Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Notes

CHAPTER 1 — Overseas Disposal

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.

3. “Since the adoption”: Charles Z. Case, “Photographing Newspapers,” in Microphotography for Libraries, ed. M. Llewellyn Raney (Chicago: American Library Association, 1936), p. 53.

4. “Old wood-pulp files”: A. F. Kuhlman, “Are We Ready to Preserve Newspapers on Films? A Symposium,” Library Quarterly, April 1935, reprinted in Studies in Micropublishing, 1853–1976: Documentary Sources, ed. Allen B. Veaner (Westport, Conn.: Microform Review, 1976).

5. “total space requirements”: Keyes DeWitt Metcalf, “Some Trends in Research Libraries,” in William Warner Bishop: A Tribute, ed. Harry Miller Lydenberg and Andrew Keogh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).

6. “All that it is necessary”: New York Sun, June 1, 1837, quoted in Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), p. 124.

7. brought prices way down: Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 742–45.

8. interesting article: Detroit Evening News, January 10, 1892.

9. “the acidity of the paper alone”: Klaus B. Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper in Light of Six Centuries of Papermaking in Europe,” in Environnement et conservation de l’écrit, de l’image, et du son (Paris: Association pour la Recherche Scientifique sur les Arts Graphiques [ARSAG], 1994), p. 136. See also Otto Wächter, “Paper Strengthening: Mass Conservation of Unbound and Bound Newspapers,” Restaurator 8 (1987).

10. scientists have been making this observation: Sally Roggia cites Paper Makers Monthly Journal (June 1920), which summarizes a work by Aribert and Bouvier: the “most frequent and most harmful chemicals remaining in the paper are free acids and free chlorine”; it is “important to avoid acidity in the alum.” Sally Roggia, “William James Barrow: A Biographical Study of His Formative Years and His Role in the History of Library and Archives Conservation from 1931 to 1941,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999.

11. Wilson: William K. Wilson and E. J. Parks, “Comparison of Accelerated Aging of Book Papers in 1937 with 36 Years Natural Aging,” Restaurator 4 (1980): “Unfortunately the papers were accidentally discarded several years ago.” Elsewhere, Wilson and Parks write: “Very few organizations can maintain a project [such as testing naturally aging paper] that spans 25–50 years, especially when there is no pot of real gold at the end of the trail.” “Historical Survey of Research at the National Bureau of Standards on Materials for Archival Records,” Restaurator 5 (1983). In 1998, the American Society for Testing and Materials announced a one-hundred-year natural-aging experiment; books containing fifteen different kinds of test paper have gone into ten libraries in North America. The object is to develop an accelerated-aging test that better correlates with natural aging.

12. now viewed with skepticism: In Artificial Aging as a Predictor of Paper’s Future Useful Life, an Abbey Newsletter Monograph Supplement, Helmut Bansa and Hans-H. Hofer find that “there may be at best an accidental agreement between the results of artificial aging at high temperatures and natural aging” (Provo, Utah: Abbey Newsletter, 1989). See also Wilson and Parks, “Comparison of Accelerated Aging,” in which the data suggest that “either the number of samples is less than adequate to provide a valid statistical population or the accelerated aging method used in 1937 does not fully simulate natural aging, or both.” Later (p. 47) Wilson writes: “Don’t try to predict permanence in years.” E. Ströfer-Hua, after an experiment that demonstrated the flaws of oven aging, concludes: “History can only happen; it cannot be simulated in advance.” E. Ströfer-Hua, “Experimental Measurement: Interpreting Extrapolation and Prediction by Accelerated Aging,” Restaurator 11 (1990).

13. “an interesting academic exercise”: American Society for Testing and Materials, “Standard Test Method for Determination of Effect of Moist Heat (50 % Relative Humidity and 90 °C) on Properties of Paper and Board,” Annual Book of ASTM Standards, 1998, vol. 15.09, D 4714, Appendix (Conshohocken, Pa.: American Society for Testing and Materials, 1998).

14. “naive hope”: Tom Lindstrom, “Discussion Contribution: Slow Fires — It’s Paper Chemistry, Physics, and Biology,” in Paper Preservation: Current Issues and Recent Developments, ed. Philip Luner (Atlanta: Tappi, 1988). Glen G. Gray writes: “Although several accelerated-aging procedures or chemical specifications have been proposed, carefully controlled experiments and many years of natural aging would be required to verify predictions.” Glen G. Gray, “Determination and Significance of Activation Energy in Permanence Tests,” in Preservation of Paper and Textiles of Historic and Artistic Value, ed. John C. Williams (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1977). Wilson and Parks write: “An accelerated aging test does not tell what a paper will be like after 25 or 50 years of storage. It only provides information concerning the ranking of different samples with respect to storage properties.” William K. Wilson and E. J. Parks, “An Analysis of the Aging of Paper,” Restaurator 3 (1979): 56.

15. newspaper library’s newsletter: British Library Newspaper Library, “Disposal of Overseas Newspapers,” Newspaper Library News 22 (winter 1996–1997).

16. wire-service story: Associated Press, “British Library Giving Away Old Newspapers,” January 29, 1997, Nexis.

17. library selected for discard: British Library Newspaper Library, “Disposal of Overseas Newspapers (Continued),” Newspaper Library News 24 (winter 1997–1998).

18. “overseas disposals project”: British Library Newspaper Library, “Disposal of Overseas Newspapers: Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the USA,” Newspaper Library News 25 (winter 1998–1999).

19. “Increasing pressure”: British Library Newspaper Library, “Disposal of Overseas Newspapers.”

20. “Material for which we cannot”: British Library Newspaper Library, “Disposal of Overseas Newspapers.”

CHAPTER 2 — Original Keepsakes

1. micro-madman: Herman H. Fussler’s early how-to book is Photographic Reproduction for Libraries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Research libraries have been “duly grateful for the space saved through newspaper-salvaging operations,” he writes, in “Photographic Reproduction of Research Materials,” Library Trends, April 1954, reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 26. Fussler’s work at the Chicago branch of the Manhattan Project is briefly discussed in Burton W. Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information (Stroudsburg, Pa.: Dowden, Hutchinson, and Ross, 1978), pp. 42–43. See also Fussler’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1997.

2. Shawn Godwin: Letter to author, July 30, 2000; Godwin would prefer that I not name the institution. Some years later, Godwin took a historical-research job in which he was supposed to make a catalog of the murals painted by two Hungarian-American artists. “Many of their murals had long been destroyed and the only documentary evidence, especially the only color evidence for them existed in a vertical file of real newspaper articles maintained by a major library. When the library moved into a new, much larger facility the vertical files were microfilmed in black and white and the originals destroyed according to apparently standard archival procedure. Fortunately on pain of death the reference librarian had previously allowed me to take the articles outside the building to a local copy shop to make color copies (the hoops I had to jump through to do this were in retrospect ironic given that the material was slated to be destroyed).”

3. U.S. Newspaper Program: See Robert P. Holley, “The Preservation Microfilming Aspects of the United States Newspaper Program: A Preliminary Study,” Microform Review 19:3 (summer 1990); and Larry E. Sullivan, “United States Newspaper Program: Progress and Prospects,” Microform Review 15:3 (summer 1986); Nancy E. Gwinn, “The Rise and Fall of Cooperative Projects,” Library Resources and Technical Services 29:1 (January/March 1985).

4. “part of the City’s own heritage”: Charles Longley, “Newspapers at the Boston Public Library,” t.s., March 13, 1998, p. 3. “The paper collection should not be discarded,” Longley writes, since “for many titles the Library has the only remaining original paper copy. As artifacts the original files provide a direct physical link with the past and are of interest as such.”

5. “original keepsake newspaper”: Hammacher Schlemmer, spring 1999 catalog (p. 58), late winter catalog (p. 17), etc.

6. its bookplates announce: The text is:

Gift of

MRS. OGDEN REID

(Helen Rogers Reid)

President,

NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, INC.

January 2, 1951

Not all the Tribune volumes are bookplated, however.

7. $39.50 an issue: If you buy from Hammacher Schlemmer, you receive the newspaper “set in a hand-bound, leatherette-covered binder that is gold-embossed with the publication title, date, and the recipient’s name,” but that costs $129.95.

CHAPTER 3 — Destroying to Preserve

1. They often do: Canadian libraries do a better job of keeping the originals as well: “With regard to the preservation of originals, the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec (BNQ) deserves special mention. Under the legal deposit regulation of its act, the BNQ receives two copies of every newspaper published in the province of Quebec. One copy is sent immediately to the conservation unit where it is filmed, and placed unfolded in an acid-free carton, in a climate-controlled storage area. Access to originals is strictly controlled.” Mary Jane Starr, “The Preservation of Canadian Newspapers,” Microform Review 15:3 (summer 1986).

2. “stock control”: See, for example, J. A. Urquhart and N. C. Urquhart, Relegation and Stock Control in Libraries (Stocksfield, Northumberland: Oriel Press, 1976), which discusses something called a “weedability factor,” defined as “the number of uses per working day per metre of shelving occupied.” Circulation statistics are all-important: “Intuitively, books which were last borrowed a long time ago seem ripe for relegation, books which were recently borrowed are left alone.”

3. “kissing through a pane of glass”: Quoted in Stephen R. Salmon, “User Resistance to Microforms in the Research Library,” Microform Review 3:3 (July 1974).

4. leave the bindings alone: “Poor binding also presents its own problems and although our cameras do cope well with tight binding we have unbound some volumes to allow filming to proceed.” John E. Lauder, “The Scottish Newspapers Microfilming Unit,” Microform Review 24:2 (spring 1995).

5. Historical Records Survey: Clifton Dale Foster, “Microfilming Activities of the Historical Records Survey, 1935–42,” American Archivist 48:1 (winter 1985). Foster writes that “the text of many filmed documents is almost illegible. One general complaint of those repositories housing copies of Historical Records Survey microfilm was that the film images are unreadable.” Luther Evans was a disciple of Robert C. Binkley, whose Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1931) influenced many. Binkley, who believed in microfilming newspapers and “letting the originals disappear” (Manual on Methods, p. 106), took an interest in the Historical Records Survey and “worked closely with Luther Evans in an advisory capacity and as a part-time field director in Ohio,” writes Foster. “During the first few months of the Survey’s existence, [Binkley] frequently urged Luther Evans to broaden the project’s scope to include microfilming. Evans, although hesitant at first, was eventually convinced and implemented many of Binkley’s suggestions.” The Historical Records Survey supplied the camera and the labor; the owning institution paid for the negatives: Luther Evans, “Recent Microfilming Activities of the Historical Records Survey,” Journal of Documentary Reproduction 2:1 (March 1939).

6. “The entire back of the binding”: Luther Evans, “Reference Department,” in Library of Congress, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942), p. 133. Charles Case, at Recordak, led the way. “A rotary machine for photographing separate sheets is considerably more rapid than a machine for handling bound volumes. One machine can therefore turn out more work and so go further in its job of preserving evanescent material and saving valuable space than one machine of the other type….The rotary machine can also be used for back files if they are cut out of the binding. This is the way we have photographed the 1914–1918 New York Times” (Case, “Photographing Newspapers,” p. 57).

7. “This was a major decision”: S. Branson Marley, Jr., “Newspapers and the Library of Congress,” Library of Congress Quarterly Journal 32:3 (July 1975), reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 425.

8. over a hundred and fifty dollars per volume: A price sheet distributed in 1998 by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, “Microfilm Department Hourly Standards and Price Per Frame,” lists a price of twenty-three cents per frame for “good newspapers”; the cost is forty cents per frame for “poor newspapers.” A typical volume — containing two weeks of a major newspaper from the first half of the twentieth century, say — might have two 150-page Sunday issues and thirteen thirty-page issues, or about 690 pages; that is, filming it would cost over $150 if the filmer classes it as good.

9. less than five dollars a volume: According to an Ohio State report, it cost $2.76 per volume to construct Berkeley’s Northern Regional Library Facility; $3.36 per volume to build the Sixth Stack Addition at the University of Illinois; $1.30 per volume (including land and financing) to build the Harvard Depository. Ohio Board of Regents, Academic Libraries in Ohio: Progress through Collaboration, Storage, and Technology, Report of the Library Study Committee, September 1987, appendix E.

10. “condensing records”: Case, “Photographing Newspapers,” p. 53.

11. wall of volumes of The New York Times: Reproduced as plate 1 in Fussler, Photographic Reproduction for Libraries. The caption is “Twelve Years of the New York Times in Original and on Film.” In those early years, Charles Puckette, the business manager of The New York Times, was less enthusiastic about replacing paper with film: “We recognize the need of the libraries to conserve space and when one is looking about for ways in which to save space, the large newspaper files naturally attract attention. But we are printers. We deal in the printed page just as librarians are primarily the custodians of the printed page. We think that the actual paper and ink as they appear in the form of the daily printed paper have inherent values in them which cannot be transmitted by film alone and which suffer, too, in reduction. An essential part of the record of today which you will preserve for the future will be the development of newspaper printing. And that part of the history of our times only the actual printed page will show.” C. McD. Puckette, “Question of Filming the New York Times,” in Raney, Microphotography for Libraries, p. 61.

12. who bought two microfilm readers: See Keyes Metcalf, Random Recollections of an Anachronism (New York: Readex Books, 1980), pp. 276–77. In 1935, “a film reproduction of the New York Herald Tribune replaced the Japanese-tissued bound file and since that time has been the only back file for the period available to readers,” Metcalf proudly wrote at the time. Keyes Metcalf, “Microphotography in the New York Public Library,” in Raney, Microphotography for Libraries, p. 85. (Semi-transparent Japanese tissue, applied with paste and pressed through a heated mangle, reinforced the pages.) See also Metcalf’s “Newspapers and Microphotography,” The Journal of Documentary Reproduction 2:3 (September 1939), which grants that the foreign-newspaper film that he is producing at Harvard “costs much more than the original,” but when you take into account the cost of binding and storage things begin to even out.

13. “to help push microphotography”: Quoted in David C. Weber, “The Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project, 1938–1955,” Harvard Library Bulletin (spring 1956), reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing.

14. sprocket perforations: Thomas A. Bourke, “The Curse of Acetate; or, a Base Conundrum Confronted,” Microform Review 23:1 (winter 1994); and Thomas A. Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing, Preservation Microfilming, and the National Preservation Effort in the Last Two Decades of the Twentieth Century: History and Prognosis,” Microform Review 19:1 (winter 1990).

15. siege of Paris: See Ralph de Sola, Microfilming (New York: Essential Books, 1944), pp. 22–25.

16. Eugene Power: See Jack Rubin, A History of Micrographics in the First Person (Silver Spring, Md.: National Micrographics Association, 1980), pp. 69–70. In the OSS project, Power had help from Frederick Kilgour, who went on to glory as the founder of OCLC, the bibliographic database. See “Eugene Barnum Power” and “Frederick Gridley Kilgour” in American Society of Information Scientists (ASIS), Pioneers of Information Science in North America, www.asis.org/Features/Pioneers/isp.htm.

17. Neil MacKay: Neil MacKay, The Hole in the Card: The Story of the Microfilm Aperture Card (St. Paul: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, 1966), p. 5. See also Rubin, History of Micrographics, which quotes Langan’s own Notes on the Early History of Microfilm Aperture Cards; and Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 107.

18. Vernon D. Tate: See Rubin, History of Micrographics, pp. 57–58. In the thirties, as Herman Fussler wrote approvingly in Photographic Reproduction for Libraries, the National Archives, under Vernon Tate’s direction, filmed bulky governmental records, which “are then destroyed except for a small percentage (e.g., 10 per cent) kept to illustrate the original format. The saving in space thus obtained is very great.” Tate himself wrote: “Legislation was procured to enable the disposition under certain conditions of valuable records that have been microfilmed.” Vernon D. Tate, “Microphotography in Wartime,” Journal of Documentary Reproduction 5:3 (September 1942); 134–35.

19. “secret military weapon”: Tate, “Microphotography in Wartime.”

20. “We’re going places Verner”: Luther Evans to Verner Clapp, June 25, 1945, Clapp papers, Library of Congress.

21. narrowly missing the chieftaincy: Clapp probably missed being appointed librarian of Congress because a McCarthyite senator from Clapp’s home state of Maryland, John Marshall Butler, had it in for him, according to a fascinating paper by Betty Milum, “Eisenhower, ALA, and the Selection of L. Quincy Mumford,” Libraries and Culture 30:1 (winter 1995). Clapp gave permission for the Library of Congress to display (as part of a UNESCO exhibit entitled “The Library in a Free World”) one of Butler’s campaign photographs, in a display-panel entitled “Distortion of Information.” (It was a cut-and-paste job, produced in 1951 by Butler’s campaign office with the apparent aid of Joe McCarthy’s money and staff, showing Butler’s opponent, veteran senator and McCarthy opponent Millard Tydings, in what at a glance seemed to be close conference with Earl Browder, ex-head of the U.S. Communist Party.) Butler complained, and Clapp sent an apology and substituted a different composite photo from Time. But Butler wasn’t appeased, and he and/or McCarthy seems to have set the FBI to work gathering dirt on Clapp, whose 1953 FBI report mentions an informant’s letter from 1928 in which Clapp was said to have been arrested in 1922 in connection with some suspicious fires at Trinity College — this sounds like FBI smear-to-order work. By his own admission, however, Clapp had been detained in the twenties for “lurking in an alley.” He wrote in his application form for the CIA: “I commenced action for false arrest, but was assured by my lawyer that the record was erased.”

22. “Reduction in bulk”: Council on Library Resources, Meeting on the Problems of Microform in Libraries (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 1958). See also “Space Problems of Large (General) Research Libraries: Report of a Meeting,” College and Research Libraries, May 1959, p. 219, in which is mentioned, as a “deferred” suggestion, a “proposal for a ‘weeding authority,’ which would roam through large research libraries and, endowed with authority derived from joint sponsorship, would recommend consolidation of collections, transfers of materials to central storage warehouses, etc.” An institution designated as “University C” (Yale, probably; see pp. 88–89) was described as “meeting the storage problem” by cutting back on acquisitions and “working through its collections subject by subject so as to discard materials of less value, replace with microtext those materials for which this may be done effectively, and transfer to a compact storage collection those items which should be retained locally but which may be assigned to a location of inferior physical accessibility.” “University D” planned to “reduce to microtext a significant segment (covering one field of study) in the library of one of the professional schools of the University” in order to test its financial feasibility and its “effects on consumers and consumer-reaction.”

23. Minuteman missile: See “Contracts,” Missiles and Rockets, January 15, 1962. AVCO also had $5.7 million for the development of nose cones for the Titan and Atlas missiles.

24. “A Good Beginning”: Verner Clapp, “A Good Beginning,” in Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting and Convention (Washington, D.C.: National Microfilm Association, 1959), on microfiche. Vernon Tate was on the governing board of the National Microfilm Association that year, as were emissaries from Xerox Haloid and Bell Labs.

25. list of names: Verner Clapp, diary, November 4, 1951, Clapp papers, Library of Congress. Another who worked on the Library of Congress’s CIA projects was Burton W. Adkinson, Director of the Reference Department. Burton, a map expert and former OSS analyst, worked for the National Science Foundation from 1957 to 1971; in 1978, he wrote Two Centuries of Federal Information, a book about the history of information science in the federal government that manages to edit the CIA out almost completely. One of the CIA projects mentioned in Clapp’s notes was the “Mo. Russ. Acc. List”—the Monthly List of Russian Accessions, begun in 1951.

26. Cold War mania: The CIA’s “Intellofax” aperture-card system was described in 1961: “The classified documents are received from scores of different major sources….Since 1954 we have been miniaturizing the documents by microphotography and mounting them in apertures on IBM punched cards. Access to the document itself is indirect, through codes punched into the cards to indicate subject, area, source, security classification, date and number of each document.” Senate Committee on Government Operations, Documentation, Indexing, and Retrieval of Scientific Information, 86th Cong. 2d sess., Document no. 113 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 63–64; quoted in Robert M. Hayes and Joseph Becker, Information Storage and Retrieval: Tools, Elements, Theories (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 168.

