I’ve come across (a month of the Detroit Evening News from 1892), though the pages were mostly detached, and though it shed flurries of marginal flakes when I moved it around, could nonetheless be page-turned and read with a modicum of care—there was an interesting article,8 with two accompanying etchings, about a city shelter for “homeless wanderers.” (Sinners slept on wooden bunks without bedding, while the newly converted got cots with mattresses, and a reading room.)

  Old newsprint is very acidic—and so? Our agitation over the acid in paper is not rational. Just because a given page has a low pH (a pH of 7 is neutral, below that is acidic) doesn’t mean that it can’t be read. There are five-hundred-year-old book papers that remain strong and flexible despite pH levels under five, a fact which has led one conservation scientist to conclude that “the acidity of the paper alone9 is not necessarily indicative of the state of permanence of paper.” It is difficult, in fact, to get a meaningful measure of how alkaline or acidic a paper actually is, since chemicals on the surface behave differently than those held within; the standard scientific tests (which often rely on a blender) don’t discriminate. It’s true that, all things being equal, pH-neutral paper seems to keep its properties longer than paper that is made with acid-containing or acid-forming additives; scientists have been making this observation,10 on and off, for more than eighty years. But saying that one substance is stronger than another is not the same as saying that the weaker substance is on the verge of self-destruction. A stainless-steel chair may be more durable than a wooden one, but the wooden one isn’t necessarily going to collapse the next time you take a seat.