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  But these difficulties didn’t deter the visionaries of fifty or sixty years ago: the end product might not look that great, but it was thrilling to be able to do the work at all. And once they’d done the heady hobbyistical thing—taken cracker-sized snapshots of the contents of their newspaper shelves, using advanced Recordak film technology—it seemed only sensible to throw the old pages away, rather than to set them aside in an annex in case the microfilm turned out poorly, or had missing issues or pages or months, or in case people had questions (say about the history of American illustration or photography) that only the originals could answer. (In some microfilm, photographs come out as little more than dark rectangles on the page.) Recordak’s Charles Z. Case extolled the benefits of “condensing records10 to microscopic form to save space”; one of the company’s promotional pictures from the thirties shows a wall of volumes of The New York Times11 at the New York Public Library, heaped and ranked willy-nilly to heighten the sense of oppressiveness: in front of them stands a prim wooden cabinet full of Kodak-made microfilm. Recordak succeeded early on in winning over Keyes Metcalf, then chief of reference at the New York Public Library, who bought two microfilm readers12 in the early thirties; later, when he became head librarian at Harvard, he launched, with Rockefeller Foundation money, a large-scale project to film foreign newspapers, in order, as he wrote the foundation’s director of humanities, “to help push microphotography.”13 In those early days, microfilm was shot on the same stock as movie film (you can still see the sprocket perforations14 from the original negative on some prints)—and one has a sense that these library administrators saw themselves in the role of studio moguls, bringing multivolume reference classics to the silver, or at least the gray-green, screen.

  Microfilm had an air of enticing sneakiness as well—of important covert operations performed in the national interest. This tradition goes back to the siege of Paris15 in 1870, when the Prussians cut all telegraph links to the city. In a peasant’s disguise, René Patrice Dagron, already a microphotographer of note, snuck his optical apparatus to Tours in wine barrels, and there photographed military communiqués at reduced size on emulsions that he gently rolled up, slid into quills, and affixed to carrier pigeons. The birds, which had been plunging exhausted from the sky when burdened with heavy paper, now flapped to Paris without incident.

  In World War II, microfilm again came to prominence. Eugene Power,16 the founder of University Microfilms, landed a big contract in 1942 with the Office of Strategic Services, later to become the CIA, to film millions of pages of German scientific papers and other documents gathered by British agents. Around the same time, the OSS needed an efficient way to sort thousands of vacation photographs of Germany that the military had solicited from the public in order to plan bombing runs. A forward-thinker named John F. Langan hired a team of women to mount microfilm snippets of each vacation photo (along with selected stills from Axis newsreels) into a rectangular hole cut in an IBM punch card that was coded to correspond to the subject of the photo. In The Hole in the Card (a company history published in 1966 by 3M’s Filmsort subsidiary), Neil MacKay17 writes, “For example, if a request were received for a shot of a bridge in occupied France that the allies wanted blown up, the cards were mechanically sorted at high speed to segregate all ‘bridge’ cards. The film in the cards was then projected on a screen to select the exact shot wanted.”

  Langan was helped by another early bird, Vernon D. Tate,18 who moved to the OSS from the National Archives, where in the thirties he had supervised the filming and destruction of a boatload of primary sources. Tate wrote in 1942 that microfilm “ranks in importance with any secret military weapon19 thus far disclosed.” One of its greatest advantages was the ease with which it could be destroyed, according to Tate:

  Books may not be blown to bits or easily burned by fire; microfilms if capture is inevitable can be rapidly and completely consumed, and as easily replaced through the making of prints from master negatives.

  Tate went on to become MIT’s head librarian.