27. BEST COPY AVAILABLE: The CIA’s cover letter to me says: “We apologize for the poor quality of these pages, but there are no better copies available.” According to C. P. Auger, other formulas are: “Reproduced from the best available copy” and “Copy available does not permit fully legible reproduction” and “This document has been reproduced from the best available copy furnished by the sponsoring agency. Although it is recognized that certain portions are illegible, it is being released in the interest of making available as much information as possible.” C. P. Auger, “The Importance of Microforms,” Microform Review 20:4 (fall 1991), reprinted from Information Sources in Grey Literature, 2d ed. (New York: Bowker-Saur, 1989).

28. AMERICA’S SPACE PROGRAM: Microform Review 5:3 (July 1976). Another Xerox/UMI ad, which ran in the January 1975 issue (4:1) of Microform Review, is headlined “The Beast and the Librarian.” It tells the story of a librarian who adopted a serials collection that began to multiply and turned into “seemingly uncontrollable beasts”: “As the swelling menagerie usurped more space, the librarian realized how many thousands of dollars the animals devoured — just sitting on the shelves….The librarian was in distress, about to be swallowed up by the paper monster, when who should come to the rescue but MIGHTY MICROFILM!” In 1984, University Microfilms produced an ad headlined space invaders: “Nobody knows where they came from. But suddenly, they were everywhere. In the stacks. In the aisles. And now, even advancing on the lobby” (Microform Review 13:4 [spring 1984]). Eugene Power, founder of University Microfilms, sold the company to Xerox in 1962; in 1983, Xerox bought Microfilm Corporation of America from The New York Times and merged it with UMI; and then in 1985, Bell and Howell bought UMI from Xerox and in 1999 renamed it Bell and Howell Information and Learning. See Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”

29. “files of American and foreign newspapers”: William Warner Bishop, “Thirty Years in the Library of Congress, 1899 to 1929,” in Essays Offered to Herbert Putnam by His Colleagues and Friends on His Thirtieth Anniversary as Librarian of Congress, 5 April 1929, ed. William Warner Bishop and Andrew Keogh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), quoted in Paul M. Angle, The Library of Congress: An Account, Historical and Descriptive (Kingsport, Tenn.: Kingsport Press, 1958), p. 53.

30. “badly congested condition”: Serials Division, Library of Congress, “Serials Division Report, 1949–1950” in Annual Reports, Reference Department, t.s., Library of Congress Manuscripts Division. Each department head submitted an annual report to the librarian of Congress; they are internal documents, not to be confused with the library’s published annual reports, which are beautifully produced books. In the published annual reports, the decision to buy microfilm copies of newspapers from external sources (e.g., Recordak), and to give away or throw away the bound originals in order to conserve space, is not mentioned.

31. “merely more of the same”: Verner Clapp, foreword to J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

32. steady space model: Also known as the “static-capacity” model. Ann Okerson, once head of the Serials Division at Simon Fraser University Library, Burnaby, British Columbia (now a big gun in digitalism at Yale), wrote in 1985: “In anticipation of the space problem, the chief librarian had earlier proposed a ‘steady space’ policy which undertook to contain the Library’s collections within the existing building until the year 2000 by various means, including microfilm alternatives to hardcopy, resource sharing, using online facilities, moving to high-density shelving for lower-use research materials, and weeding/discard.” Okerson’s library sold some of its more valuable backfiles to a dealer in Scarsdale, or swapped them for microfilm, an arrangement that “turned out to be very fruitful for the library.” Ann Okerson, “Microform Conversion — A Case Study,” Microform Review 14:3 (summer 1985). In the early nineties, Okerson advised William Bowen, president of the A. W. Mellon Foundation, as the Foundation planned its ambitious assault on paper. See Anthony M. Cummings et al., University Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Research Libraries, November 1992, www.lib.virginia.edu/mellon/mellon.htm.

33. “It is an art”: Clapp, “Good Beginning.”

34. “permitting the disposal”: Marley, “Newspapers and the Library of Congress,” in Veaner, pp. 429, 436n.

35. None of this epochal activity: The closest the library came at the time to publicly revealing what was afoot was the statement that “since 1939 the Library has been engaged in preserving its newspaper files by transferring them to microfilm,” in a section describing the microfilming of foreign archives. Library of Congress, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1952 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), p. 62. Luther Evans makes no reference to the decision to substitute microfilm (in-house or bought) for the library’s originals in his “Current Microfilm Projects at the Library of Congress,” Das Antiquariat (Vienna) 8 (August 15, 1952).

36. “The problem of deteriorating newspapers”: Library of Congress, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1956 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), p. 25.

37. naval warehouse: In 1972, the library moved “some 50,000 volumes of bound domestic newspapers, which are gradually being microfilmed,” to the Duke Street warehouse, “to provide space for the expansion of the overcrowded general collections.” Bound foreign newspapers were stored in Alexandria beginning in 1968. Library of Congress, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1972 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 36.

38. in its Information Bulletin: E.g., “From commercial sources, major titles being acquired on film to replace the Library’s holdings include the Portland, Maine, Press Herald for January 1940–December 1944 and January 1947–May 1950, the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat and Chronicle, 1905–June 1955 [my hometown paper], the Concord, N.H., Daily Monitor, 1874–1923, the Leavenworth, Kans., Times, April 25, 1871–1950, the Topeka, Kans., Daily Capitol, 1890–June 1950, the Dallas, Texas, Morning News, 1900–April 1950, the Portland, Oreg., Daily Journal, March 11, 1902–1936, and the Milwaukee, Wis., Journal, 1891–1909 and 1921–August 1950.” “Serial Division,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:2 (January 9, 1976). Six months later, there were new titles: “Major domestic titles being filmed at the Library during the past half year are the Sioux City (Iowa) Journal for 1871–1874 and 1894–1950, the New York City Jewish Journal and Daily News for 1910–1915 and 1929–March 1953 (films for 1916–1928 are already available), the Portland (Oreg.) Oregonian for July 1874–December 1945, and as a cooperative project with the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Baltimore (Md.) Post for November 20, 1922–March 24, 1934.” The list continues: “From commercial sources, major titles being acquired on film to replace the Library’s holdings included the New Orleans (La.) Item for 1920–1958, and the States for January 1916–August 1933, the Lewiston (Maine) Evening Journal for 1880–1955, the Topeka (Kans.) State Journal for 1880–June 1934, the Philadelphia (Pa.) Record for 1877–August 1910, the Las Vegas (Nev.) Sun for 1951–1961, the San Francisco (Calif.) Daily Alta California for 1859–1891, the Norfolk (Va.) Virginian-Pilot for 1945–May 1955, and the Nashville (Tenn.) American for 1853–September 1910.” “Newspaper Preservation Program,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:28 (July 9, 1976).

39. “Wood pulp paper” here just seems: It isn’t true, of course, that newsprint suddenly became composed of wood pulp in 1870—paper manufacturers used some percentage of rag and straw for decades afterward, and they mixed chemically digested wood and mechanically ground wood together — but it is an appealing simplification if you want to clear shelf space. The Albany Argus of March 19, 1872, for example, contained “fifteen per cent. chemical woodpulp in addition to fifteen rag and seventy straw.” Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, p. 102.

40. detailed inventory: Library of Congress, “19th and 20th Century U.S. Newspapers in Original Format: Inventory of Volumes Held in Remote Storage,” 1998, www.loc.gov/rr/news/inventor.htm.

41. ALL ON FILM: One of the cards for the Chicago Daily Tribune confides: “Vols. For 1900–1971 have been discarded.”

42. “Generally we retain the inkprint”: See also “Collections Policy Statements: U.S. Newspapers,” November 1996, on the library’s website, lcweb.loc.gov/acq/devpol/neu.htm (viewed June 2, 2000): “The preferred format for permanent retention is silver-gelatin-on-polyester-base 35mm roll microfilm….newspapers published prior to 1870 on ‘rag’ paper may be retained in original ink-print format if they have artifactual value.”

43. rag-paper library editions: These titles are listed in the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1938 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), p. 193. See also Library of Congress, Serials Division, Holdings of American Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Newspapers Printed on Wood Pulp Paper, mimeograph, May 1950, in which a note below the listing for The Detroit News says: “Commencing July 8, 1929, the Library of Congress file of this title is printed on rag paper.” The library owns no issues of The Detroit News now. Incidentally, in the 1941 annual report, the library announced its receipt of a gift of 221 volumes of the New York Forward, 1901–1927: “This extensive file of the early years of this important Jewish paper was received by gift from the Jewish Daily Forward, of New York. It supplements the later years of the file already on our shelves.” All but a handful of these gift volumes are gone, according to the library’s 1998 online inventory.

44. “Microfilming came at a propitious time”: Charles G. La Hood, Jr., “Microfilm for the Library of Congress,” College and Research Libraries, July 1973. La Hood writes: “Normally, the Library requires the supplier [of newspaper microfilm] to furnish sample rolls of each file for quality-control testing before ordering, so that the pulp files are not destroyed prematurely.”

45. “crisis of space”: Library of Congress, Working Group on Reference and Research, Report to the Task Group on Shelving Arrangement (July 8, 1997, updated October 30, 1997), p. 2.

46. James Billington: At the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, a quasi-professorial group under the direction of historian Sherman Kent, Billington wrote research reports, known as intelligence estimates, for President Eisenhower and other advisers. Richard Nixon, who as vice president paid close attention to intelligence briefings, became an admirer: “James Billington is, of course — you mention intellectuals. Now, there’s an intellectual — just to show you I have an open mind — who everybody ought to know better. He has a first-class geopolitical mind. He particularly is expert in Soviet affairs. I’d like to see him sometime — I‘d like to see him ambassador to Russia. I think he would be a great ambassador” (Richard Nixon interview with Brian Lamb, part 2, Booknotes, C-SPAN, March 1, 1992). In 1956, while the CIA’s MKULTRA drug experiments on unwitting Canadians were in full swing (formally approved by Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953), and not so long after the CIA’s 1954 paramilitary invasion of Guatemala (micro-managed by Dulles), James Billington toured the intelligence capitals of the world as Dulles’s personal assistant. See Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), pp. 393, 429; and James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999), pp. 489–92. Dulles had “this ability to make quite cold-blooded assessments while remaining warm and gracious that was quite remarkable,” Billington told Srodes. “People talk about the Cold War frenzy, but I admit I slept better after that trip knowing that some of these plans never got off the ground.” The Library of Congress doesn’t make too much of Billington’s CIA years now; a website biography of him skips past that time: “A graduate of Princeton University, he attended Oxford University’s Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate in history. At Harvard University from 1957 to 1962, he taught history and was a research fellow at the Russian Research Center” (Library of Congress, “James H. Billington,” www.loc.gov/bicentennial/bios_billington.htm). But as late as 1959, while he was employed by Harvard’s Russian Research Center, Billington apparently still had a consulting relationship of some kind with the agency: he wrote a CIA memorandum entitled “Sino-Soviet Relationship,” dated September 18, 1959; it is footnoted in a paper published in the CIA’s in-house historical journal, Studies in Intelligence. See Harold P. Ford, “The CIA and Double Demonology,” Studies in Intelligence, winter 1998–1999, www.odci.gov/csi/studies/winter98–99/art05.htm (viewed August 22, 2000). For the relationship between the CIA and Harvard’s Russian Research Center, see Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

CHAPTER 4 — It Can Be Brutal

1. Richmond, Virginia, Daily Dispatch: The yellow address label reads:

A R Spofford 12mch80

Librarian of Congress

2. what looks to be a butcher’s apron: Gene Gurney and Nick Apple, The Library of Congress: A Picture Story of the World’s Largest Library (New York: Crown, 1981), p. 113.

3. Joseph Mitchell: See Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 139.

4. “The anarchist”: New York World-Telegram, February 2, 1934, p. 1.

5. “people rarely browse”: E. E. Duncan, “Microfiche Collections for the New York Times/Information Bank,” Microform Review, October 1973.

6. “blind as lovers”: Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 440.

7. the research was subsidized: Bourdon W. Scribner, “Summary Report of Research at the National Bureau of Standards on Materials for the Reproduction of Records,” in Transactions, International Federation for Documentation, vol. 1, fourteenth conference (Oxford, 1938).

8. “cellulose acetate motion-picture film”: John R. Hill and Charles G. Weber, “Stability of Motion-Picture Films as Determined by Accelerated Aging,” Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards 17 (December 1936).

9. “in the same category of permanence”: Quoted in Kuhlman, “Are We Ready to Preserve Newspapers on Films?” in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 385.

10. shrink, buckle, bubble: See Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.” Bourke writes: “Libraries with extensive collections of older silver gelatin and diazo microforms should realize that much of this may be at risk.” According to Preservation Resources, a top-of-the-line modern microfilming company, “the only solution is reduplication onto polyester films before the acetate film becomes so deteriorated that it compromises the legibility of the film image. If left for too long, even duplication becomes impossible.” Preservation Resources, “Preserving Microfilm,” www.oclc.org/oclc/promo/presres/9138.htm (viewed September 13, 2000).

11. “dreaded vinegar syndrome”: Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.”

12. by the mid-eighties: “NYPL did not abandon the use of cellulose acetate until about 1983 with the inception of the Research Libraries Group Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project, which mandated the use of polyester base for all silver gelatin film made by the participants in the project.” Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.”

13. Corona spy satellites: “One serious problem was unanticipated breakage of the acetate film,” according to F. Dow Smith, but “new polyester-based film from Eastman Kodak increased the reliability considerably.” F. Dow Smith, “The Design and Engineering of Corona’s Optics,” in Corona: Between the Sun and the Earth, ed. Robert A. McDonald (Bethesda, Md.: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1997). In an article about the Corona project, Seth Shulman writes: “Help finally arrived when a research team at Eastman Kodak discovered how to adhere emulsion to a polyester-based film, which proved much more durable under harsh conditions.” Seth Shulman, “Code Name Corona,” Technology Review, October 1996.

14. Millions of rolls of acetate images: It wasn’t cheap to produce that acetate: “From 1952 through 1966, the Library spent well over $1,000,000 putting 150,000 brittle books on microfilm.” John P. Baker, “Preservation Programs of the New York Public Library. Part Two: From the 1930s to the ‘60s,” Microform Review 11:1 (winter 1982). Bourke sums up the New York Public Library’s predicament: “The physical condition of many reels of silver gelatin film on cellulose actate base at NYPL is not good.” Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.”

15. strange spots: Lawson B. Knott, Jr., “Aging Blemishes on Microfilm Negatives,” General Services Administration Circular, no. 326, January 21, 1964. See also Ellen McCrady, “The History of Microfilm Blemishes,” Restaurator 6 (1984). McCrady observes that microfilm’s fineness of grain causes problems: “Silver, normally a stable material, becomes more reactive when finely divided. As a result, silver halide microfilm is more strongly affected by processing, humidity and various oxidizing gases and contaminants than many other types of film.”

16. “attacked metal filing cabinets”: Susan Cates Dodson, “Microfilm — Which Film Type, Which Application?” Microform Review 14:2 (spring 1985).

17. “complete image loss”: Carl M. Spaulding, “Kicking the Silver Habit: Confessions of a Former Addict,” American Libraries, December 1978.

18. Dodson measured the temperature: She also quotes Peter Adelstein of Kodak: “Examples of image loss have been observed after short exposures to 150°….The essential fact to keep in mind about vesicular film stability in that even very short exposure times to elevated temperatures will destroy the image.” Peter Z. Adelstein, “Preservation of Microfilm,” Journal of Micrographics 11:6 (July/August 1978), quoted in Dodson, “Microfilm — Which Film Type.”

19. serious light-damage: Mark Jones, Fading of Diazo Microfilms in Readers, NRCd Publication 10 (Hatfield, England: NRCd, 1978), cited in Dodson, “Microfilm — Which Film Type.”

20. certain species of fungi: Aspergillus, penicilium, alternaria, and cladosporium, for example, can grow in the gelatin emulsion of film. See E. Czerwinska and R. Kowalik, “Microbiodeterioration of Audiovisual Collections,” Restaurator 3 (1979).

21. easily scratched: “Silver film is easily scratched and abraded. Small foreign particles and the sharp edge of a poorly designed or out-of-adjustment reading machine will both gouge away the thin, soft gelatin emulsion as roll film is wound back and forth in use. In the main, this type of damage happens to such frequently used film as recent years of major newspapers; but a pristine roll of film can be badly scratched in a single use, particularly in the hands of an unskilled person.” Spaulding, “Kicking the Silver Habit.”

22. “extreme susceptibility”: Spaulding, “Kicking the Silver Habit.” See also Philippe Rouyer, “Humidity Control and the Preservation of Silver Gelatin Microfilm,” Microform Review 21:2 (1992); and Peter Adelstein, “Status of Permanence Standards of Imaging Materials,” Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 36:1 (January/February 1992).

23. check of master negatives: Erich J. Kesse, “Condition Survey of Master Microfilm Negatives, University of Florida Libraries,” Abbey Newsletter 15:3 (May 1991), palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/abbey/an/an15/an15-3/an15-313.htm. Kesse writes, “Mold was the primary or partial cause of deterioration of 64 % of cases.” And the master negatives weren’t always master negatives: “Further examination of the entire master negative collection revealed a distressing fact. 12 % of master negatives were acetate- and polyester-based diazo copies. Another 40 % of the masters, while silver-gelatin emulsion, were not first generation film.” Some of the damage that Kesse describes sounds relatively minor; on the other hand, a bit of foxing that might on paper obscure a single letter may blot out a portion of a paragraph on film.

24. “there seems to be a much wider”: James M. Reilly, et al., “Stability of Black-and-White Photographic Images, with Special Reference to Microfilm,” Abbey Newsletter 12:5 (July 1988).

25. original draft: The draft title was “Are Your Microfilms Deteriorating Nicely, Librarian?” Clapp papers, Library of Congress. In 1957, Clapp correctly wrote that microfilm’s “dangers of deterioration are even greater” than those of paper, because they are “less easily detectible and more devastating.” Council on Library Resources, First Annual Report, 1957, p. 20. In the next year’s report, he writes that “though microfilm is widely used to provide a permanent copy in place of the impermanent original form of the newspaper, it has been found that microcopies are themselves subject to deterioration. This is all the more dangerous for being much less easily detected” (p. 25). Eventually, though, Clapp stopped talking about the dangers of microfilm deterioration and stressed the dangers of paper deterioration instead.

26. “excessive residual hypo”: Robert C. Sullivan, “The Acquisition of Library Microforms: Part 2,” Microform Review 6:4 (July 1977), p. 210.

27. “in more than 50 percent”: Sullivan, “Acquisition,” p. 210. In fiscal year 1972, for example, 589 units were tested, and 356 were rejected; in fiscal year 1976, 639 units were tested, and 266 were rejected. “It must be emphasized,” Sullivan writes, “that rejection by the laboratory does not necessarily mean rejection for addition to the Library’s collections. In fact, since the majority of microform units purchased for the Library are 35mm microfilm reels of newspaper files, and many of these are non-current files dating back fifty to one hundred years or more, many of the ‘Rejections’ noted by the laboratory are for reasons such as loss of text due to uncut bindings, original damaged or mutilated, leader and/or trailer insufficient, or incompleteness. If, after consultation with the Recommending Officer, it is determined that the best or only file available was filmed, then the decision may be made to accept the film.” Sullivan offers some reassurance, however, saying that the lab’s recommendation to reject film is accepted when the flaw or combination of flaws is “considered fatal, such as excessive hypo content, pagination inverse, splice in positive film, non-silver emulsion film stock, or lack of clarity or readability.” Buying flawed film is not in itself an act of irresponsibility; buying flawed film to replace originals is.

28. trance-inducing job: In the mid-sixties, the Library of Congress’s Photoduplication Service, including the Newspaper Camera Room, had a “high rate of staff turnover, exceeding 40 percent overall, with correspondingly increased difficulty in recruiting qualified replacements.” Library of Congress, “Administrative Department — Office of Collections Maintenance and Preservation,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 25:41 (October 13, 1966).

29. “invisible product”: Allen B. Veaner, “Crisis in Micropublication,” Choice, June 1968, pp. 448–53.

30. “Serious defects”: Veaner, “Crisis in Micropublication.” Carl Spaulding, in “Kicking the Silver Habit,” says that “few libraries test their silver film acquisitions, few know for sure whether those micropublications have been processed according to archival standards.” Because The New York Times is heavily used, librarians discovered the problems with its filmed copies, beginning in September 1967, almost immediately. There was, Veaner writes, a “precipitous drop in technical quality” after the Times bought Microfilm Corporation of America and ended its arrangement with University Microfilms; some pictures appeared as “unintelligible blotches of grey, black, and white”; “it was reliably reported that the newspaper’s research staff was unable to utilize its own product.” Eventually, the Times refilmed a stretch of months; now Bell and Howell/UMI, formerly University Microfilms, is producing the film. See Allen Veaner, “New York Times on Microfilm,” Choice, December 1968.

31. about one third of her library’s reels: Nancy Kraft, Final Report, Iowa Newspaper Project: Microfilming, State Historical Society of Iowa, 1992.

32. compelled some improvements in standards: The Kodak MRD line of microfilm cameras, whose basic design dates from the fifties and even earlier (they are no longer sold or serviced by Kodak) remain the pack mules of American newspaper work, despite the fact that there are now, and have been for at least a decade, computer-controlled camera systems that offer higher resolutions and better ways of monitoring and adjusting contrast and focus than Kodak’s cameras offer. In the late eighties, C. Lee Jones, president of MAPS (now Preservation Resources, a microfilm bureau founded by the Council on Library Resources), began evaluating a German-designed Herrmann & Kraemer camera, which offered, he told me, “resolutions that had only been dreamed about prior to that.” Within a month he was convinced that he had to “convert the whole shop to H&K cameras.” Eventually they bought twelve more. Resolution, in the microfilm world, is measured in line-pairs per millimeter. A typical frame of Kodak-shot preservation microfilm can legibly record one hundred and twenty pairs of lines per millimeter on a test-pattern “target”; Herrmann and Kraemer cameras offered resolutions forty to sixty percent better than that (higher, by the way, than the six hundred dots-per-inch resolution that is the benchmark in many current digitization projects) — a matter of considerable importance when you are shrinking large newspaper pages from the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties filled with many columns of closely printed footnote-sized type onto a fixed width of thirty-five-millimeter film. The H&K cameras also had ways of automatically correcting for variations in contrast — another endemic problem in age-toned newsprint pages. “It’s the subtle change in contrast that throws microfilmers most often,” Jones explained. “Where they may have a perfectly fine setting at the beginning of a book, it may not be worth the powder to blow it up at the end.” But the bulk of newspaper-microfilming work did not go to MAPS, but to places with less good equipment. “MAPS got very little of the U.S. Newspaper Project,” says Jones, “because those were long established procedures often done by commercial shops, and examined by people who were not really trained to evaluate the quality of film.” The NEH, which was paying the bills, demanded only that microfilming shops adhere to industry standards that, according to Jones, were written with the limitations of the Kodak camera in mind. “These were minimum standards,” Jones says. “And if you’re talking about producing preservation microfilm for the very long term future, I don’t think you can afford to adhere to minimum standards.” In 1993, Jones wrote: “To simply reformat endangered materials into a form resistant to scanning or one that complicates scanning is a serious disservice to scholars and researchers of the future.” That, however, is what has happened. C. Lee Jones, “Preservation Film: Platform for Digital Access Systems,” Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 58 (July 1993). Jones now directs the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City.

33. “NORTHAM COLONISTS HOLD MEETING”: Foster’s Weekly Democrat & Dover Enquirer, January 16, 1914.

CHAPTER 5 — The Ace Comb Effect

1. “News is selected”: G. C. Bastian, Editing the Day’s News, 1923, quoted in Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, p. 279.

2. “Papers are torn apart”: Joseph G. Herzberg, Late City Edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), p. 13.

3. “there will be many times”: James F. Green, “Problems with NYT Eds. & Indexes,” posting to Library Collection Development List, March 9, 1994.

4. Chicago Sun-Times published a story: The article, by Peter Lisagor, appeared in the Sun-Times on September 17, 1970. See Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 226–27. Some of what Nixon said was quoted by Henry Brandon in The Retreat of American Power (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), p. 134; Kimball would like to see it all in its original form.

5. Newspapers in Microform: Various volumes (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984 and earlier).

6. Bosse: David Bosse, Civil War Newspaper Maps: A Cartobibliography of the Northern Daily Press (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).

7. “significant gaps”: For example, fourteen days were missing from the Chicago Daily Tribune for 1862 and 1863, and January 2 through April 28, 1865, were missing from the Chicago Post. Bosse, Civil War Newspaper Maps, pp. 211–12.

8. Edwina Dumm: See Lucy Shelton Caswell, “Edwina Dumm: Pioneer Woman Editorial Cartoonist, 1915–1917,” Journalism History 15 (spring 1988). In another Ace comb variation, several libraries get rid of a particular title before anyone has microfilmed it, knowing, however, that another set exists; later, the single remaining copy available for microfilming turns out to have gaps. Matthew J. Bruccoli, working on a biography of John O’Hara, wanted to study a run of the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Journal, in which O’Hara had published his earliest journalism. (O’Hara wrote a column for the Journal called “After Four O’Clock”—of which, according to Bruccoli, O’Hara was “intensely proud.”) The Journal’s own backfile had gone to the Schuylkill County Historical Society when the paper went out of business, but Bruccoli discovered that this run lacked volumes for 1924 through 1926, the period of O’Hara’s activity there. The other libraries in the area had, Bruccoli told me, donated their runs of the Journal to paper drives during the Second World War, “apparently with a certain amount of glee.” In his foreword to The O’Hara Concern (New York: Popular Library, 1977), Bruccoli writes: “The disappearance of this material resulted in the most serious hole in my research.”

CHAPTER 6 — Virgin Mummies

1. Dr. Isaiah Deck: “On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt, by Dr. Isaiah Deck, chemist, etc., New-York,” in Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New-York, for the Year 1854 (Albany: C. van Benthuysen, Printer to the Legislature, 1855), pp. 83–93.

2. 113 Nassau Street: Deck, “On a Supply of Paper Material,” p. 93. The New York Times: Elmer Davis, History of the New York Times, 1851–1921 (New York: The New York Times, 1921), illus. f.p. 74. Vanity Fair: “The staff of ‘Vanity Fair’ met on Fridays in the old editorial rooms, 113 Nassau Street, and drank, and smoked, and discussed the next issue.” Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Detroit: Gale Research, 1970), pp. 137–38, quoted in n. 63 of a biography by Dave Gross of nineteenth-century American hashish-eater and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870), nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Ludlow/THE/Biography/foot63.htm.

3. six thousand wagons: Joel Munsell, Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making (New York: Garland, 1980; facsimile of 5th ed., Albany: J. Munsell, 1876), p. 146. Munsell derived this figure from “The Rag and Paper Business,” New York Tribune, November 4, 1856, p. 3.

4. Mill women sorted: See Library of Congress, Papermaking: Art and Craft (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1968), illus. p. 67.

5. four-inch squares: “The woman stands so as to have the back of the blade opposite to her, while at her right hand on the floor is a large wooden box, with several divisions. Her business consists in examining the rags, opening the seams, removing dirt, pins, needles, and buttons of endless variety, which would be liable to injure the machinery, or damage the quality of the paper. She then cuts the rags into small pieces, not exceeding four inches square, by drawing them sharply across the edge of the knife, at the same time keeping each quality distinct in the several divisions of the box placed on her right hand. During this process, much of the dirt, sand, and so forth, passes through the wire cloth into a drawer underneath, which is occasionally cleaned out.” Richard Herring, Paper and Paper Making, Ancient and Modern, 3d ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1863), pp. 75–76.

6. cutting machine: O’Brien, Story of the Sun; Munsell, Chronology, p. 82.

7. black specks: Herring, Paper and Paper Making, p. 88. India rubber, writes Herring, “is a source of much greater annoyance to the paper maker than is readily conceived.”

8. equal to England’s and France’s combined: Munsell, Chronology, p. 144.

9. Rag imports: Munsell, Chronology, pp. 126, 138.

10. “Complaints of the price and scarcity”: Munsell, Chronology, p. 136.

11. “on account of the high price”: Munsell, Chronology, p. 136.

12. Several generations of papermakers: See Munsell, Chronology, and Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943).

13. a paper made from horseradish: Munsell, Chronology, p. 137.

14. “seem to invite us”: Quoted in Hunter, Papermaking, p. 233.

15. “reluctant to spare even a fragment”: Hunter, Papermaking, p. 286n.

16. “flames would literally spout”: Quoted in Bob Brier, Egyptian Mummies (New York: William Morrow, 1994), p. 318.

17. “locomotives of Egypt”: Mummies were bought “by the ton or by the graveyard” as locomotive fuel, Mark Twain half-skeptically noted in his 1869 book of travels, Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; or, the New Pilgrims’ Progress (New York: Hippocrene Books, n.d.; facsimile of Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1869), p. 632.

18. Punch: “Musings on Mummy-Paper,” Punch 12 (May 29, 1847), p. 224.

19. twenty-three tons: Munsell, Chronology, p. 120.

20. “fairer (Pharaoh)”: The pun is Deck’s, not mine.

21. exactly contemporary with the publication: Deck’s article is dated “March, 1855” at the end, although it appeared in the 1854 volume of the American Institute’s Transactions.

22. J. Priestly bought 1,215 bales: Munsell, Chronology, p. 142.

23. “It is within”: “The Rag and Paper Business,” New York Tribune, November 4, 1856.

24. “made from the wrappages”: “Paper from Egyptian Mummies,” Syracuse Daily Standard, August 19, 1856 (undated editorial reprinted from The Albany Journal). See also Munsell, Chronology, p. 149.

25. “into the hopper”: Munsell, Chronology, p. 198. The report appeared in an editorial in the Bunker Hill Aurora, sometime in 1866.

26. Dard Hunter was oddly hesitant: Hunter, Papermaking, pp. 287–91. Joseph Dane goes further. He believes mummy paper to be a “delusion” and a “myth,” and he has no confidence in Hunter’s sources for Syracuse, Broadalbin, and Gardiner; and he isn’t at all sure about Deck’s Swiftian proposal, either. But Dane hasn’t read Deck’s proposal, which, he says, is “untraceable”—Hunter gave no citation for it and called it a “manuscript,” which makes Dane suspicious. I traced Deck by calling the helpful librarian at the Onondaga Historical Association, Judy Haven. Joseph A. Dane, “The Curse of the Mummy Paper,” Printing History 18:2 (1995).

27. Horace Greeley: Greeley was an active member of the American Institute; he became its president in 1866. John Campbell, a paper merchant a few doors down from Dr. Deck on Nassau Street, was also a member of the Institute in 1855. I found them listed in a scarce pamphlet owned by Columbia University: Catalogue of the Life and Annual Members of the American Institute of the City of New York (New York: New York Printing Co., 1868).

28. Richard Hoe: Hoe’s specialty was high-speed presses. Without plentiful, cheap paper, publishers would be less likely to convert to faster equipment; I speculate that Hoe may have had an interest in Deck’s proposal for that reason. Hoe had served on the committee in 1852 that organized the Institute’s popular fair at Castle Garden (now Battery Park), where novelties of science and engineering were awarded prizes. Morse’s telegraph was first displayed at the 1842 fair; Walt Whitman delivered a “Song of the Exposition” to open the 1871 fair, announcing that America would build a cathedral of sacred industry that was “mightier than Egypt’s tombs.”

29. whiskey blenders: Nicolas Barker is the source of this image.

30. Hall and McChesney: Hendrix TenEyck, an executive of Hall and McChesney, was president of the American Microfilm Association when Verner Clapp gave his keynote address in 1959.

CHAPTER 7 — Already Worthless

1. “A Life-Cycle Cost Analysis”: William Richard Lemberg, Ph.D. diss., School of Library and Information Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1995, www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/publications/DigtlDoc.pdf. Michael Buckland, Lemberg’s thesis supervisor at Berkeley, writes that “one of the principal expected benefits of the move from paper-based to digital libraries is in the massive cost-savings expected to result from an expected reduction in duplication.” Michael Buckland, “Searching Multiple Digital Libraries: A Design Analysis” (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/oasis/multisrch.htm (viewed August 13, 2000).

2. “the most valuable fibre”: Munsell, Chronology. Munsell is at first unfamiliar with esparto grass, calling it “spartum,” “Exparto,” and “waterbroom”—he attributes its initial use to a Parisian stationer named Jean A. Farina, in 1852. The material “at first encountered great opposition both from proprietors and their workmen, but finally assumed vast importance as a raw material” (p. 124). In 1866, Lloyd’s Newspaper imported two hundred and sixty tons of esparto grass to London (p. 200); in 1870, there was an esparto shortage, and the price more than doubled (p. 213); in 1871, Lloyd, the newspaper publisher, owned 180,000 acres in Algeria, on which he raised his own esparto crop (p. 221); in 1872, English esparto imports had passed 130,000 tons, and Munsell writes that the Times “was printed on paper made more or less of this material, as was that of most of the other leading journals, periodicals and current publications generally” (p. 226). In its article “Paper,” the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica has a large and handsome engraving of the “Sinclair Esparto Boiler,” featuring recirculative “vomiting pipes,” and no pictures of wood-pulping equipment. See also British Paper and Board Makers’ Association, Paper Making: A General Account of Its History, Processes, and Applications (Kenley, Eng., 1950), pp. 31, 47, 101. The turn-of-the-century English book, then, is likely to have little or no wood pulp in it; American paper and English paper have different compositions and are likely to age differently.

3. Lesk: Michael Lesk, Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1997). Lemberg’s dissertation gets a paragraph on pp. 76–77.

4. “very high performance Backbone Network Service”: E.g., a 1999 National Science Foundation grant of $422,000 to Harvard for a “High-Performance Internet Connection” connecting Harvard to NYNEX and the NSF’s vBNS, in order to support scientific projects and “Digital Library Applications.” Of course Harvard should have high-speed Internet connections, if it needs them, but the federal government shouldn’t be paying for them, and the money shouldn’t come bundled in a plan to destroy traditional libraries.

5. routinely prepare for digitization: At a 1998 conference sponsored by the Research Libraries Group and Great Britain’s National Preservation Office, John E. McIntyre, head of preservation of the National Library of Scotland, discussed the results of an informal survey of digitization practices in a paper called “Protecting the Physical Form.” He wrote: “Returns from the Preparation Group’s questionnaire suggest that disbinding in order to scan a volume is common, in most cases so that a flat bed scanner can be used.” John E. McIntyre, “Protecting the Physical Form,” in Guidelines for Digital Imaging, Joint RLG and NPO Preservation Conference, 1998, www.rlg.org/preserv/joint/mcintyre.htm.

6. “knowing that the original will be disbound”: Carla Montori, “Re: electronic/paper format & weeding,” PADG (Preservation Administrators Discussion Group), December 15, 1997, archived on the CoOL (Conservation OnLine) website, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/12/msg00011.htm (viewed September 29, 2000).

7. Making of America: Michigan’s Making of America books are to be found at moa.umdl.umich.edu.

8. “It is substantially cheaper”: Michael Lesk, “Substituting Images for Books: The Economics for Libraries,” Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (symposium), Las Vegas, April 1996, www.lesk.com/mlesk/unlv/unlv.htm (viewed September 19, 2000).

9. “avaricious in [their] consumption”: William G. Bowen, “JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Communication,” the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, October 4, 1995, www.mellon.org/jsesc.htm. JSTOR’s webpage background document states that the “basic idea” behind Bowen’s JSTOR “was to convert the back issues of paper journals into electronic formats that would allow savings in space (and in capital costs associated with that space) while simultaneously improving access to the journal content.” JSTOR, Background, www.umich.edu./~jstor/about/background.htm (1996) (viewed September 15, 2000). A recent JSTOR brochure entitled “Electronic Archives of Core Mathematics Journals” says: “By making the complete runs of important journal backfiles available and searchable over the World Wide Web, JSTOR not only provides new research possibilities, it also helps librarians reduce longterm costs associated with storing these materials.”

10. survey conducted by JSTOR: JSTOR, Bound Volume Survey, April 3, 2000, www.jstor.org/about/bvs.htm (viewed September 19, 2000).

11. “modem life”: “The third class of tendencies is easily identifiable with those impulses to disinterested benevolence which are so prominent in modern [OCR’d as modem] life.” Henry Rutgers Marshall, “Emotions versus Pleasure-Pain,” Mind, n.s. 4:14. (April 1895): 180–94. I also got multiple hits for “modemist” and “modemism,” none having to do with data-communications.

CHAPTER 8 — A Chance to Begin Again

1. “application of the camera”: Raney, “Introduction,” in Microphotography for Libraries, p. v.

2. “a couple of curious librarians”: M. Llewellyn Raney, “A Capital Truancy,” The Journal of Documentary Reproduction 3:2 (June 1940). Possibly Keyes Metcalf was there, and the scout was probably from the Rockefeller Foundation; Charles Z. Case of Recordak helped out with the cost analysis.

3. “Every research library would”: Fremont Rider (writing anonymously), “Microtext in the Management of Book Collections: A Symposium,” College and Research Libraries, July 1953, reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 206. Rider presented this proposal anonymously here, but in other settings he repeated it almost word for word under his own name.

4. James T. Babb: In the 1952–1953 annual report of the Yale University library, Babb announced that “our shelves are weighted down with many books and periodicals that we easily could do without.” In the past, he said, Yale was “ambitious to be a library of record; that is, have one copy of every book of any importance.” This was “a highly questionable ambition,” Babb believed; and it was time to undo what his forebears had done. He proposed, and the Yale Corporation approved, a “drastic” plan to “1. Decatalogue and discard material which is considered to have no further scholarly value,” and “2. Purchase or reproduce with our own equipment, in microtext form other books and periodicals, the original then being discarded.” James T. Babb, Report, 1952–1953, quoted in John H. Ottemiller, “The Selective Book Retirement Program at Yale,” Yale University Library Gazette 34:2 (October 1959).

5. “Roses, jasmine”: Fremont Rider, And Master of None: An Autobiography in the Third Person (Middletown, Conn.: Godfrey Memorial Library, 1955), p. 46.

6. “converted to psychism”: Fremont Rider, Are the Dead Alive? (New York: B. W. Dodge, 1909). Theodore Dreiser supplied the book’s title; David Belasco based a play on it called “The Return of Peter Grimm.”

7. “They are thoroughly disgusted”: Fremont Rider (writing as Alfred Wayland), Are Our Banks Betraying Us (New York: Anvil Press, 1932), quoted in Rider, And Master of None, p. 98.

8. “astonishing flood”: Rider, And Master of None, p. 99.

9. “You are right!”: Roosevelt’s letter (typewritten except for the last two sentences) reads: “Dear Mr. Rider: Thank you ever so much for your very nice letter and the pamphlet which you sent me. I have been much interested in reading it. You are right! Keep it up— Very sincerely yours, Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The letter is dated “At Warm Springs, Georgia, May 6, 1932.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Fremont Rider, Fremont Rider papers, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. (Suzy Taraba, Wesleyan’s university archivist and head of special collections, located it and sent me a copy.) Roosevelt gave his nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

10. He began a system: Rider, And Master of None, p. 152: “Wholesale methods of disposition do not bring the highest possible prices; but they enabled Wesleyan to dispose of its discards at very small handling cost”; after buying fifty thousand volumes and selling off thirty thousand, Rider was pleased to discover that “the additions to the Library actually cost it nothing.”

11. “mathematical fact”: Fremont Rider, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library (New York: Hadham Press, 1944), p. 8.

12. “natural law”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 16.

13. “veritable tidal wave”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 13.

14. “It is a problem”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 13.

15. “We absolutely must”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 13. Rider’s book predated by a year Vannevar Bush’s famous article in the Atlantic Monthly, “As We May Think” (July 1945), which envisioned a scholar’s workstation holding thousands of books on microfilm.

16. later students of library progress: Robert E. Molyneux, “What Did Rider Do? An Inquiry into the Methodology of Fremont Rider’s The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library,” Libraries and Culture 29:1 (summer 1994); and Steven Leach, “The Growth Rates of Major Academic Libraries: Rider and Purdue Reviewed,” College and Research Libraries, November 1976. Leach writes: “The Rider hypothesis cannot be used reliably to project library growth”; after reaching three million volumes, “an individual library can anticipate a deceleration in its rate of collection growth.” On the other hand, Leach confirms “Rider’s fundamental perception that library growth would become an increasingly perplexing problem for university libraries.” Molyneux finds “serious flaws in Rider’s analysis” and argues that Rider’s law of exponential doubling “resulted from a miscalculation which was either not caught in the subsequent versions of these tables or caught and not reported.” It is “troubling,” writes Molyneux, that “Rider’s analysis escaped criticism and was cited approvingly for so many years, especially given the fact that the theory so obviously contradicted common experience.”