  After the war, the most influential microfilm booster was a polymathic, bow-tie-wearing career librarian named Verner Clapp. Clapp became the number-two man at the Library of Congress under Luther Evans (“We’re going places Verner,”20 Evans wrote him in 1945, “and I’m very glad you’re a good sailor”); after narrowly missing the chieftaincy21 himself, Clapp went on in 1956 to direct the new and very flush Council on Library Resources, which bestowed hundreds of thousands of Ford Foundation dollars on technologies of image shrinkage. In 1958, Clapp chaired a meeting on “Problems of Microform in Libraries” at the Cosmos Club in Washington; the first item on the agenda was “Reduction in bulk22—the problems of library storage.” One of Verner Clapp’s cherished bulk-reducing projects was the “Verac,” built by AVCO Corporation (they were at work on the reentry system for the Minuteman missile23 at the time)—a cubic-foot set of stacked photographic plates layered with super-high-resolution “Lippman emulsion,” which could hold a million page-images, each accessed by a servomechanism that, as Clapp put it, “brings the addressed image into the scanning position through a paroxysmic effort of approximately one-tenth of a second’s duration.” The Verac could make you a hard copy (Clapp uses this Cold War term in 1964), with the help of a Printapix tube, or the image could be made to appear on a “vidicon,” or closed-circuit-TV screen. It didn’t work, though—the words were blurry. Or perhaps the blur accurately reproduces Clapp’s own tears of frustration, for the paroxysmic Verac was an expensive failure. Like missile defense, leading-edge library automation is a money pit.

  At the 1959 annual meeting of the National Microfilm Association, Clapp gave the keynote address, entitled “A Good Beginning.”24 He spoke of a hoped-for day in which microfilm machines “can be made a personal accoutrement, as homely and as natural and as essential as the tooth-brush, the ball-point pen, or as eyeglasses.” He also told delegates that microfilm “has come to the forefront again and again in time of war, and some of its best-known achievements are associated with espionage.” Most of his listeners that day were unaware that Clapp himself was, at the time, a consultant for the CIA, and that since at least 1949, while he was still at the Library of Congress, he had been an official intelligence contact with top-secret clearance. Clapp’s CIA file includes “Report of Liaison” forms from 1953 and 1954 which state that his task was to “maintain liaison on mutual library matters as well as monitor certain CIA-financed Library of Congress activity.”

  What that activity was precisely is hidden behind a censor’s busy Magic Marker; some of it probably concerned the contract microfilming of classified documents. In Clapp’s handwritten daily minutes, now held at the Library of Congress’s manuscripts division, there is a note from November 1951, when he was chief assistant librarian—“Round up on CIA projects,” followed by a list of names,25 including Frederick Wagman (a lifelong microfilm enthusiast, later director of the University of Michigan’s library and president of the American Library Association) and John W. Cronin, the Library of Congress’s head of processing and member of the American Library Association’s committee on cooperative microfilming projects. Around the same time, Clapp notes that he’s gotten word from Alexander Toth, the CIA’s librarian, that the “CIA contract is in mill.”

  All Clapp’s notes are on paper, easily read today. Clapp’s CIA file, on the other hand, is an unfortunate victim of the Cold War mania26 for micro-preservation: it looks to have been inexpertly filmed at some point, and it has undergone a severe fading, as microfilm does when technicians don’t take care to rinse off the hypo fixative. The copy that the CIA sent me is poignantly stamped with the words BEST COPY AVAILABLE27 on almost every nearly indecipherable page. Some of the pages are, though uncensored, completely unreadable. The same cautionary language—BEST COPY AVAILABLE—accompanies the printouts from microfilmed newspapers that one can order from the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.

  There was a palpable
glamour to microfilming in those early days, difficult though it may be to feel it now—a hot chemical whiff of cinematography and of high-stakes intelligence work. And there was, as well, the entrepreneurial appeal of creating a product you could sell to other libraries, and the further compensations that flowed from selling your master negatives and reproduction rights to commercial microfilm companies such as University Microfilms, as most libraries that possessed early homegrown film eventually did.