17. “tacit confession of past failure”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 56.

18. “new expenses and fresh problems”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 57.

19. “gratifyingly close”: Fremont Rider, “Microcards vs. the Cost of Book Storage,” American Documentation 2:1 (January 1951), reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing. See also p. 203, where Rider (anonymously) says that the storage cost would come “gratifyingly close to 99 %,” and Rider, The Scholar, pp. 101–2. Rider had no qualms about clearing out existing card catalogs; his paper “The Possibility of Discarding the Card Catalog” appeared in Library Quarterly in July 1938.

20. “micro-reading machines”: Fremont Rider, “Author’s Statement,” in Keyes Metcalf et al., “The Promise of Microprint: A Symposium Based on The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library,” College and Research Libraries, March 1945.

21. Microcard Foundation: Rider, And Master of None, pp. 204–5; Martin Jamison, “The Microcard: Fremont Rider’s Precomputer Revolution,” in Libraries and Culture 23:1 (winter 1988).

22. Atomic Energy Commission: See Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information, p. 47. The Department of Defense and the weather bureau were also users of Microcards: Rider, And Master of None, p. 205.

23. “produces heat which”: J. S. Parsonage, “The ‘Scholar’ and After: A Study of the Development of the Microcard,” Library Association Record, November 1949, reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing.

24. conventional microfilm: Microcards are hard on the eyes, but Readex Microprint, another opaque system that relies on reflected light, is worse, in my experience.

25. 1,600 Microcard-viewing machines: Jamison, “The Microcard.” In his autobiography, Rider claims that there were three thousand reading machines in use, but he often exaggerated. Rider, And Master of None, p. 205.

26. “To any one who has New England blood”: Rider, And Master of None, p. 112.

27. “All that we have to do”: Rider, The Scholar, p. 115.

28. “required reading”: Metcalf et al., “The Promise of Microprint.”

29. “it is difficult”: Edward G. Freehafer, in Metcalf et al., “The Promise of Microprint.” In the same symposium, Donald Coney of the University of Texas wrote: “Mr. Rider’s proposal for the transfer of books to micro-cards is a genuinely epochal idea. If widely adopted, it would mark the first significant change in books since the substitution of the codex for the roll.”

30. page full of praise: Rider, And Master of None, p. 202.

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

1. Rider’s friend and ally: Rider wrote a letter of support endorsing Clapp for the position of librarian of Congress. Betty Milum, “Eisenhower, ALA, and the Selection of L. Quincy Mumford,” Libraries and Culture 30:1 (winter 1995), n. 16. Clapp’s diary records a breakfast with Rider (July 13, 1951) and a request from the Microcard Foundation to borrow material from the Library of Congress for copying (March 16, 1951). Verner Clapp papers, Library of Congress. Both Rider and Clapp were frustrated inventors — Rider developed the Wesleyan book truck (“astonishingly practical,” he said in his autobiography), and he had “revolutionary” ideas for vertical-takeoff-and-landing propellers; Clapp became caught up in the inventions that the Council on Library Resources was paying for.

2. “full cropping”: On books that had “inordinately wide margins and no more than nominal value,” Rider had his staff “trim a wide slice off all three edges of the book, covers and all….Our theory in treating them thus roughly is that it is expensive enough to store the texts of such materials: and that we have no very good reason to store forever a lot of accompanying waste paper” (Compact Book Storage [New York: Hadham Press, 1949], p. 60). Henry Petroski discusses (without, perhaps, the requisite incredulity) Rider’s related attempts to store Wesleyan’s books with their fore-edges down and their titles and call numbers hand-lettered on their cleanly guillotined bottom edges; Petroski says that “overall [Rider’s] analyses were sound and truly space-saving, even if a bit extreme and labor intensive.” Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). On the jacket of Compact Book Storage, Rider prints blurbs from prominent librarians: Luther Evans at the Library of Congress was, predictably, “very much impressed” by the book’s recommendations: “I entertain the serious possibility that we may adopt some of them.” Harvard’s Keyes Metcalf wrote, “We have been doing thinking along the same lines”; Yale’s James T. Babb said the book was “tremendously interesting.”

3. Wildlife Disease: See “Scientific Journal in Microfilm — An Experiment in Publishing,” Library Journal, April 1, 1959.

4. “The Problem of Size”: Council on Library Resources, Third Annual Report (1959), pp. 11ff. In 1961, Clapp wrote: “One of the most obvious advantages to be obtained by libraries from microcopying is in saving of storage space, but the cost of microcopying is so great as rarely to justify its use for space-saving alone. Additional justification is required, such as saving of binding costs, preservation against deterioration, ease of duplication, or adaptation to mechanized duplicating or information storage-and-retrieval devices.” Council on Library Resources, Fifth Annual Report (1961), p. 23.

5. “baloney, baloney”: Kathleen Molz, “Interview of Verner Clapp, Council on Library Resources, Inc. by Kathleen Molz, editor, Wilson Library Bulletin,” p. 17, Verner Clapp papers, Library of Congress. Later published as Kathleen Molz, “Interview with Verner Clapp,” Wilson Library Bulletin 40:2 (1965). In this version, Clapp refers to the gap between scientists and humanists as “a bunch of sheer baloney.”

6. “After numerous inquiries”: Verner Clapp, “The Library: The Great Potential in Our Society?” Keynote address at the second annual Congress for Librarians, St. John’s University, Jamaica, N.Y., February 22, 1960, Wilson Library Bulletin, December 1960.

7. “The world’s population”: Council on Library Resources, Third Annual Report (1959).

8. “Massive dissemination”: Verner Clapp, The Future of the Research Library (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), p. 30.

9. “the storage library would”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 25.

10. “lesser-used books”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 25.

11. “loved gadgets”: Deanna B. Marcum, “Reclaiming the Research Library: The Founding of the Council on Library Resources,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996).

12. “solutions to the problems”: Council on Library Resources, First Annual Report (1957).

13. Warren Weaver: Weaver was a guiding spirit at the Rand Corporation; at an early Rand gathering in June 1948, doing his best to recruit the finest war talent available, he said that Rand would occupy itself with problems of “military worth,” investigating “to what extent it is possible to have useful quantitative indices for a gadget, a tactic or a strategy, so that one can compare it with available alternatives and guide decisions by analysis.” Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 72. See also Erik Peter Rau, “Combat Scientists: The Emergence of Operations Research in the United States during World War II,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999; Rau mentions, for example, Weaver’s hope of recruiting architects, civil engineers, and construction engineers to aid the mathematical study of “aerial bombardment,” p. 330.

14. “fire control”: See Warren Weaver, Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), pp. 77ff.

15. Philip Morse: Morse’s autobiography is In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977). In 1946, Morse and another “polemologist” (warfare scientist; their coinage, from the Greek polemos, warfare) published a classified textbook covering damage coefficients, lethal areas, train bombardment, and gunnery statistics, but even then Morse was already thinking about using the same quantitative techniques to assist in urban planning. Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research (Washington, D.C.: Operations Evaluation Group, U.S. Navy, 1946).

16. Morse wanted to computerize: Morse mentions a decision to move some books to the basement of the science library: “If circulation had been computerized at the time, the move could have been planned with greater knowledge of expected results, and also a wider variety of possible actions would have been available to choose from.” Philip M. Morse, Library Effectiveness: A Systems Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), p. 166.

17. “cannot now be operated”: Morse, Library Effectiveness, p. 1. “Books are still the most convenient packages of information, but this may no longer be true in the future,” Morse writes (p. 186).

18. secret OR analysis: “The broad purpose of Project AC-92 is the determination of optimum tactics for use in the employment of very heavy bombers in operations against Japan.” Merrill M. Flood, Aerial Bombing Tactics: General Considerations (A World War II Study) (Santa Monica: Rand, 1952).

19. “poison gas”: Flood, Aerial Bombing Tactics, p. 6. Flood was also one of the inventors of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game-theoretic thought-experiment in which two criminals decide independently whether each will inform on the other. See William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

20. “very major steps”: Merrill M. Flood, “New Operations Research Potentials,” Operations Research 10:4 (July — August 1962): 436.

21. “many of the decisions normally”: Flood, “New Operations Research Potentials,” p. 429.

22. Verner Clapp hired Flood: I say “Clapp hired” because Clapp made all the decisions: “the choice of projects to be funded were,” in the early years of the Council on Library Resources, “very much Clapp’s.” William Joseph Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader and Change Agent in the Preservation of Library Materials,” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1986, p. 70.

23. Gilbert W. King: Gilbert W. King et al., Automation and the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1963). King was a follower of Warren Weaver and Philip Morse; “Operations research is meaningless unless it gets results quickly,” he wrote in a paper on probabilistic techniques. Gilbert King, “The Monte Carlo Method as a Natural Mode of Expression in Operations Research,” Journal of the Operations Research Society of America 1:2 (February 1953). King worked on projects for the Office of Naval Research, and he developed a translation machine at International Telemeter and IBM before moving to Itek. The others who worked on the King Report, as it came to be known, were: Harold P. Edmundson (of Planning Research Corporation, a Rand spin-off with large military and CIA contracts), Merrill M. Flood (formerly of Rand and later of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, a center that sponsored research in psychopharmacology and computer networks under the direction of wartime OSS psychologist James Grier Miller), Manfred Kochen (also of Rand and then of the Mental Health Research Institute; Kochen did the math behind the idea of “six degrees of separation”), Richard L. Libby (Air Force intelligence), Don R. Swanson (who worked at defense-and-intelligence contractor Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, soon to become TRW, and who eventually took charge of the library school at the University of Chicago); and Alexander Wylly, who had studied tank logistics for Planning Research Corporation in 1956.

24. Itek Corporation: Itek’s role in the CIA’s Corona satellite program is covered in Smith, “Design and Engineering of Corona’s Optics”; and in Shulman, “Code Name Corona.”

25. ex-CIA paramilitarist: Frank Lindsay was Itek’s president beginning in 1962; Lindsay was deputy chief of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination from 1949 to 1951. “He joined the Ford Foundation in 1953, served on several Presidential commissions, and, since 1962, has been president of the Itek Corporation. After the 1968 election, President-elect Nixon asked Lindsay to head a secret task force on CIA reorganization.” R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 161.

26. the stacks would be closed: “The adoption of an automated system will require that the Library stacks be closed in order to insure the accuracy of the various recording functions. Closing the stacks will result in a reduced need for subject-related classification as a medium for stack arrangement, since the stacks will no longer serve as a single large browsing collection. As a result, new methods of efficient storage based on demand frequency or other criteria will become feasible.” King et al., Automation and the Library of Congress, p. 43.

27. funded by the Department of Defense: King et al., Automation and the Library of Congress, p. 68.

28. Filesearch: Automation and the Library of Congress, pp. 47, 76. The Filesearch system was built by FMA, Inc.; the initials stood for Fenn, McPherson, and Arsenault — three engineers from Magnavox who developed this variation on Vannevar Bush’s Rapid Selector microfilm machine. Robert M. Hayes, letter to author, September 1, 2000.

29. military used the Filesearch: “As with most early computer systems, FileSearch information can not be accessed as originally designed. FileSearch was used primarily by the defense and intelligence communities and was not adopted by the civilian sector in any numbers. Thus, there was no commercial commitment to maintain this particular system. Unable to make Filesearch work on current hardware, the National Archives re-filmed the Vietnamese documents on standard microfilm. Historians should resign themselves to facing similar frustrations with computer databases.” Michael E. Unsworth, “A Lesson Not Learned: The MACV ‘Answer Machine,’ ” abstract of a paper given at a symposium, “After the Cold War: Reassessing Vietnam” (April 1996), www.ttu.edu/~vietnam/96papers/macv.htm (viewed September 14, 2000).

30. wiry, energetic: Clapp is so described in Louise S. Robbins, “The Library of Congress and Federal Loyalty Programs, 1947–1956: No ‘Communists or Cocksuckers,’ ” Library Quarterly 64:4 (October 1994). The title quotes Luther Evans, who informed poet Karl Shapiro that he didn’t want either of them in the Library of Congress.

31. Lawrence F. Buckland: Interview with author, October 5, 2000.

32. Henriette Avram: Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, “Henriette Avram, Associate Librarian for Collections Services, to Retire from the Library of Congress,” ALCTS Network News, 1:8 (June 25, 1991), www.ala.org/alcts/publications/an2/an2v1/an2.v1_no8.htm.

33. Some of Verner Clapp’s ideas: Library of Congress, Verner Warren Clapp, 1901–1972: A Memorial Tribute (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973).

34. John H. Ottemiller: Yale’s Ottemiller is described as “shrewd, tough, and crusty” in Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), which mentions his wartime work for the Office of Strategic Services with Frederick Kilgour, later of OCLC.

35. “a possible need”: Ottemiller quotes Fremont Rider’s estimate that Yale would own two hundred million volumes by 2040 and says, “Panic, then, becomes a moderate word which no longer exaggerates the situation.” The grant was for fifty thousand dollars, allowing the selective retirement program to increase its throughput from twenty thousand to sixty thousand books a year (some moved to departmental libraries or storage, some microfilmed and then discarded, some discarded outright), “thereby providing a body of material large enough to validate statistical data as soon as possible.” Ottemiller, “Selective Book Retirement Program,” p. 72.

36. Arthur Carson: Interview with author, June 23, 2000. The National Security Agency was initially interested in Carson’s crystal storage system, as was the FBI (they were thinking of using it for a visual database of fingerprints), but it was the Council on Library Resources that came through with a contract. Before starting Carson Laboratories, Carson says that he designed a small, stealthy, nuclear-powered submarine, to be made of fiberglass, that he very nearly convinced the English to build; however (according to Carson), Hyman Rickover, head of the U.S. nuclear fleet, didn’t want the British admiralty to be operating nuclear subs and used his influence to have the project dropped.

37. Fiber optics?: Council on Library Resources, Seventh Annual Report, period ending June 30, 1963, p. 28. The Institute for Scientific Information, founded by Eugene Garfield, published Current Contents and the Science Citation Index; Garfield called Clapp a “great gadgeteer.” Eugene Garfield, “Information Science and Technology: Looking Backward and Looking Forward,” a lecture at the Catholic University of America, January 25, 1999, students.cua.edu/org/asis/jan99.htm; and Eugene Garfield, Eugene Garfield, Ph.D. (homepage), www.garfield.library.upenn.edu.

38. “reducing the required number”: Council on Library Resources, Fifth Annual Report (1961), p. 25.

39. combine closed-circuit TV: Council on Library Resources, Second Annual Report (1958), p. 24.

40. de Florez Company: Council on Library Resources, Second Annual Report (1958), p. 24. Clapp also hired the Defense Electronic Products division of Radio Corporation of America to build a page-turner. RCA came up with a system of air blowers and “thumbs”: “Once the top page is pulled from the stack, it is quickly blown by jets of air to the opposite side where another thumb catches it and pulls it tightly to the portion of the book on that side. This machine is endowed with four thumbs, not just two.” Radio Corporation of America, Defense Electronic Products, “A Proposal for an Automatic Page Turner: Submitted to the Council on Library Resources in Response to ‘An Automatic Page Turner — the Basic Requirements,’ November 1, 1957.”

41. radiological weapons: A memo to the chief of operations of the CIA’s Directorate for Plans (DD/P), dated 28 October 1954, discusses the possibility of irradiating the Soviet Union “in conjunction with appropriate psychological warfare measures” and “paramilitary exploitation,” possibly accompanied by radio broadcasts and leaflets emphasizing the “humanitarian concern of the United States” (as evidenced by the use of this “relatively benign” weapon), yet stressing, on the other hand, that “full recovery would depend upon complete inactivity, in the absence of which sterility, prolonged illness and possibly death would ensue.” The proposal’s attachment (dated June 6, 1952) discusses the “need of many special techniques and devices not commercially available or as yet undeveloped or unknown”; it proposes “to establish a research program under the over-all guidance of a CIA Research Board chaired by Admiral Luis De Flores [sic]” and to “continue the contract with his company.” The document is one of thousands that have been scanned, OCR’d, and made available on the Web as part of a federal investigation into human radiation experiments; see Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System, record number c0030 (“CIA, Memorandum for DD/P from DC/SE, dated 28 October 1954, subject: same as above”), hrex.dis.anl.gov. When in 1954 a germ-warfare scientist jumped out a window following a CIA-sponsored drug-research session, de Florez sent a memo to CIA head Allen Dulles asking him not to issue reprimands to those in charge of the experimental program because it would interfere with “the spirit of initiative and enthusiasm so necessary in our work.” John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (New York: Times Books, 1979), chap. 5.

42. “not particularly suited”: Charles La Hood, letter to Verner Clapp, June 26, 1970, de Florez files, Council on Library and Information Resources.

43. Joseph Becker: Before he left the CIA in 1968, Becker won the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit; in an obituary, The New York Times wrote that he “computerized the Central Intelligence Agency’s records.” “Joseph Becker, 72, Information Expert,” The New York Times, July 27, 1995, p. D22.

44. “some of the realities”: Council on Library Resources, 1962 Annual Report, p. 9.

45. “Transceiving time”: H. G. Morehouse, Telefacsimile Services Between Libraries with the Xerox Magnavox Telecopier (Reno: University of Reno Library, December 20, 1966).

46. white rats: J. C. R. Licklider’s M.A. thesis at Washington University was “The Influence of a Severe Modification in Sleep Pattern on Growth and Learning Ability of White Rats” (1938); his experiments with sleepy rats at Harvard are described in J. C. R. Licklider and R. E. Bunch, “Effects of Enforced Wakefulness Upon the Growth and the Maze Learning Performance of White Rats,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 39 (1946). In “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology (April 1968), Licklider writes that “life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

47. Libraries of the Future: J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). Among the participants and committee members acknowledged by Licklider in his preface were Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, both cyberneticists of distinction; Caryl P. Haskins, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Gilbert King of Itek; Philip Morse, the OR pioneer; and John R. Pierce of Bell Labs, designer of Telstar 1 and coiner of the word “transistor.” For background on Licklider, SAGE, DARPA, air defense, real-time computing, and man-machine symbiosis, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

48. “special manifestations of library work”: Council on Library Resources, Fourth Annual Report (1961; introductory essay by Verner Clapp), p. 10.

49. Air Force Librarian: CIA file, Verner Warren Clapp.

50. fired or allowed to resign: See Robbins, “Library of Congress and Federal Loyalty Programs”; Robbins cites one librarian’s plaintive appeal to Clapp in October 1952: “Next month it will be one year since I received the first interrogatory, and needless to say this matter has weighed very heavily on me.” Clapp answered that he was “anxious for settlement”; her case wasn’t settled for another six months. The well-placed hints of informants could be career-destroyers, as Clapp knew, and he was careful in his deliberations; his daily journal from the early fifties reveals the extraordinarily time-consuming work he performed as part of the Library of Congress’s three-man loyalty-review board, manned by Clapp, Frederick Wagman, and Burton Adkinson. Only two employees were fired outright from the library for political disloyalty between 1947 and 1956; but, as Robbins writes, “some resigned during the investigation process; some, after charges but before a hearing,” while others weren’t hired because “the loyalty panel concluded that a full field investigation would just be too costly”; and “at least ten lost their jobs during the purge of ‘perverts.’ ” When the American Library Association (rather bravely, considering the temper of the times) passed a resolution condemning loyalty oaths, Clapp stoutly defended their necessity; to oppose their use, he wrote, “is actually to aid and abet the hysteria which the tests are designed to counteract” (Library Journal, April 15, 1950).

51. Office of Censorship: See Steven M. Roth, The Censorship of International Civilian Mail during World War II: The History, Structure, and Operation of the United States Office of Censorship (Lake Oswego, Oreg.: La Posta Publications, 1991). Censors slit letters open neatly on the left side (so that the examiner’s resealing label wouldn’t cover the stamp); they read the contents, noted certain items (discussions of enemy troop movements, for instance); sometimes photographed the letter and placed its sender or addressee on a watch list; “condemned” some mail; and returned to sender mail that contained prohibited material — e.g., statements “indicating low morale of the United States or its allies” (p. 98).

52. Human Ecology Fund: See Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, chap. 9, which mentions Keeney on p. 156n. And see Andrew Sommer and Marc Cheshire, “The Spy Who Came in from the Campus,” New Times, October 30, 1978, p. 14, in which Keeney, interviewed in retirement, admitted that he had (according to the authors) “advised the Agency on ways of setting up covert funding operations” and said that he “was told by CIA officials that MKULTRA [one of the covert drug-testing programs] was designed to counter Soviet and Chinese brainwashing techniques, developed through the use of psych-chemicals and hypnosis.” The authors mention Keeney’s work at the National Endowment for the Humanities: “When questioned as to whether the NEH was ever used to cloak CIA operations, he [Keeney] asked incredulously, ‘Do you know what would happen to an agent who used the NEH as a cover?’ After a dramatic pause he answered, ‘He would be killed.’ He would not elaborate on this peculiar assertion.”

53. Caryl Haskins: For Haskins’s work on the Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, see Susan Wright, Preventing a Biological Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 29–30.

54. Project Artichoke: “Dr. Caryl Haskins was selected to head up the Panel and endeavored, in conjunction with OSI [the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence] to enlist the services of other qualified professional personnel.” Memo to Assistant Director, Scientific Intelligence from Project Coordinator, Subject: Project Artichoke, April 26, 1952. See Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX), record number c0022 (“CIA, Meeting Attendance”) at rex.dis.anl.gov.

55. Haskins traveled to Canada: “The genesis for the mind-control research was worked out at a top-secret meeting June 1, 1951, at the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal….an anonymous handwritten note found in the archives identifies Dr. Caryl Haskins and Commander R.J. Williams as the CIA representatives at the meeting.” David Vienneau, “Ottawa Paid for ‘50s Brainwashing Experiments, Files Show,” The Toronto Star, April 14, 1986, final edition, p. A1, Nexis. And see related articles in The Toronto Star, April 15–17, 1986, and April 20, 1986. Haskins did not return calls from the Toronto Star reporter. (Haskins didn’t answer my letter, either, but his former assistant sent a polite note saying that Haskins was “in excellent health” but that I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t answer, as “1951 was such a long time ago.”)

56. available to the CIA as a consultant: “Dr. Haskins indicated that the Panel had contributed about as much as it could for the present and until resources were built up in the agency to undertake the staff and field work necessary, the panel would hold itself ready (as individual consultants) to be of any further advisory assistance.” Memorandum to Assistant Director, April 26, 1952, Argonne National Laboratory, Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX), record number c0022 (“CIA, Meeting Attendance”). Haskins was also (for over twenty years) an influential member of the executive committee of the Smithsonian Institution — and here’s the strange part: in the sixties, under director Leonard Carmichael (also a board member, like Barnaby Keeney, of the CIA’s Human Ecology Fund), the Smithsonian did germ-warfare research. After receiving a series of inoculations, Smithsonian researchers traveled to islands in the Pacific to study how birds transmit disease; avian blood samples were shipped, frozen, to the Army’s biological-weapons lab at Fort Detrick. The disease data was turned over to the CIA, whose MKULTRA program was studying “Avian Vectors in the Transmission of Disease.” The Smithsonian’s germ-warfare studies, and the CIA’s biological experiments for that period, are chronicled in two Washington Post investigations: Bill Richards, “Germ Testing by the CIA,” The Washington Post, August 11, 1977, p. A1, Nexis, and Bill Richards, “CIA Involvement at Smithsonian Called Limited,” The Washington Post, August 31, 1977, p. A12, Nexis; and Ted Gup, “The Smithsonian Secret: Why an Innocent Bird Study Went Straight to Biological Warfare Experts at Fort Detrick,” The Washington Post Magazine, May 12, 1985, Nexis. See also Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); and Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). It occurs to me that the CIA’s interest in the avian vectors of disease may possibly explain the otherwise puzzling choice of Wildlife Disease as the journal Verner Clapp published on Microcards.

57. gruff and likeable: For an account of Louis Wright’s increasing doubts about the activities of the Council, see Deanna B. Marcum, “Reclaiming the Research Library: The Founding of the Council on Library Resources,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996). Marcum confirmed Wright’s doubts about Clapp in a phone interview.

58. “the most informed point of contact”: Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” p. 93.

59. “first library millionaire”: Paul Wasserman, “Interview with Paul Wasserman Regarding the Early History of CLIS,” Esther Herman (interviewer), January 11, 1995, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, www.clis.umd.edu/faculty/wasserman/pwinterview.htm. In 1947, at the Library of Congress, Mortimer Taube was put in charge of a project paid for by the Office of Naval Research to index and abstract scientific research and reports of interest to Navy weapons designers; see Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information, p. 149. Robert M. Hayes, former dean of the UCLA’s School of Library and Information Science, wrote me that Taube was “among the librarians who helped the CIA.” Having come up with his improved “Uniterm” method of indexing, Taube formed Documentation, Inc., and “received funding from the intelligence community, CIA included, to carry out the development of a variety of retrieval techniques based on that concept.” Robert Hayes, e-mail to author, 29 August 2000.

60. didn’t work either: In 1967, the annual report mentioned the Council’s “continued but unsuccessful attempts to develop a hand-held portable inexpensive device for viewing microforms.” Having no luck with hand-helds, the Council proceeded to commission the Taylor-Merchant Corporation to build a prototype projector for microfiche and microfilm, whose “portability and economy should prove attractive to graduate students and others.” The microform projector never made it to market. Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 28.

61. a conduit for CIA money: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment (New York: Bantam, 1967), p. 137; and Sol Stern, “A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with particular reference to the NSA, CIA, etc.,” Ramparts, March 1967. The sponsorship of the Independence Foundation is recorded on the title page of Carl F. J. Overhage and R. Joyce Harman, eds., Intrex: Report of a Planning Conference on Information Transfer Experiments (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

62. “better and more economical systems for weeding”: Overhage and Harman, Intrex, p. 14.

63. “digital storage of encoded full-text”: Also “transmission of a scanned-image electrical signal over a communication network and display and/or reproduction in full size or microform for temporary and/or permanent retention by the user.” Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 15.

64. “Project INTREX fell very short”: Colin Burke, “Librarians Go High-Tech, Perhaps: The Ford Foundation, the CLR, and INTREX,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996).

65. traditionalist members of his board: Besides Louis Wright, there was Lyman Butterfield, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, editor of the Adams papers. But the scientists dominated: in addition to Caryl Haskins, Philip Morse, and Warren Weaver, there was Joseph C. Morris, a large cigar-smoking physicist from Tulane who had worked on submarine warfare and then on the Manhattan Project (where he got a radiation burn on one hand), described in a eulogy as “a notorious gadgeteer” and an “inveterate dial-twiddler” (College of Arts and Sciences, Tulane University, “Resolution on the Death of Professor Morris,” Meeting Minutes, May 19, 1970, Tulane University Archives). And there was James S. Coles, president of Bowdoin College, where he built tall buildings and raised huge sums. Coles, a chemist, spent the war at the Underwater Explosives Research Laboratory at Wood’s Hole; there, according to The Boston Globe (June 14, 1996, p. 49), he “conducted research to improve [the] underwater ignition and explosive power of depth charges, depth bombs, and torpedo warheads.” He joined the Council’s board in 1960.

66. “rescued many millions of pages”: Council on Library Resources, Second Annual Report (1958), pp. 25–26.

67. “the destruction of the text”: Alan B. Pritsker and J. William Sadler, “An Evaluation of Microfilm as a Method of Book Storage,” College and Research Libraries 18:4 (July 1957).

68. Crerar Library: Research Information Service, John Crerar Library, Dissemination of Information for Scientific Research and Development (Chicago: John Crerar Library, 1954).

69. The library was moving: See Council on Library Resources, Seventh Annual Report (1963), p. 24; and Edward J. Forbes and David P. Waite, Costs and Material Handling Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals, Lexington, Massachusetts: Forbes & Waite, 1961, held by the University of Michigan Libraries.

70. “Costs and Material Handling”: The consultants were Forbes and Waite, who specialized, wrote Clapp vaguely, in “information systems design including photographic applications,” for which imprecision one should perhaps substitute “defense and/or intelligence workers”; Clapp, normally a scrupulous bibliographer, doesn’t supply the full names of the consultants in the annual report for several years — an indication of some concern over secrecy. Edward J. Forbes and David P. Waite, Costs and Material Handling Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals (Lexington, Mass.: Forbes and Waite, 1961), held by the University of Michigan Libraries; Verner Clapp and Robert T. Jordan, “Re-evaluation of Microfilm as a Method of Book Storage,” College and Research Libraries, January 1963. Forbes and Waite write that the volumes under consideration are a collection of “older periodical issues (prior to 1920).”

71. “considerable labor saving”: Clapp and Jordan, “Re-evaluation.”

72. “except that of destruction”: Clapp and Jordan, “Re-evaluation.”

CHAPTER 10 — The Preservation Microfilming Office

1. twenty-four microfilm cameras: La Hood, “Microfilm for the Library of Congress.”

2. “otherwise beyond redemption”: Council on Library Resources, Twelfth Annual Report (1968), p. 28. See also Library of Congress, “National Preservation Program — First Phase,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 26:4 (January 26, 1967): “In its own preservation program, the Library of Congress has been segregating its brittle books for several years and microfilming thousands of publications too brittle to bind.”

3. “Space was a key word”: Library of Congress, “Administrative Department.”

4. “arrangements for assuring the preservation”: Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 34. See also Norman J. Shaffer, “Library of Congress Pilot Preservation Project,” College and Research Libraries, January 1969. Shaffer writes that the Library of Congress preferred to microfilm nonfiction, rather than fiction, since scholars interested in fiction “would probably want to use the physical volumes.”

5. “safely discard”: Gordon Williams, The Preservation of Deteriorating Books: An Examination of the Problem with Recommendations for a Solution, report of the ARL Committee on the Preservation of Research Library Materials, September 1964, p. 17. In Library Journal, Williams compellingly wrote that “it will cost only about $2 more per volume to preserve the original for an indefinitely long future time and make a microfilm copy of it only when the book needs to be used, than it will cost to microfilm the original now and discard the original completely.” But Williams also condoned heavy discarding: “It is not necessary that more than one example of most deteriorating books be preserved” if “another example is being preserved” and a “usable copy of the text is cheaply and readily available.” Gordon Williams, “The Preservation of Deteriorating Books,” Library Journal, January 1, 1966.

6. “varied greatly”: Shaffer, “Library of Congress Pilot Preservation Project.” Shaffer writes that “in nearly all cases the survey located at least one copy elsewhere which was, except for the brittleness of the paper, in excellent condition.”

7. “the slums”: Richard L. Williams, “The Library of Congress Can’t Hold All of Man’s Knowledge — But It Tries, As It Acquires a New $160-Million Annex,” Smithsonian 11:1 (April 1980), p. 43.

8. Frazer G. Poole: Library of Congress, “Frazer G. Poole,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 26:10 (March 9, 1967).

9. at Clapp’s suggestion: Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” p. 86. Clapp rejected the traditional method of bookbinding, sewing through the fold, as too costly for most libraries (p. 88).

10. indiscriminate rebinding: See Linda J. White, Packaging the American Word: A Survey of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Publishers’ Bindings in the General Collections of the Library of Congress, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, 1997; formerly available at lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/survey. “It is alarming to find,” White writes, “that of the general collections 93 % of the sample items from the 1840s have been library bound; only 7 % remain in original publisher’s bindings.” White’s paper was also presented at a conference entitled “Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Century: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians,” sponsored by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association, June 23–26, 1998, Washington, D.C.

11. 98 three hundred thousand non-newspaper volumes: Lawrence S. Robinson, “Establishing a Preservation Microfilming Program: The Library of Congress Experience.” Microform Review 13:4 (fall 1984).

12. “embrittled to the extent”: Robinson, “Establishing a Preservation Microfilming Program.”

13. “The volumes are cut”: Robinson, “Establishing a Preservation Microfilming Program.”

14. “running our cameras against the clock”: William J. Welsh, “The Library of Congress: A More-Than-Equal Partner,” Library Resources and Technical Services 29:1 (January/March 1985): 89.

15. Joanna Biggar: “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books to Save Them?” The Washington Post Magazine, June 3, 1984.

16. not bound by the Freedom of Information Act: “Although the Library is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, as amended (5 U.S.C. § 552), this Regulation follows the spirit of that Act consistent with the Library’s duties, functions, and responsibilities to the Congress. The application of that Act to the Library is not to be inferred, nor should this Regulation be considered as conferring on any member of the public a right under that Act of access to or information from the records of the Library.” Library of Congress Regulation 1917–3, September 18, 1997.

17. shelving everything: The library receives three free copies of a great many books — two under the copyright-deposit program and one under the Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) program. “In fiscal year 1995, the Library obtained 49,201 books through the CIP program. These additional titles are either added to the collections or used as part of the Library’s exchange program.” They also receive the discards from other federal libraries; generally, they swap these for things they want, or they give them away. “In fiscal year 1995, the Library received more than two million items from Federal agencies, and, although only a very small number were selected for the collections, several thousand were used in exchanges with other libraries for materials needed by the Library of Congress. Many thousands of other Federal transfers were used in the Library’s surplus books programs.” In 1995, the estimated value of the books given to the library under the copyright deposits program was $20,158,594. General Accounting Office, Financial Statement Audit for the Library of Congress for Fiscal Year 1995, www.gao.gov/special.pubs/pw_loc.txt (viewed June 3, 2000). See also Linton Weeks, “Brave New Library,” The Washington Post Magazine, May 26, 1991, which describes the work of the Selections Office, where books that aren’t to be added to the collection are marked with a red X on the first page. Lolita Silva of that office told Weeks, “I think you develop a feel for the material. Sometimes with a book of poetry — how it’s published, how it’s presented to you — tells you it’s worth keeping.” Weeks writes that the library did not take elementary-school or high-school textbooks except those dealing with American history.

18. “I am happy to announce”: The memo, dated September 13, 2000, is from the head of the Library of Congress’s Processing and Reference Section to serials librarians; it refers to the library’s new program of asking certain publishers to stop sending the library items for copyright deposit.

19. Finnegans Wake: This story came from a book dealer. Verner Clapp and Luther Evans authorized the disposal of duplicates in the fifties, during a space crunch. Clapp noted on March 19, 1951, that he had visited the annex, deck 7, north, with Frederick Wagman and Luther Evans. “Agreed: To dispose of stuff from Dupl. Coll. by weeding good stuff, advertising the remainder & pulping if no bids are recd.” The library also throws away book jackets, except in rare instances, see lcweb.loc.gov/acq/devpol/bookjack.htm, June 15, 1999 (viewed June 2, 2000).

20. misshelved: Side-by-side duplicates make shelvers’ lives easier, and thus reduce shelving errors, because the copy remaining on the shelf offers a quick visual cue as to where a book is supposed to go.

21. A recent survey: White, Packaging the American Word. White created a random population of four hundred books sold by six American publishing houses between 1830 and 1914 to serve as a sample for her study of American bookbindings. She found that of these (“the rare books of tomorrow,” she called them) twenty-six percent had received an “inappropriate” rebinding, and about six percent were missing in inventory or Not on Shelf, even after special additional searches. Thirty-seven books had already been reformatted, and, of those, thirty-three were found to be “Reformatted (original destroyed)” while four were “Reformatted (original retained)”—thus, in her sample nearly ninety percent of the microfilmed books from these six American publishers had been destroyed. Nine books had been deacidified.

CHAPTER 11 — Thugs and Pansies

01. “Space is always a problem”: Irene Schubert, “Re: Serials microfilming,” PADG (Preservation Administrators Discussion Group), archived on the CoOL website (CoOL stands for Conservation OnLine), palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/10/msg00023.htm, October 31, 1997. Paula De Stefano, head of preservation at New York University, also contributed to this thread: she wrote that generally she stopped at the copyright cutoff date, then 1922. (That’s one reason so many older obscure things that libraries would otherwise have left alone were sliced open and expensively emulsioned — they’re in the public domain.) Then De Stefano wrote: “Of course, any titles already available on film are bought and the hard copy is tossed to make room on shelves. Space is a huge issue here.” PADG archives, CoOL website, October 31, 1997, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/10/msg00022.htm. The current textbook of preservation microfilming says that it’s okay to throw out volumes that aren’t yet brittle, if you gain lots of space in doing so — hardly a preservational argument: “The institution may decide that filming long runs of serials, theses, or other coherent collections will so significantly ease space constraints that these items should be filmed as a unit even if some individual pieces are less suitable. For example, even if a few issues of a serial title were not acidic or not yet brittle, there would still be advantages in filming the entire run”—and getting rid of the paper. Lisa L. Fox, ed., Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists, 2d ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), pp. 105–6.

02. Scotch-taping of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Esther Boyd-Alkalay and Lena Libman, “The Conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Laboratories of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem,” Restaurator 18 (1997). The cellotaping, which caused “irreversible damage,” began in the late fifties in the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem; later, some of the tape was removed with trichloroethylene, and then the fragments were reinforced with lens tissue glued on with polyvinyl acetate or Perspex in solution. “As a result, the parchment glitters like glass and becomes rigid and fragile.”

03. “This cannot be emphasized”: Nancy E. Gwinn, ed., Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists (Chicago: American Library Association, 1987), chap. 2, p. 36. Wesley Boomgaarden originally drafted this chapter, according to the preface.

04. “It must be stressed”: Gwinn, Preservation Microfilming, p. 37. The textbook asks: “With the enormous volume of paper-based materials that require reformatting to preserve primarily the intellectual content, can the institution justify microfilming as only an interim measure, and thus retain great quantities of printed materials after microfilming?”

05. book conservators generally report: See, for example, the organization chart published in Peter Sparks, “The Library of Congress Preservation Program,” in The Library Preservation Program: Models, Priorities, Possibilities, ed. Jan Merrill-Oldham and Merrily Smith, proceedings of a conference, April 29, 1983 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1985), p. 71.

06. “With few exceptions”: David H. Stam, “Finding Funds to Support Preservation,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1940 made a grant to the New York Public Library that “would supply funding to make a master negative from which the income to be derived from future sales would amortize the original investment”—helping libraries to help themselves. Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”

07. “a lot of material from the Jewish division”: Phone interview with Wesley Boomgaarden, April 21, 2000.

08. “When my hard-working”: Wesley Boomgaarden, “Preservation Microfilming: Elements and Interconnections,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, papers from the RTSD Preservation Microfilming Institute, New Haven, April 21, 23, 1988 (Chicago: Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, 1989), p. 8.

09. “most of the filmed volumes”: Committee on Institutional Cooperation, “Coordinated Preservation Microfilming Project,” Annual Report 1995–1996, nova.cic.uiuc.edu/CIC/annrpt/ar95-96/cpmp4.htm (viewed September 25, 2000). This multiphase, NEH-funded enterprise was also called the Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project.

CHAPTER 12 — Really Wicked Stuff

01. “licensing arrangements”: The phrase appears in the testimony of Peter Sparks before the Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, House of Representatives, Oversight Hearing on the Problem of “Brittle Books” in Our Nation’s Libraries, March 3, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 105.

02. “Oh, the odor”: Scott Eidt, phone interview, April 25, 2000. Edward Frankland, the great nineteenth-century chemist who discovered diethyl zinc, wrote in his diary of his early experience with a related compound (dimethyl zinc) that when he exposed the new substance to air there was a “violent action” and a foot-long flame, followed by a “gas of a most insupportable odour.” Colin A. Russell, Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy, and Conspiracy in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 79.

03. Koski: Ahti A. Koski et al., “Studies of the Pyrolysis of Diethylzinc by the Toluene Carrier Method and of the Reaction of Ethyl Radicals with Toluene,” Canadian Journal of Chemistry 54 (1976).