  But the main reason microfilm (and its rectangular, lower-resolution cousin, microfiche) has always fascinated library administrators is, of course, that it gives them a way to clear the shelves—to “expand without expanding,” in the words of a full-page Xerox-UMI advertisement in the July 1976 issue of Microform Review. The picture in the ad is of a squeezed, feather-shedding American eagle; the headline is AMERICA’S SPACE PROGRAM IS IN TROUBLE:28

  We don’t have enough of it. Space. Not in the cities. Not on the land, and, as we don’t need to tell you, not in the libraries. University Microfilms can give you more space. More space translates as more ways to expand without expanding, more options open.

  Serials Management in Microform is our own slum clearance program.

  Newspaper collections were the first slums to be cleared (books came later), and because the Library of Congress had the largest newspaper collection in the country, it was one of the first to go to work. (The Library of Congress had “files of American and foreign newspapers29 more complete and in greater amount than in any other library,” wrote one celebrant a decade before the clearance began.) In 1950, an energetic soul named Clyde S. Edwards was put in charge of the library’s Serials Division; an internal report for that year pointed out “the badly congested condition30 of the bound newspaper collections, and the urgent need for space in which to expand them.” But the newspapers were never to have enough space again. Verner Clapp, microfilm futurist, was by this time running day-to-day operations at the library (Luther Evans was out of the country for long periods, on missions for UNESCO), and Clapp was not a believer in “merely more of the same31—ever and ever larger bookstacks and ever and ever more complicated catalogs.” He subscribed to what is sometimes called the steady space32 model. The ideal research library would (as he described it in his 1964 book The Future of the Research Library) reach a certain fixed physical size and stay there forever: techno-shrinkage systems (improved Veracs or, eventually, textual databases) would allow librarians to “retire” their originals (i.e., shear their spines and take their pictures) in favor of ever more densely packed micro-surrogates. The curious twists of meaning that accompany microfilming were not entirely lost on Clapp. “It is an art,”33 he told the conventioneers in 1959, “dedicated to preservation, yet it is often practiced as a preparation for deliberate destruction.”

  Rather than putting up more shelves for the newsprint collection, or building or leasing a warehouse—traditional reactions to a space shortage—the Library of Congress’s response in 1950 was to abandon the binding and storing of many new newspapers: incoming papers were dumped after a few months, as soon as commercial microfilm arrived to put in their place. That practice saved dramatically on binding costs, thus subsidizing the cost of the microfilm, and it “retard[ed] somewhat the normal growth of this congested condition,” wrote a still dissatisfied Clyde Edwards, “but will not improve the present state of things.” There was only one sure way to relieve the overcrowding, Edwards advised in a later report: “I am convinced that the only solution to this problem lies in an intelligently planned reduction of the original files.”

  Edwards needed upper-level permission for such a far-reaching disposal program, however. In a “conference decision,” the library’s managers determined to solve the newspaper problem by, as Branson Marley put it, “permitting the disposal34 to other libraries of bound newspapers replaced by microfilm.” A unobtrusive footnote follows Marley’s innocent-sounding sentence: “Volumes for which there are no takers are destroyed.” None of this epochal activity,35 in which the Library of Congress began its slow betrayal of an unknowing nation, was published in contemporary annual reports.

  Volumes for which there are no takers are destroyed. Increasingly, there weren’t takers, because such is the prestige of our biggest library that whatever its in-house theoreticians come to believe, however nonsensically misinformed, however anathematic to reasoned stewardship, other research libraries will soon believe as well. In 1956, Verner Clapp’s last year at the library, the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress was a little more forthright than it had been about what was going on: “The problem of deteriorating newspapers36 was accentuated by the equally vexing problem of making deck space for newly bound volumes. Following a survey of these problems, orders were placed for a number of microfilm copies of domestic titles available in this form.”

  But because it takes time to microfilm backfiles amounting to millions of pages, the “planned reduction” went fairly slowly at first. Bill Blackbeard told me that when he first began saving newspapers in the late sixties and early seventies, the Library of Congress still had a huge collection, handsomely bound, stored in a naval warehouse37 on Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. “They had virtually every major American newspaper from a large city,” Blackbeard said, “usually from the beginning of the newspaper, or the time that the papers were sent to the Library of Congress—through the nineteen-fifties. Most of these bound files ended about nineteen-fifty.” These papers hadn’t received the kind of heavy wear that, say, a Kansas City Star might have gotten at a public library in Missouri, or The Detroit News might have in Detroit.