04. “In the late fifties”: Richard D. Smith, whose Wei T’o process was slighted by the Library of Congress for years, published a thorough critique of diethyl zinc in Restaurator, in which he said that it had been tried as an ignition agent for Apollo-Saturn rocket, an assertion that some rocket scientists confirm. Smith’s excellent study is, however, prefaced by several paragraphs of hoo-ha about “the history of modern civilization deteriorat[ing] into dust.” “Deacidifying Library Collections: Myths and Realities,” Restaurator 8 (1987).

05. Ballistic-missile engineers: John J. Rusek, Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Purdue University, phone interview. See also John D. Clark’s entertaining Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 9, 13. Also George P. Sutton, Rocket Propulsion Elements: An Introduction to the Engineering of Rockets, 3d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 252.

06. hypergolic: The term “hypergolic” was first used by German rocket scientists. Clark, Ignition, p. 14.

07. “high-energy aircraft and missile fuel”: Hawley’s Condensed Chemical Dictionary, 12th ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), p. 397.

08. “During the war”: In 1944, the Army was considering the use of pyrophorics, but they had not yet proved “of practical value.” “They are difficult to control and constitute a great storage hazard,” wrote Brigadier General Alden H. Waitt of the Chemical Warfare Service. “However, there are a number of substances that ignite spontaneously on contact with the air, and methods may be devised for making practical use of them.” Gas Warfare: Smoke, Flame, and Gas in Modern War, 2d ed., Fighting Forces ed. (Washington, D.C.: Infantry Journal, 1944), p. 52.

09. “encapsulated flamethrower”: Interview with Allen Tulis, April 4, 2000. Later, the Air Force picked up on the idea of a pyrophoric flame weapon, adapting it for air-to-ground use, but they chose a slightly less reactive compound called triethyl aluminum in place of diethyl zinc. Triethyl aluminum also bursts into flame on contact with air, but it’s cheaper. Tulis worked on chemical demining and fuel-air explosives, as well.

10. rupture eardrums: For a description of blast injuries related to fuel-air explosives, see United States Department of Defense, “Clinical Presentation of Primary Blast Injury,” Virtual Naval Hospital, www.vnh.org/EWSurg/ch05/05ClinPresPrimBlast.htm (viewed September 25, 2000).

11. its own voraciously combustive chemistry: See G. von Elbe and E. T. McHale, Annual Interim Report: Chemical Initiation of FAE Clouds, report by Atlantic Research Corporation to Bernard T. Wolfson, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C. contract no. F49620-77-C-0097 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1979). The report is marked “Approved for public release; distribution unlimited.” Von Elbe was a bomb designer with a Ph.D. from Berlin; he wrote a paper on “The Problem of Ignition” in the Fourth Symposium (International) on Combustion (Combustion and Detonation Waves), held at MIT in 1952 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1953).

13. Dr. John Lee: Much of the Air Force’s FAE research is still restricted; Dr. Lee, however, holds a relevant unclassified patent. John H. Lee, “Chemical Initiation of Detonation in Fuel-Air Explosive Clouds,” U.S. patent no. 6,168,123 (December 1, 1992), which lists diethyl zinc as one of the liquid initiators.

CHAPTER 13 — Getting the Champagne out of the Bottle

01. a grant from the Council: Nancy E. Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation,” College and Research Libraries 42:2 (March 1981).

02. unhappy time at a pesticide company: Kelly told me that the plant would get a boatload of white arsenic from Europe and make a big pile of it in a warehouse. Then, in the heat of summer, managers would hire men off the street to shovel it into the reactor to make pesticides like calcium arsenate and lead arsenate. The men “were sweating like pigs, and they’d get arsenic dust all over them,” Kelly said. “Inside of about two weeks, they’d be unable to work because of arsenic poisoning. The plant said, ‘It’s okay, just go ahead and work, you won’t get hurt.’ Finally they couldn’t work any more so they just laid them off and got some more in.” Kelly left the company after nine months.

03. thirty and seventy pounds of liquid DEZ: The DEZ was initially diluted with a solvent (which “provides increased safety in the handling of the agent,” according to Williams and Kelly’s patents) but later used in its undiluted, neat form. John C. Williams and George B. Kelly, Jr., “Method of Deacidifying Paper,” U.S. patent nos. 3,969,549 (July 13, 1976) and 4,051,276 (September 27, 1977).

04. “thoroughly acidified”: John Williams, phone interview, April 2000.

05. General Electric was lukewarm: GE was “unwilling to take the risk of an incident with the chemical diethyl zinc.” Carolyn Harris, “Preservation of Paper Based Materials: Mass Deacidification Methods and Projects,” in Conserving and Preserving Library Materials, ed. Kathryn Luther Henderson and William T. Henderson (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 67.

06. “small air leaks”: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Book Preservation Technologies, OTA-0-375 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), p. 30. One GE worker burned his arm when some diluted DEZ “dripped on his skin from piping that he was cleaning.” The injury did not require hospitalization (p. 73).

07. “we have demonstrated”: George B. Kelly, Jr., “Mass Deacidification,” in Preservation of Library Materials, ed. Joyce R. Russell (New York: Special Libraries Association, 1980). In the discussion that followed this paper, Kelly was asked whether other conservation labs might adapt an existing vacuum-drying chamber to treat books using DEZ. “It is possible,” Kelly wrote, “but you are going to have to have some extremely good engineers and extensive modifications of the chamber. You cannot afford one mistake. One mistake and you have a disaster on your hands. Proceed with caution.”

08. “400 to 600 years”: W. Dale Nelson, “Space Technology Used to Prolong Life of Books,” Associated Press, May 23, 1982, Nexis.

09. “at least five million volumes”: “Conquest of Brittleness, the Ruin of Old Books,” The New York Times, August 8, 1984, sec. B, p. 8, late city final edition, on microfilm. In a 1990 Times article on deacidification, Malcolm Browne, the great war journalist, apparently divided 77,000 by 365 days in order to come up with a fresh-seeming number: “At a rate of more than 200 volumes a day, books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, are turning to dust. But after a decade of research, accidents and administrative delays, the library reports that it is about to take a major step toward stopping the rot.” Malcolm W. Browne, “Nation’s Library Calls on Chemists to Stop Books from Turning to Dust,” The New York Times, May 22, 1990, p. C1.

10. “handling of diethyl zinc”: Library of Congress Information Bulletin, April 23, 1984; quoted in Karl Nyren, “The DEZ Process and the Library of Congress,” Library Journal, September 15, 1986.

11. “no known safety risks”: Daniel Boorstin, “Letter to the Honorable George M. O’Brien, Member of Congress [Transmitting] Statement on the Library of Congress’s Diethyl Zinc Gas Phase Book Deacidification Process,” July 10, 1984, quoted in a footnote to Smith, “Deacidifying Library Collections.”

12. weapons procurers: The library’s secretiveness and its unwillingness to document its experiments in peer-reviewed journals are discussed in Jack C. Thompson, “Mass Deacidification: Thoughts on the Cunha Report,” Restaurator 9:4 (1988).

13. 113 degrees: Glenn Garelik, “Saving Books with Science,” Discover, March 1983.

14. “self-sustaining and uncontrollable”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 25.

15. The results were “mixed”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 31, 42–43.

16. Thus many of the stacked books: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 42–43.

17. “Cause of odor a mystery”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, October 1994, lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).

18. “a Library of Congress representative”: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center, Accident Investigation Board Report of Mishaps at the Deacidification Pilot Plant, Building 306 on December 5, 1985, and February 14, 1986, James H. Robinson, Jr., Board Chairman (September 4, 1986), p. 96.

19. Later, Welsh admitted: Representative Vic Fazio “criticized the librarians for secretly diverting funds from other library programs to support the DEZ experiment,” reported The Washington Post. “ ‘Specifically,’ [Fazio] wrote Boorstin last Dec. 2, ‘over $2.3 million of the $3,740,474 obligated since fiscal year 1981 has come from funding sources other than those approved by…Congress.’ ” Phil McCombs, “Library’s Preservation Go-Ahead; Dangers of Book-Saving Process are Discounted,” The Washington Post, February 11, 1987, p. C-1, final edition, Nexis. At the hearing, Fazio said, “You didn’t realize you had gotten hooked on this approach.” Welsh answered, “I realized I was hooked, but not that I was using that much money without your permission.” Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, pt. 2, February 10, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 417.

20. “The time drivers”: See NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 79.

21. “Shortly after the water injection”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 6.

22. “[Name whited out] has been applying pressure”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 80. A memo of December 5, 1985, reporting the “Incident at Magnetic Test Quiet Lab 306” to a NASA manager ends thus: “Any inquiries concerning this incident should be referred to Dr. Peter Sparks, Library of Congress, 202-287-5213.” NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 49.

23. Before NASA had completed its investigation: NASA had produced an interim report on the December 5 explosion, but not a final one, when the second explosion took place. “By February 14, 1986, Mr. Marriott’s group was well into the investigation of the December 5, 1985, mishap and verbal reports had been provided to the Director of Engineering, and an interim written report was provided on January 17, 1986” (NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 15). One respondent stated that he was “upset that they were working out at building 306 before the report from the December 5, 1985, Accident Review Board was released” (p. 92). The Library of Congress asserted that the DEZ facility was shut down after the “fire” in December “pending a review of the cause of the fire.” Cleanup began, the library claimed, “following completion of the review,” whereupon the “second incident occurred.” Library of Congress, “Library’s Book Deacidification Program Moves Forward Following Review of Incidents and Pilot Plant,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:27 (July 7, 1986).

24. “disenchanted” electrician: There were, he said, “too many people giving orders without following normal procedures.” NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 91. “Before the December 5 fire,” the electrician “had not known that DEZ could explode” (p. 92).

25. a substantial volume: “After the December 5, 1985 fire, it was general knowledge that DEZ was in the system,” according to one interviewee. NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 95.

26. “black goop”: NASA, Accident Investigation, pp. 9, 110.

27. copper elbow pipe: NASA, Accident Investigation, pp. 11, 93.

28. too hot to touch: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 109.

29. Northrup did not inform NASA: NASA, Accident Investigation, pp. 25–26.

30. “the walls were blown apart”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 14.

31. “The violence of the explosion”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 36.

32. there were no relief valves: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 28.

33. “We’re going to blow it”: Welsh, phone interview, March 25, 2000.

34. armored vehicles: Welsh, phone interview, March 25, 2000.

35. “vast and unprecedented cuts”: Library of Congress, “The Librarian of Congress Testifies Before Appropriations Subcommittee,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:9 (March 3, 1986).

36. “disassembled by means of shaped”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 16.

37. whoomp: Phone interview with an eyewitness who does not want to be named, April 2000.

38. “there has never been an important”: Boorstin also formally said good-bye to the members of the house subcommittee during that meeting; he was retiring from the Library of Congress. Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, Hearings, p. 394.

39. rats: “The study will expose rats to acute, subchronic, and chronic inhalation of zinc oxide particles at various concentrations in air….An examination of sperm morphology and vaginal cytology will also be performed on specimens in the sub-chronic and chronic studies. Some specimens from the sub-chronic exposures will be mated to study the reproductive and teratogenic effects.” U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 79. The cost of the rat study, performed by the Battelle Memorial Institute, is given on p. 18.

40. The tests were “inconclusive”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 77. In another test, DEZ-treated paper was applied to the skin of guinea pigs and the eyes of rabbits.

41. optical-disk program: See, for example, William J. Welsh, “The Preservation Challenge,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program. “In the area of preservation research, the Library of Congress is currently engaged in two promising projects of enormous potential value,” Welsh writes, both of which apply “ultra-high technology to preservation”: diethyl zinc and optical disk.

42. “On Friday, February 21”: Library of Congress, “Engineering Problems Experienced at Deacidification Test Facility,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:11 (March 17, 1986).

43. “The Library’s own review”: Library of Congress, “Library’s Book Deacidification Program.” The DEZ technique “is a viable process that can be implemented and handled safely,” according to the article.

44. “didn’t have the chemical processing experience”: Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, Hearings, p. 435.

45. “Dump DEZ”: Karl Nyren, “It’s Time to Dump DEZ,” Library Journal, September 15, 1986.

46. “danger and unmanageability of DEZ”: Karl Nyren, “DEZ Process.”

47. Welsh published a rebuttal: William J. Welsh, “In Defense of DEZ: LC’s Perspective,” Library Journal, January 1987.

48. when it does use DEZ: Scott Eidt told me: “Diethyl zinc wasn’t used a great deal as a Ziegler-Natta catalyst. It was used, as far I remember, and is still used, in dilute hydrocarbon solution, to scavenge out water from the polymerization process — that is, it would react with the water in the solvent and knock it out.” Book Preservation Technologies also resorts to vague language, perhaps in order to avoid mentioning the military uses: “Metal alkyls have been used for many years in a variety of applications. Their major use today is as an intermediate in the manufacturing of polyethylene and polypropylene” (p. 28).

49. neat and by the ton: “During the course of a year, Texas Alkyls will be trucking 15 to 20, 430-gallon tanks of neat liquid DEZ from their facility in Houston to the full-scale plant site,” U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 71. Stauffer Chemical wrote a letter to the Library of Congress dated April 18, 1985, in which it observed that the rate of gas generation is two orders of magnitude greater for neat diethyl zinc than for DEZ diluted fifty-fifty with a solvent. The letter is paraphrased in NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 144. The gas, mainly ethane, is flammable.

50. “DEZ is produced”: Welsh, “In Defense of DEZ.”

51. “DEZ is and always will be”: Koski added, “The cylinder that DEZ is stored in is labelled as pyrophoric but these cylinders are not perpetually in flame either, although [their contents] certainly would be if the valve was cracked open.”

52. $2.8 million: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 18.

53. “I think the safety questions”: Boyce Rensenberger, “Acid Test: Stalling Self-Destruction in the Stacks,” The Washington Post, August 29, 1988, p. A13, final edition, microfilm.

54. “were so startling”: Robert J. Milevski, “Mass Deacidification: Effects of Treatment on Library Materials Deacidified by the DEZ and MG-3 Processes,” in The 1992 Book and Paper Group Annual, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Conservation, 1992). Milevski became the preservation librarian at Princeton in 1992.

55. one-hundred-million-dollar twenty-year contracts: Rensenberger, “Acid Test.”

56. thirty thousand books a week: Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 111.

57. “And if you know Billington”: Billington’s occasional outbursts are described in Linton Weeks, “In a Stack of Troubles: The Librarian of Congress Has Raised Funds. And His Voice. And a Lot of Eyebrows,” The Washington Post, December 27, 1995, p. F1, Nexis. “In August 1995, Billington learned that the U.S. attorney had written him a letter expressing concern about the way book damage was being reported. Someone on the library staff had answered the letter. ‘Unsatisfactorily, and in my name,’ says Billington. ‘He went hysteric,’ says one library official who asked not to be named. Billington remembers that he threw something. He says it may have been a book.”

58. Alphamat: Nielsen Bainbridge, Alphamat Artcare, www.nielsen-bainbridge.com/bainbridge/html/sparks_testimonial.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).

59. “strategic information reserve”: Testimony of James Billington, April 19, 1994, before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities. Billington disseminated several variations of this speech.

60. “substituting technology for paper”: James Billington, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, June 15, 1992, excerpted in Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter, September 1992. In 1999, Billington told Congress that one of the library’s “key current overriding initiatives” is “providing massive digital access to information and, at the same time, streamlining and re-engineering our handling of access to books and other traditional containers of knowledge.” Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 106th Cong., 1st sess., 1999, p. 120.

61. Bhabha Atomic Research Center: See the capsule biography accompanying Chandru Shahani and William K. Wilson, “Preservation of Libraries and Archives,” American Scientist, May — June 1987. Bhabha scientists began work on India’s nuclear bomb in 1971, according to Nicholas Berry of the Center for Defense Information (e-mail to author). See also Center for Defense Information, “Building the Indian Bomb,” May 19, 1998, www.cdi.org/issues/testing/inbombfct.htm (viewed August 14, 2000).

62. “pathetically poor engineering”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate (October 1994), lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm.

63. If in fifty years: Jana Kolar notes that “while most treated papers degrade less rapidly, some results of accelerated ageing experiments show an increased degradation of papers whose pH has been changed from the acidic to the alkaline region using deacidification treatment.” Accelerated-aging experiments can, however, supply only directional hints. Jana Kolar, “Mechanism of Autoxidative Degradation of Cellulose,” Restaurator 18 (1997).

CHAPTER 14 — Bursting at the Seams

1. costs were bundled: Between 1984 and 1994, the Library of Congress spent $5.7 million of the $11.5 million congressional appropriation for the construction of a diethyl-zinc facility, according to General Accounting Office, Financial Statement Audit for the Library of Congress for Fiscal Year 1995. Although they are difficult to document, the overhead costs attributable to diethyl-zinc research and development must be added to that amount.

2. Landover: Library of Congress, Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:22 (May 28, 1976).

3. long-frozen Everyman’s Library edition: F. L. Hudson and C. J. Edwards, “Some Direct Observations on the Aging of Paper,” Paper Technology 7 (1966); cited in Richard Smith, “Paper Impermanence as a Consequence of pH and Storage Conditions,” Library Quarterly 39:2 (April 1969): 183.

4. Cold War librarians: See Library of Congress, “Welsh Named Deputy Librarian,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:4 (January 23, 1976).

5. “warehouses of little-used material”: William J. Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians: Opportunities and Challenges,” paper presented at the seventh international seminar, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Library Center, Kanazawa, Japan, 1989, in Research Libraries — Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. William J. Welsh (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).

6. “vastly more than the microfilming”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”

7. “Disk storage is attractive”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”

8. “the extremely high resolution”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”

9. “reproduce items with sufficient quality”: Carl Fleischhauer, “Research Access and Use: The Key Facet of the Nonprint Optical Disk Experiment,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 42:37 (September 12, 1983). Also quoted in Biggar, “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books.”

10. reduce the three Library of Congress buildings: The article describes the data-retrieval jukebox that is “humming away” in the basement of the Madison building: “Deputy librarian W.J. Welsh says the jukebox, part of a three-year, $2.1 million pilot program, is the face of the bibliographical future — one that could shrink the library’s entire 80 million item collection into one of the library’s three existing building[s].” Ken Ringle, “Card Catalogue to Be Filed Away; Library Turns to Computers,” The Washington Post, November 13, 1984, p. A1, final edition. See also Ellen Z. Hahn, “The Library of Congress Optical Disk Pilot Program: A Report on the Print Project Activities,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 42:44 (October 31, 1983), which gives space and “compaction” as one of the justifications of the optical-disk program. Hahn writes that “miniaturization in some form” is essential because “the likelihood of building another Library building on Capitol Hill is at best remote.” The scanning will be destructive: “In most cases, the print material, that is, periodicals, will be guillotined and then scanned automatically at a rate of one page every two seconds.” One of the benefits of the optical-disk program, according to a later article, is “the elimination of the not-on-shelf or ‘N.O.S.’ problem”: if you destroy the item in order to scan it, it is no longer part of the collection, and therefore won’t be missing when you look for it. Library of Congress, “Library Announces Public Opening of Access to Optical Disk Technology,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:7 (February 17, 1986).

11. war propaganda: During the war, “a division for the study of propaganda analysis was established. What later became the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services was first set up as the Division of Special Information in the Library of Congress….A War Agencies Collection gave duly accredited representatives of the Government access to materials which, for reasons of security, had to be withheld from the public….Exhibits, broadcasts, lectures were designed to reflect the war aims of the United States….Mr. MacLeish was frequently absent, sometimes for extended periods, first as director of the Office of Facts and Figures, subsequently as assistant director of the Office of War Information.” David C. Mearns, The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress, 1800–1946 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1947), p. 214.

12. letter of agreement: The text of the agreement between MacLeish and Donovan is reproduced in William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance (New York: Dial, 1977), pp. 141–44n.

13. “bursting at the seams”: Gurney and Apple, Library of Congress, p. 17.

14. marble-finned kitsch box: The building “reminds some critics of the monumental architecture of the Third Reich.” Stephen Klaidman, “Cultural Center Problems Are Space, Money, Boredom,” The Washington Post, June 12, 1977, p. B1.

15. “miniaturiz[ing] existing collections”: Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians.”

16. “Networking can and should”: Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians.”

CHAPTER 15 — The Road to Avernus

1. groundless guesswork: “Perhaps the most outrageous of Barrow’s distortions of prior work was his equation of 25 years of natural age to 72 hours in a dry oven at 100ºC., with his use of multiples of 72 hours to represent multiples of 25 years. This must have been based on ruler measurement of freehand lines in charts in one NBS [National Bureau of Standards] study; yet this study, the only direct comparison of natural and accelerated aging available when Barrow introduced his equation, warned explicitly and repeatedly that the four data points on which the charts were based were insufficient for quantitative treatment. Later work has removed all credibility from Barrow’s equation; yet it is apparently still used by some librarians and vendors.” Thomas Conroy, “The Need for a Re-evaluation of the Use of Alum in Book Conservation and the Book Arts,” Book and Paper Group Annual 8 (Washington, D.C.: Book and Paper Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, 1989), p. 14n.

2. three days in an artificial-aging oven: Barrow Research Laboratory, Test Data of Naturally Aged Papers (Richmond, Va.: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1964), p. 21. See also Verner Clapp, “The Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper, 1115–1970 (part 2),” Scholarly Publishing, April 1971, and Smith, “Paper Impermanence,” p. 186.

3. Barrow’s results: Deterioration of Book Stock, Causes and Remedies, conducted by W. J. Barrow, ed. Randolph W. Church (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1959), p. 15.

4. “The research carried out”: Leon J. Stout et al. of the Preservation Committee of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, “Guaranteeing a Library for the Future,” Restaurator 8:4 (1987).

5. “Barrow startled the library world”: Rutherford D. Rogers, “Library Preservation: Its Scope, History, and Importance,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program.

6. Perhaps all those who, like Peter Sparks: “Library officials say that unless the destruction is stopped, 97 percent of the volumes in the federal government’s premier library — also the world’s largest information storage center — will eventually disintegrate. All other libraries are thought to face the same problem. ‘It’s a very serious problem but, fortunately, we think we’re moving rapidly toward a solution that we think is very promising,’ said Peter G. Sparks, director of the library’s Mass Deacidification Program.” Rensenberger, “Acid Test.”

7. “From the investigations”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 87.

8. hire some statisticians: Council on Library Resources, Sixth Annual Report, p. 22.

9. “these 1.75 billion pages”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 27.

10. Robert N. DuPuis: DuPuis also worked at General Foods. At Philip Morris, he became chairman of the Industry Technical Group of TIRC, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, stalwart funder of pro-cigarette scientific research. Another Philip Morris scientist, John D. Hind, served as a consultant to the Barrow lab; see Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book: A Two-Year Research Program (Richmond: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1963).

11. DuPuis wrote memos: Richard Kluger writes that “Philip Morris’s research director, Robert DuPuis, sent a memo dated July 20, 1956, from Richmond to the company’s top officers in New York reporting in ventilated cigarettes ‘a proved decrease in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide plus an increase in oxygen content of the smoke’; the former, he explained, was ‘related to decreased harm to the circulatory system as a result of smoking,’ while the latter meant there would be less chance of depriving cells of oxygen ‘and of starting a possible chain of events leading to the formation of a cancer cell.’ ” Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 184. See also Council on Library Resources, Twelfth Annual Report (1968), p. 29.

12. “If we do find any”: Gene Borio, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue Draft: Corporate Activity Project: Part 1, undated, www.tobacco.org/Documents/jonesday1.htm, p. 101. DuPuis appeared on the second of two See It Now programs on “Cigarettes and Lung Cancer,” CBS TV, June 7, 1955.

13. Vacudyne: See Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation,” and Gene Borio, “Secret Tobacco Document Quotes,” www.tobacco.org; Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, discusses tobacco ammoniation.

14. Litton Bionetics: Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation.” Litton also performed the DEZ tests on guinea pigs: the report is entitled Guinea Pig Dermal Sensitization Study DEZ (Diethyl Zinc) Treated Paper and Untreated Paper, Final Report (Rockville, Md.: Litton Bionetics), 1984.

15. caused headaches and nausea: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 27.

16. “comparatively expensive”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 28.

17. “sensible solution”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 29.

18. “storage, binding, and other maintenance costs”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 28.

19. “already the standard method”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 28.

20. long, multi-part essay: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper,” Scholarly Publishing, January, April, and July 1971.

21. known and advised since 1948: Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” p. 47.

22. “an essentially solitary worker”: Clapp, “The Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 362.

23. a formula developed by the S. D. Warren: S. D. Warren had a recipe that employed “lime mud,” an alkaline substance; the paper performed better in accelerated-aging tests. See Richard D. Smith, “Deacidification Technologies: State of the Art,” in Luner, Paper Preservation.

24. “treated his sources crudely”: Thomas Conroy, “Methodology of Testing for Permanence of Paper — Progress Notes no. 2—Tentative Outline,” quoted in Roggia, “William James Barrow,” p. 7.

25. “aggressive promoter”: Roggia, “William James Barrow,” p. 177.

26. “widely, if incorrectly, credited”: Roggia, “William James Barrow,” p. 176.

27. “stop holding onto myths”: Roggia, “William James Barrow,” pp. 166–76.

28. “I have spent many hundreds of hours”: Verner Clapp, letter to Bernard Barrow, August 19, 1968, in Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” pp. 100–101.

29. “catastrophic decline”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 230.

30. “disastrous condition of paper”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 231.

31. “The Road to Avernus”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (January 1971), p. 114. The phrase alludes to Virgil’s Aeneid 6:126. The Avernian Lake, near Vesuvius, whose sulphurous vapors supposedly killed any bird that flew over it, was an entrance to hell.

32. “librarian/archivist’s worst enemy”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (January 1971), p. 115.

CHAPTER 16 — It’s Not Working Out

1. “knew more about old papers”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 356.

2. He quit college: Sally Cruz Roggia, “William James Barrow,” in Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998).

3. “The Barrow laminating process”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (January 1971), p. 112.

4. same substance that microfilm: Barrow published an early description of his method, entitled “The Barrow Method of Laminating Documents,” in the Journal of Documentary Reproduction 2:2 (June 1939), which in the thirties and forties was a center of microfilm theory. An experienced operator could laminate between 75 and 125 documents per hour, wrote Barrow.

5. Protectoid: James L. Gear, “Lamination after 30 Years: Record and Prospect,” American Archivist 28:2 (April 1965).

7. The reason that Barrow knew: See Smith, “Deacidification Technologies.”

8. New York Public Library: Five rare playbills from the NYPL’s theater collection were the first to be treated to the Barrow process, in 1956. John Baker, “Preservation Programs of the New York Public Library.”

9. the Library of Congress: Barrow demonstrated his lamination process at the Library of Congress in 1951, at a staff forum called “Techniques for the Preservation of the Collections,” presided over by Verner Clapp and Luther Evans. “The acetate film seals up the document and makes it relatively resistant to acidic gases and other injurious elements in the air,” reported the Library of Congress Information Bulletin. At the same forum, Barrow also previewed his experimental technique of ink-lifting: the “process of transferring print from a deteriorated paper to a good rag paper” by stripping off a layer of ink onto a sheet of acetate and then laminating the acetate to a sheet of rag paper. “Staff Forum,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 10:42 (October 15, 1951). In an obituary of Barrow published in the Eleventh Annual Report (1967) of the Council on Library Resources, the Library of Congress is said to have “availed itself of this technique for a number of important documents” (p. 46). In addition to a regular-size laminator, the Library of Congress also bought from Barrow a large laminator for maps. [William James Barrow], Procedures and Equipment Used in the Barrow Method of Restoring Manuscripts and Documents (Richmond: W. J. Barrow, 1961), p. 11.

10. “We have found”: David H. Stam, “The Questions of Preservation,” in Welsh, Research Libraries — Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, p. 313.

11. Zentrum für Bucherhaltung: Ann Olszewski, the Preservation Librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, sent a book from her library’s local-history collection to ZFB for restoration. Olszewski’s predecessor had sent the book to Booklab for photocopying, where it was disbound, but Olszewski didn’t throw it away. Post paper-splitting, the repaired book is “nothing short of miraculous,” she says.

CHAPTER 17 — Double Fold

1. MIT Fold Tester: Barrow used a slightly gentler device that oscillated through ninety degrees. It was built to his own specifications, making independent verification of his results impossible; later he used the MIT machine exclusively; in any case, the nature of the mechanical stress is the same.

2. “Changes in folding endurance”: D. F. Caulfield and D. E. Gunderson, “Paper Testing and Strength Characteristics,” in Luner, Paper Preservation. “It has long been known,” writes Robert Feller, “that folding endurance decreases markedly in the early stages of thermal aging of paper, whereas tensile strength does not.” Robert L. Feller, Accelerated Aging (Marina del Rey, Calif.: Getty Conservation Institute, 1994).

3. B. L. Browning: B. L. Browning, “The Nature of Paper,” in Deterioration and Preservation of Library Materials, ed. Howard W. Winger and Richard D. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Caulfield and Gunderson similarly note that the results of fold-endurance tests “vary widely even on presumably identical samples.” See also Gerhard Banik and Werner K. Sobotka, “Deacidification and Strengthening of Bound Newspapers Through Aqueous Immersion,” in Luner, Paper Preservation: “Although the folding endurance is a sensitive test procedure, it only leads to reasonable results when applied to new and strong paper samples.”

4. “While folding endurance”: Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper,” p. 133, n. 2.

5. “None of the commonly used paper tests”: Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper,” p. 133.

6. “simulates the bending of a leaf”: Barrow Research Laboratory, Test Data of Naturally Aged Papers (Richmond, Va.: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1964), p. 13.

7. one of the Barrow Laboratory’s books: Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book.

8. one of the last big experiments: Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book — V: Strength and Other Characteristics of Book Papers, 1800–1899 (Richmond: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1967).

9. Clapp’s literary assistance: “Clapp’s editorial aid to Barrow was of the most intensive kind — typically page-on-page of notes suggesting the clarification of meaning, restructuring and reordering of text, deletion of whole sections, and addition of fact and opinion. There is no evidence that Clapp provided such extensive and extended collaboration to any other person at any time.” Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” pp. 50–51.

10. including seven books: Frazer G. Poole, “William James Barrow,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (New York: Dekker, 1969).

11. “An ‘unusable’ record”: Williams, Preservation of Deteriorating Books, p. 15. Williams is following Barrow, who at one point defined as “unusable” a book having a fold endurance of between one tenth of a fold and one fold. “A leaf in a book of this strength should be turned with much care and is unsuitable for use unless restored.” Barrow Research Laboratory, Test Data of Naturally Aged Papers, p. 41. (Barrow’s fractional folds are scientifically meaningless, by the way.) Elsewhere, Barrow says that papers that fail to survive three folds on an MIT tester are “brittle papers needing restoration.” Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book, p. 10.

12. whose page “breaks off”: Preservation Department, Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, Preservation Department Manual, www.indiana.edu/~libpres/Manual/prsmanual2.htm, last revised March 16, 2000.

13. “four corner test”: Mono Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging (MARC), MARC Procedures: Brittle Books, Northwestern University, www.library.nwu.edu/marc/procedures/brittle.htm, last revised March 10, 1999.

14. “when a lower corner”: “Brittle Books Replacement Processing,” Memorandum 95-1, Ohio State University Libraries Preservation Office, www.lib.ohio-state.edu/OSU_profile/preweb/memo951.htm, July 1995. Brittle books under this definition “are not able to be rebound or routinely repaired.”

15. “very gentle tug”: Preservation Department, University of Maryland Libraries, Brittle Materials and Reformatting Unit, www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/TSD/PRES/checkrelated.htm, last revised July 28, 1999.

16. “in jeopardy when anyone”: Paul Koda, “The Condition of the University of Maryland Libraries’ Collections,” Technical Services Division, University of Maryland Libraries, www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/TSD/PRES/surtext.htm, last revised March 5, 1999.

17. Columbia University: In 1987, Columbia’s method was as follows: “To TEST FOR PAPER STRENGTH fold the lower corner of page 50 back-and-forth three times. (For volumes less than 100 pages long, fold corner of page located about 1/3 of the way from title page.) If the paper withstands folding and a slight tug it is strong and can be sent for commercial treatment. If paper folds 2 or 3 times but then falls off it is borderline brittle and must be sent to the Conservation Lab for treatment. If the paper breaks easily it is brittle and can only be replaced, filmed, photocopied or boxed.” Columbia University Libraries, Preservation Department, The Preservation of Library Materials: A CUL Handbook, 4th ed., March 1987, p. 2.

18. “A book is considered”: “Definition of Brittleness,” Reprographics Unit, Preservation Department, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, web.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/repro/brittle/britdef.htm, last revised December 3, 1996.

19. “planned deterioration”: “Planned Deterioration: Guidelines for Withdrawal,” Reprographics Unit, University of Florida, web.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/repro/brittle/autowd_pd.htm, 1998.

20. If and when: George A. Smathers Libraries, Preservation Bulletin 7.6, August 11, 1992, web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/manual/CMManual7-6.htm, part of A Manual for Collection Managers. This particular Florida document defines an item as brittle if it fails to survive a “double fold test measure less than six.” Though the chapter is dated 1992, the Manual is listed as “Updated 5/17/99.”

21. “one cannot qualify a book page”: Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper,” p. 133. See also David Erhardt, Charles S. Tumosa, and Marion F. Mecklenburg, “Material Consequences of the Aging of Paper,” in Preprints, ICOM Committee for Conservation, vol. 2, twelfth triennial meeting, Lyon, 1999: “Even quite degraded paper retains most of its elasticity, and it is only ‘abuse’, such as folding over a corner, that results in damage. Careful handling is still safe.”

CHAPTER 18 — A New Test

Edmund Gosse: A company called Archival Survival microfilmed Questions at Issue in 1991 for New York University’s preservation department.

I turned the page: Really I should say “I turned the leaf”: bibliographers make a distinction between leaves and pages, there being a page on either side of a leaf. But I’m speaking loosely here.

not have been creased in vain: Linda White, author of Packaging the American Word, the survey of book bindings at the Library of Congress (since suppressed by the library), tested all the books in her sample for brittleness in the approved Library of Congress manner by folding a corner until it broke. She found that only fifteen books, out of 294 she tested (i.e., the 294 she was able to test out of the 400 she took from the catalog as her sample, some of which were missing or Not on Shelf or destroyed after filming), were classifiable (using Library of Congress definitions) as “Brittle Unusable.” (Some of the other books from her sample that had been reformatted and destroyed would presumably have failed their fold tests, too, however.) White told me that in the first ten or so fold tests that she performed, she made fairly big corners, and then they got gradually smaller. “Toward the end they’re just these tiny little things, because I started feeling so guilty about taking those corners off.” She kept the broken-off folds in a Baggie in her desk.

Barrow once took a reporter: “The Paper Man,” Richmond News Leader, June 8, 1963; quoted in Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation.”

CHAPTER 19 — Great Magnitude

Stanford University: Sarah Buchanan and Sandra Coleman, Deterioration Survey of the Stanford University Libraries Green Library Stack Collection, June 1979. “When fold test of 6 folds employed at corner; breaking or tearing occurs when corner tugged gently.” I’m assuming (I hope correctly) that the six folds are single folds, convertible into three double folds.

“in the judgement of experienced”: Robert R. V. Wiederkehr, The Design and Analysis of a Sample Survey of the Condition of Books in the Library of Congress (Rockville, Md.: King Research, 1984), p. 20. Wiederkehr writes that “if a book has paper so brittle that FOLD is 0 to 1, it should be preserved by microfilming rather than deacidification, and is assigned a value for FOLDC1 of 0.”

“The Yale Survey”: Gay Walker et al., “The Yale Survey: A Large-Scale Study of Book Deterioration in the Yale University Library,” College and Research Libraries, March 1985.

“Water leaks occurred”: Gay Walker, “The Evolution of Yale’s Preservation Program,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program, p. 53.

“To get a piece of the action”: Peter Sparks, “Marketing for Preservation,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program, p. 75.

Haas’s undergraduate thesis: Warren James Haas, English Book Censorship, Thesis, Bachelor of Library Science, University of Wisconsin (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, for the Association of College and Reference Libraries, 1955), Microcard [microfiche]. Haas begins with a quotation from a 1664 pamphlet that he found in Bigmore and Wyman’s A Bibliography of Printing (1884): “Printing is like a good dish of meat, which moderatly eaten of turns to the nourishment and health of the body; but immoderately, to surfeits and sickness.” It looks as if the Library of Congress microfilmed and discarded an original three-volume Quaritch edition (250 copies printed, 1880–1886) of this work.

Preparation of Detailed Specifications: Warren J. Haas, Preparation of Detailed Specifications for a National System for the Preservation of Library Materials (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, February 1972).

“much master negative microfilm”: Haas, Preparation, p. 10. A master can be hard to find sometimes. One survey noted in 1992 that “many micropublishers currently listed in machine readable bibliographic records have moved, sold all or portions of their businesses, or are no longer supplying microfilm copies of masters.” Erich Kesse, “Survey of Micropublishers,” A Report to the Commission on Preservation and Access, October 1992. Robert DeCandido says that “the master has to some extent become a public resource. Certainly a compelling argument can be made that the fate of that film is a matter of public concern and its destruction or loss is against the public interest. In the same way that historic and cultural landmarks are legally protected even if privately owned, so should preservation microfilm masters have some sort of restrictions on their use and disposal.” True, and yet a “microfilm master” is in fact a copy: DeCandido, who ran the Shelf and Binding Preparation Office at the New York Public Library during a period when the library was destroying large numbers of books, fails to extend his analysis to cover the real master — not the film, but the original document. Robert DeCandido, “Considerations in Evaluating Searching for Microform Availability,” Microform Review 19:3 (summer 1990).

“ultrafiche”: See E. M. Grieder, “Ultrafiche Libraries: A Librarian’s View,” Microform Review, April 1972. “Two- and four-year colleges or emerging universities are most likely to be tempted by these collections. They may feel the lack of large foundation collections, and perhaps hunger for more impressive libraries.” See also Mark R. Yerburgh and Rhoda Yerburgh, “Where Have All the Ultras Gone? The Rise and Demise of the Ultrafiche Library Collection, 1968–1973,” Microfilm Review 13 (fall 1984). In 1968, a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica called Library Resources charged $21,500 for more than twelve thousand books, pamphlets, documents, and periodicals, reproduced on 12,474 ultrafiches. While acknowledging that ultrafiche collections ultimately failed, the Yerburghs contend that the “librarian must declare war on microform illiteracy and user resistance.” They point out that a 1968 proposal by David Hays was the proximate cause of the ultrafiche fervor. In 1966, however, Clapp’s Council on Library Resources had paid Republic Aviation, builder of fighter planes and photoreconnaissance aircraft, to investigate “an ultra-fiche storage and retrieval system.” See David G. Hays, A Billion Books for Education in America and the World; a Proposal (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1968); and Council on Library Resources, Twelfth Annual Report (1968).

“should weigh heavily”: Haas, Preparation, p. 25.

“federal financial support”: Haas, Preparation, p. 27.

even perhaps a film: Haas, Preparation, p. 14.

former OSS outpost chief in Paris: John Edward (Jack) Sawyer was head of the Mellon Foundation from 1975 to 1987. His career in the Office of Strategic Services is mentioned in Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 385–86.

“savvy, shrewdness”: James M. Morris, “The Foundation Connection,” in Influencing Change in Research Librarianship: A Festschrift for Warren J. Haas, ed. Martin M. Cummings (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 1988), p. 73.

“Careful analytical work”: [Warren Haas], Brittle Books: Reports of the Committee on Preservation and Access (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 1986), p. 7.

CHAPTER 20 — Special Offer

“collection building”: Veaner, “Crisis in Micropublication,” pp. 448–53. In 1990, Susan Cady wrote that the “quality of a research library is still measured primarily by the size of its holdings. Microforms are counted within those holdings as items owned (film rolls, microfiche pieces, etc.) and titles held. Thus they enhance the status of the institution at a relatively low cost in terms of both purchase price and storage space.” Cady herself has no regrets about the loss of the newspapers: she says that the “preservation of newspapers by microfilming has been one of the real success stories of this technology.” Susan A. Cady, “The Electronic Revolution in Libraries: Microfilm Déjà Vu?” College and Research Libraries, July 1990.

accreditation: Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”

shady entrepreneurs: Veaner, “Crisis in Micropublication.”