  A few times a year, the library would publish in its Information Bulletin38 a list of the papers it was replacing with film: if no federal agencies wanted them, they could go to other libraries or non-profit organizations; if no non-profits wanted them, they might go into dealers’ trucks; if dealers had gotten their fill, they went to the dump. “Their files were just immaculate, white paper, good-looking stuff,” Blackbeard said. “They couldn’t wait to get rid of them.”

  Two documents together disclose the enormity of the Library of Congress’s print-purgation program over the past several decades. One is a forty-six-page mimeographed list entitled Holdings of American Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Newspapers Printed on Wood Pulp Paper, prepared by the Library of Congress’s Serials Division in May 1950, just before Clyde S. Edwards strode onto the scene. (“Wood pulp paper” here just seems39 to mean everything published after 1870, aside from several titles printed especially for libraries in the thirties on ultra-durable rag paper.) The publication served as a hit list of sorts; it includes not only the item counts of post-1870 volumes for more than six hundred different newspapers (everything from the Alaska Daily Empire from 1913 to 1949, in 105 volumes, to the Laramie, Wyoming, Republic and Boomerang from 1916 to 1949, in 103 volumes) but also the “estimated number of exposures” that it would take to microfilm all of them: sixty-seven million.

  The other document is a detailed inventory,40 prepared in the summer of 1998, entitled “19th and 20th Century U.S. Newspapers in Original Format: Inventory of Volumes Held in Remote Storage.”

  According to the 1950 count, there were over sixty-seven thousand volumes of post-1870 wood-pulp newspapers in the Library of Congress. From that gigantic land-mass of print, a few thousand volumes now remain. Looking at the numbers a slightly different way, there were, in 1950, around fifty wood-pulp newspaper runs that numbered more than 400 volumes. (661 volumes of The Cincinnati Enquirer from 1874, for instance, 498 volumes of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, 630 volumes of the Portland Daily Journal, 594 volumes of the Brooklyn Eagle, 495 volumes of The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1874, 413 volumes of Hearst’s New York American, and so on.) There are no runs of more than four hundred volumes now—and no runs of more than three hundred, or two hundred, or one hundred. Whispers of this secret history are to be found in the small card catalog that librarians keep behind the reference desk
in the newspaper reading room: above the typed entry for the New York Herald Tribune, for instance, is a handwritten note: ALL ON FILM41—(817 VOLS. DISCARDED).

  Diane Kresh was until recently in charge of the Library of Congress’s Napoleonically named Preservation Directorate; I brought up the newspapers with her on one of my visits to the library. “Generally we retain the inkprint42 until we have a microfilm available,” she said. I asked her if she thought that was a good policy.

  “I do,” she said. “I’ve seen bound newspapers that have become so embrittled that they can’t be used. They are still intact—things aren’t falling on the floor. But you can’t open them, and you can’t turn the page.”

  So the library got rid of the newspapers because of their condition, not because of space requirements? Or was it some combination?

  “Oh, no, it wouldn’t be the space,” said Kresh. “It’s the inherent vice of deteriorating paper, and particularly newsprint.”

  But it was the space, unquestionably. The Library of Congress once owned the Chicago Tribune, The Detroit News, the New York Forward, and The New York Times in rag-paper library editions43—printed, in other words, on stock that is significantly stronger than practically all book paper of the twentieth century. The library banished these titles anyway. Charles La Hood, the library’s chief of photoduplication in the seventies, wrote: “Microfilming came at a propitious time,44 as the Library of Congress was experiencing an acute space problem in its newspaper collection.”

  When I pointed out to Kresh that ex-Library of Congress newspapers find avid buyers every day, and thus could not be nearly as decrepit as she was implying, Kresh admitted that “there is, obviously, ultimately a storage issue.”