“disposing easily and profitably”: Murray S. Martin, “Matters Arising from the Minutes: A Further Consideration of Microform-Serials Exchange,” Microform Review 2 (April 1973); and “New Microfilms for Old Books,” American Libraries, February 1970. Martin points out that “a minimum sale of ten to fifteen copies is necessary for a micropublisher to reach a break-even point.” When he was associate dean of libraries at Penn State, Martin wrote: “It may save money to buy microforms instead of holding on to bound volumes, but if the volumes were not used before, they are unlikely to be used in the new format in which case even more money would be saved by discarding them altogether.” Murray Martin, “Promoting Microforms to Students and Faculty,” Microform Review 8:2 (spring 1979).

“to cooperate with micropublishers”: Pamela Darling, “Developing a Preservation Microfilming Program,” Library Journal, November 1, 1974.

Iowa’s NEH- and state-funded newspaper project: Prison inmates hired by the State Historical Society of Iowa prepped the pages. But the historical society didn’t participate in Heritage’s free filming offer, because they wanted to keep control of their master negatives.

“gilded age”: Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”

“Let’s suppose that the user”: Salmon, “User Resistance.”

“an information burial system”: Harold Wooster, Microfiche 1969—a User Survey (Arlington, Va.: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1969), quoted in Salmon, “User Resistance.” Another librarian wrote Wooster: “Daily we have an experience which breaks my librarians’ hearts. Our users come in or call up for information. We research and locate it. In those instances when they are told we have it only on microfiche, the reply is ‘forget it’ usually accompanied by an emphatic wave of a hand.” Daniel Gore writes: “Underlying most decisions to purchase microcollections is, I believe, an instinctive realization that such things will, with few exceptions, get little or no use once they are acquired.” Daniel Gore, “The View from the Tower of Babel,” in To Know a Library (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), originally published in Library Journal, September 15, 1975; quoted in John Swan, “Micropermanence and Electronic Evanescence,” Microform Review 20:2 (spring 1991).

“the plain fact is that”: Spaulding, “Kicking the Silver Habit.”

“we need massive infusions”: Margaret S. Child, “The Future of Cooperative Preservation Microfilming,” Library Resources and Technical Services 29:1 (January/March 1985): 96.

“need to be targeted”: Child, “Future,” p. 100.

“the general public needs”: Child, “Future,” p. 100.

“universal panacea”: Child, “Future,” p. 96.

CHAPTER 21 — 3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars

“Analysis of the Magnitude”: Robert M. Hayes, “Analysis of the Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits of the Preservation of Research Library Books: A Working Paper Prepared for the Council on Library Resources,” January 21, 1985. With further funding from the Council on Library Resources, Hayes followed this up with a longer report in 1987, which included a revealing survey of attitudes toward microfilm. (“Nearly half the respondents regarded microform, in general, as UNACCEPTABLE,” Hayes writes, and he quotes responses such as “Film is the last resort; never use if we can get copy”; and “Personally abhor microfilm for use”; and “Intolerable for reading, especially hard technical reading”; and “Easier to see thing in newspaper in the original.”) The second, expanded version was entitled “The Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits of the Preservation of Brittle Books,” November 30, 1987; in it, the original 1985 working paper was reprinted, exactly as it was first published, as “Report #0.” Robert M. Hayes, e-mail letter to author, June 21, 1999.

Hayes was a network consultant: Hayes’s papers are at UCLA; the OCLC entry for them (accession no. 37992540) includes a biographical note. See also Anne Woodsworth and Barbara von Wahlde, eds., Leadership for Research Libraries: A Festschrift for Robert M. Hayes (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988), which includes an incomplete biography and a bibliography — Hayes’s work for the military is either unmentioned or shielded behind acronyms such as USAFBMD.

SWAC: The Standards Western Automatic Computer was designed by an Englishman, Harry Huskey, in 1950. Robert Hayes used it on problems of “matrix decomposition,” but the SWAC was also employed to calculate Mersenne primes, useful for cryptography. Hayes wrote me: “Much of the work of staff at the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA”—home of the SWAC—“was actually concerned with coding and decoding methods. I am sure that NSA funding was important. That wasn’t the focus of my own work, so I cannot say for certain, but from all that I have learned since then, I am sure it was the case.”

Magnavox: In the late fifties, Magnavox invented the Magnacard system of information storage, an unsuccessful product. Also, as subcontractors for Kodak, Magnavox’s engineers worked on the electronics for the Minicard System, developed for the Air Force and the CIA.

Joseph Becker: Hayes had no consulting contracts with the CIA, he informs me; he took care not to discuss the CIA with Becker. Hayes would have been “delighted to have had such contracts for both financial and intellectual reasons,” but they were not forthcoming.

“The most far-reaching solution”: Robert M. Hayes and Joseph Becker, Handbook of Data Processing for Libraries (New York: Becker and Hayes, 1970), p. 69.

“effectively destroying”: Hayes, “The Cost Analysis for the Preservation Project: Report # 3 on the Preservation Project,” in his “The Magnitude,” p. 27.

a 1984 “Preservation Plan”: Hayes, “Analysis of the Magnitude,” p. 15.

CHAPTER 22 — Six Thousand Bodies a Day

“many documents”: Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 1.

“dangerously brittle state”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 40.

“Across the country”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 39.

“facing extinction”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 31.

“French generals”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 35.

“almost a dead book”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 23.

“A mind is a terrible”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 24. Vartan Gregorian may not have written this speech himself and so perhaps should not be held responsible for all of it. Gregorian’s remarks were repeated nearly verbatim a year later in a talk by the New York Public Library’s Richard De Gennaro. Here is Gregorian, before Congress: “Anyone of us who uses books and paper is exposed to the problem of deteriorating paper. Looking at a four day old Washington Post, or a four year old paperback, they decay before our eyes.” Here is De Gennaro: “Any one of us who uses books and paper is exposed to the problem of deteriorating paper. Look at a four-day-old newspaper or a four-year-old paperback. They decay before our eyes.” Richard De Gennaro, “Research Libraries: Mankind’s Memory at Risk,” in Luner, Paper Preservation. De Gennaro went on to run Harvard’s library system.

“Our thrust at the Endowment”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 3.

“has only been in the forefront”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 37.

“We are dependent upon people”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 33.

“Our research houses”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 44.

“join in the task”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 61.

“a kind of giant step”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 125.

“The purpose of the work”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 60.

“The books themselves”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 58.

“It is not unlikely”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 109.

CHAPTER 23 — Burning Up

Haas himself (blue shirt): Terry Sanders, Slow Fires, written by Ben Maddow and narrated by Robert MacNeil, a presentation of the American Film Foundation (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 1987). The film exists in an hour version and a half-hour version. The longer version was the original one; this account is based on it.

trying tendentiousness: For example, near the end of Slow Fires, we move slowly past an enormous computer, while Robert MacNeil says, “Stone, clay, canvas, paper, tape, and disk — a human diary, a chain of knowledge that connects everyone to everyone else. All our faith, passion, and skill — all the horror and beauty of the generations past — are left for us to ponder, unless we choose to let it wither, disintegrate, burn, and die, leaving us to stumble in the dark.”

Grand Prize: The Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter, November — December 1989. Daniel Boorstin, however, says some excellent things in the film about the book as a technological achievement and, perhaps with diethyl zinc on his mind, calls the library “a laboratory of our memory and a catalyst of our expectations.”

“do anything to help”: Commission on Preservation and Access, “ ‘Slow Fires’ Film Wins Award, is Widely Shown,” Newsletter insert, February 1988.

“giant Brittle Books exhibit”: See the photograph in the Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 20 (February 1990). The exhibit included a leather-bound book, two feet by three feet, with some distressed bits of paper arranged in front of it, and a quotation from Slow Fires reproduced in large letters: “The great task of libraries, worldwide, is the preservation of the ordinary.”

“ ‘slow fires,’ triggered”: Quoted in Merrily Taylor, “Paper — Why Friends Should Care About It!” Among Friends of the Library of Brown University 5:2 (March 1989).

CHAPTER 24 — Going, Going, Gone

“She will emerge”: Billy E. Frye (provost of Emory University and chairman of Battin’s Commission on Preservation and Access), speaking in 1996 CAUSE Elite Award Winner: Patricia Battin (Washington, D.C.: CAUSE, 1996), videotape.

Booz, Allen and Hamilton: The grant was “sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries in cooperation with the American Council on Education under a grant from the Council on Library Resources.” Warren Haas was president of the Association of Research Libraries when he got the grant for Columbia. Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Organization and Staffing of the Libraries of Columbia University (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1972).

“the personal computer”: Patricia Battin, “The Electronic Library — a Vision for the Future,” EDUCOM Bulletin, summer 1984.

“The basic shape of our collections”: Patricia Battin, “Preservation at the Columbia University Libraries,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program, p. 37.

“active assault”: Battin, “Preservation at the Columbia University Libraries,” p. 37.

oversewing: W. Elmo Reavis invented the oversewing machine and began selling it in 1920. Like Barrow’s process of lamination, oversewing was something that seemed fast and cheap and durable at the time, but it is irreversible, and it has worked out badly. You begin by milling off the back of the book. This destroys the serried integrity of its signatures, so that it can’t from then on be repaired in the traditional way, by “sewing through the fold,” and it removes about an eighth of an inch of inner margin. The oversewing needles stab obliquely into the paper from there, consuming more margin. If you then try, a decade later, to rebind an oversewn book, you have to mill off the back a second time, and you may end up with a book so tightly bound that you can barely get it open enough to read the inner text; the pages are likely to break and pull out at their puncture-points as you try to force them open, say, facedown on a photocopier. Between 1920 and 1986 (when specifications underwent modifications), countless books were oversewn that shouldn’t have been, as libraries decommissioned or reduced their in-house binderies and sent books to commercial firms equipped with Elmo Reavis’s angle-stabbing machines and their descendants. See Elmo Reavis’s appendix to Library Binding Manual: A Handbook of Useful Procedures for the Maintenance of Library Volumes, ed. Maurice F. Tauber (Boston: Library Binding Institute, 1972); and Jan Merrill-Oldham and Paul Parisi, Guide to the Library Binding Institute Standard for Library Binding (Chicago: American Library Association, 1990); and Robert DeCandido and Paul Parisi, eds., ANSI/NISO/LBI Standard for Library Binding, draft 7.3.1, June 12, 1998, sunsite.berkeley.edu/Binding/NISO7_4.txt.

“scraps of faded, rusted, brittle paper”: New York Public Library, “When Did Newspapers Begin to Use Wood Pulp Stock?” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 33 (1929).

“we will not add to our collections”: Battin, “Preservation at the Columbia University Libraries,” pp. 38–39.

“old boy network”: CAUSE, 1996 CAUSE Elite Award Winner. The CAUSE Elite Award was sponsored by Systems and Computer Technology (now SCT), which sells database software and consulting services to universities and government agencies. CAUSE was a non-profit corporation devoted to furthering the “use and management of information systems in higher education” (Jane N. Ryland, “CAUSE: Notes on a History,” September 1998, www.educause.edu/pub/chistory/chistory.htm); in 1998, it merged with Educom, another non-profit advocate of educational networks and information systems; the new entity became EDUCAUSE. One of the founders of Educom in the sixties was James Grier Miller, former psychopharmacologist and OSS spy evaluator; Educom’s acting president in 1970 was retired CIA man Joseph Becker. See Robert C. Herrick, “Educom: A Retrospective,” Educom Review 33:5 (1998), www.educause.edu/pub/ehistory/ehistory.htm; and EDUCAUSE, “EDUCAUSE is Official!” www.educause.edu/coninfo/educause_official.htm (July 1, 1998) (viewed October 25, 2000). The current president of EDUCAUSE is Brian L. Hawkins, who was for a decade a computer administrator at Brown University and an adviser to companies such as IBM, Apple, NeXT, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft; Hawkins and Patricia Battin together edited The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the Twenty-first Century (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998). Hawkins believes in a thoroughgoing liquidation of research collections: “Not only would electronic storage be far cheaper, it would also eliminate the present duplication,” he writes, in a chapter of The Mirage of Continuity entitled “The Unsustainability of the Traditional Library.” EDUCAUSE is jointly funded by educational institutions and by large corporations; IBM, for instance, is currently a “Platinum Partner,” meaning that in exchange for $100,000 or more in annual contributions, IBM receives “a guaranteed corporate presentation opportunity at the annual conference,” plus free advertising, the best floor space at the conference, and other benefits. The president of a company called Word of Mouse, which sells advertising on mouse-pads at university libraries, said that “the people at EDUCAUSE know my customers and open the right doors.” Word of Mouse is a Bronze Partner of EDUCAUSE. EDUCAUSE, “Corporate Partner Program,” www.educause.edu/partners (viewed October 25, 2000).

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

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

“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

“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

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

play by Robert de Flers: Francis de Croisset, Le Souvenir de Robert de 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

“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

“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

“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

“cost-effective buffer technology”: Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 21 (March 1990).

Technical Assessment Advisory Committee: The committee had a three-day retreat at the Coolfont Conference Center in September 1990, which the members judged “most productive.” Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter, September 1990.

The relatively simple substitution: See my essay “Discards,” in The Size of Thoughts (New York: Random House, 1996).

“Our biggest misjudgment was”: William Welsh, “Can Bill Welsh Conquer Time and Space for Libraries?” interview with Arthur Plotnik, American Libraries 15:11 (December 1984).

“only a small increment”: M. Stuart Lynn, “Digital Technologies, Preservation and Access,” The Commission on Preservation and Access Newsletter 43 (March 1992), www.clir.org/pubs/cpanews/cpan143.htm. Actually, Lynn’s words here are “have our cake and eat it. too” because the OCR program interpreted the comma as a period. Michael Lesk is similarly recorded as estimating the number of “books per square fool” that a building can hold. Michael Lesk, Preservation of New Technology, a report of the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee to the Commission on Preservation and Access (Washington, D.C.: Commission on Preservation and Access, October 1992), www.clir.org/pubs/reports/lesk/lesk2.htm. These are tiny errors that nonetheless demonstrate the importance of keeping the original printed report.

CHAPTER 35 — Suibtermanean Convumision

“anticipated resistance”: Task Force on Collection Management, Systemwide Operations and Planning Group, “Action/Decision Minutes,” February 26, 1999, UCI’s Information Page on UC Systemwide Library Planning, sun3.lib.uci.edu/~staff/system_wide.htm (viewed September 25, 2000).

“digital collections can alleviate”: Anne Kenney, “Digital Image Quality: From Conversion to Presentation and Beyond,” paper presented at the Scholarly Communication and Technology conference, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University, Atlanta, April 24–25, 1997, arl.cni.org/scomm/scat/kenney.htm.

“rapidly self-destructing”: Anne R. Kenney and Lynne K. Personius, The Cornell/Xerox/Commission on Preservation and Access Joint Study in Digital Preservation. Report: Phase 1, “Digital Capture, Paper Facsimiles, and Network Access” (December 1990).

extremely rare math books: Cornell University Library Math Book Collection, moa.cit.cornell.edu/dienst-data/cdl-math-browse.htm. For instance, one of the books, Pierre Maurice Duhem’s Sur les déformations permanentes et l’hysteresis (Brussels: Hayez, 1896), is listed on the OCLC database as existing in two places, at Princeton and at the Burndy Library of MIT. For an early work on hyperspace by Giuseppe Veronese entitled Fondamenti di geometria a più dimensioni (Padua: Tipografia del Seminario, 1891), there are six U.S. libraries on OCLC (and one in São Paulo) listed as owning the original book.

germ-free facsimiles: Kenney and Personius, Cornell/Xerox/Commission on Preservation and Access Joint Study.

Peruvian guano: Solon Robinson, Guano: A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers; Containing Plain Directions How to Apply Peruvian Guano to the Various Crops and Soils of America (New York, 1853). If my count is correct, there are twelve original copies of Guano in the OCLC database (perhaps of two editions, perhaps of one edition differently cataloged), plus twelve microfiche copies made in 1985 by Lost Cause Press and one roll of microfilm produced by the Ohio Historical Society in 1985 and owned by Marietta College. See the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University, cdl.library.cornell.edu/chla/. Solon Robinson writes: “With assurances to my friends that I have no other interest in the increased consumption of guano, I am most sincerely and respectfully, Your old Friend, Solon Robinson.”

“There may also be opportunities”: Kenney and Personius, Cornell/Xerox/Commission on Preservation and Access Joint Study.

“escalating cost of storage”: “The Making of America: Creating Electronic Pathways to Our Heritage,” Cornell University Library and Cornell Information Technologies, 1993. One of the aims of the Making of America project was to win over humanities scholars, who “lag behind their counterparts in the sciences and professions in making use of sources on-line.” The proposal also mentions that Cornell “is committed to a policy of no new library building projects for central campus beyond the year 2000.”

subterranean convulsion: “The Java Upheaval,” Manufacturer and Builder, January 1883, p. 219, cdl.library.cornell.edu. The URL for the page is cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/pageviewer?frames=1&coll=moa&view=50&root=%2Fmoa%wFmanu%2Fmanu0015%2F&tif=00225.TIF&cite=http%3A%2F%2Fcdl.library.cornell.edu%2Fcgi=bin%2Fmoa%2Fmoa-cgi%3Fnotisid%3DABS1821-0015-623; select “text” in the box next to “View as” to see the text that has been OCR’d from the image. I searched for the word “mmm” in Cornell’s scan of the monumental and already fully microfilmed compendium of Civil War documents called The War of the Rebellion and found this from volume seven, p. 285, about the capture of Fort Donelson: “Timat evemming lime emmemv landed thirteen steamuboat loads of fresh troops. It was minov- mmm~mniP~st we could not homing maimmtain onr position agaumist smieli overwhnel maiming mmumbers. I xvas Satistie (1 that their last trool)s xvere ot (~mmeral Bimell’s comninand. We felt time wammt of re-elminoreemminemints, bmmt did not ask for thenin, because we knew they were not to be had.” The scanned image of this page is legible; the OCR text is, however, a wreck.

“OCR accuracy is high”: I found this note by clicking on “A note on viewing the plain text of this volume” while browsing by title and year.

“to preserve the informational content”: This production note appears on the first scanned page.

“due to the brittle nature”: Cornell University Library, “The Conversion Process,” Making of America, cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_conversion.htm.

truffle hunting: Cornell’s Making of America database helped me find the poem about mummy paper in Punch, because it was republished (with no date) in Littell’s Living Age (which Cornell scanned and discarded), as well as the mummy item in Scientific American.

CHAPTER 36 — Honest Disagreement

“Think about space costs”: Pamela W. Darling, “Microforms in Libraries: Preservation and Storage,” Microform Review 5:2 (April 1976). Darling also points out that the “cost of the microform is almost always less than would be the cost of binding the original issues, and no one has to claim missing issues, replace lost covers, or give readers no service for months while last year’s volumes are ‘At Bindery.’ Instead, the original issues can be held in the periodical reading area for as long as interest keeps them ‘current,’ and then sold, exchanged or discarded since the microform will be available for backfile reference.” In a 1974 article in Library Journal, Darling said that microfilm was “a medium more stable than paper,” which “takes up 90 percent less space to store.” “Developing a Preservation Microfilming Program,” p. 2803.

“keep re-examining”: Pamela W. Darling, “A Local Preservation Program: Where to Start” (an article based on a paper presented at a “Books in Peril” conference), Library Journal, November 15, 1976. As a grande dame of the preservation movement, Darling later wrote the introduction to Nancy Gwinn’s textbook, Preservation Microfilming.

special consultant: “National Preservation Program Office Expands,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin, November 5, 1984.

self-study manual: Pamela Darling, ed., Preservation Planning Program: An Assisted Self-Study Manual for Libraries (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1982).

“may well be cheaper”: Patricia Battin, “The Management of Knowledge: Issues for the Twenty-first Century,” paper presented at the seventh international seminar, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Library Center, Kanazawa, Japan, 1989, in Welsh, Research Libraries, p. 399. On the same page, Battin writes Byronically of the “tangled web of new interdependencies” brought about by our growing dependence upon technology.

“millions of books”: Patricia Battin, Written Statement of Patricia Battin, Past President, Commission on Preservation and Access, on the Fiscal Year 1996 Appropriations for the National Endowment for the Humanities, March 31, 1995.