The Way the World Works

Truckin’ for the Future

I got a call from the Rochester Public Library, the library I used most as a child. They were getting rid of their card catalog; I had written about card catalogs at some length in The New Yorker. Did I want it? If I paid for shipping, they would mail it from Rochester to Berkeley — minus the cabinets, which had resale value. I said no, I didn’t want it, I wanted them to keep it. So they threw it out.

About a year later, I got some unhappy e-mails from librarians at the San Francisco Public Library. The SFPL had just moved to a new building, and the press was responding with prolonged, ecstatic coverage. Robert Hass, U.S. poet laureate, wrote that “the interior of the library is a marvel, so deeply delicious you forget your previous ideas of what a library is”; Allan Temko, architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, likened its several inner bridges to “the visionary architecture of Piranesi.” The old card catalog, however, was, according to the librarians who wrote me, going to be destroyed — the cards recycled, the cabinets auctioned off. For now it still sat intact in the old building: an ornately carved summation of the contents of a great urban public library, “frozen” (i.e., not filed into or updated) as of 1991. “You are the only one who can save it now,” a librarian wrote me.

Because I felt I had shirked my duty as a preservationist in my hometown, I agreed to try to keep it intact. On May 21, 1996, I made a formal request under the Public Records Act to inspect the card catalog. (The Public Records Act is California’s version of the federal Freedom of Information Act.) This legalistic demarche would, I hoped, define the catalog as a public document, and temporarily prevent the administration from treating it as surplus property. The request was not unreasonable: the database conversion project wasn’t finished, and there were thousands of cards in the card catalog for books held in closed-stack areas of the library that had no match yet in the online system. (More than half the library’s collection was in closed, unbrowsable stacks.) The request was, however, denied, in a letter from the city librarian, Kenneth E. Dowlin: “We are unable to allow this at this time.”

So, inspired by the library’s own letterhead, which reads: “Access, Discover, Empower,” I sued for legal access. On June 26, 1996, eighteen drawers from the old card catalog were brought over to the new building, where I was allowed to use them. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors proposed and passed a nonbinding resolution “urging the Library Commission to preserve the card catalog at the Main Library and make it available to the public.” On September 3, 1996, after hours of public testimony, the Library Commission voted to find a way to keep it.

But by the time I was successfully looking up names like Walter Benjamin, John Milton, and J. K. Huysmans on paper cards — and noticing that there were substantially fewer books in the online catalog by these writers than there were in the card catalog — I had spent over a month talking to members of the library staff. I knew the real story, which is only incidentally about catalogs.

The real story is about what happens — what to a greater or lesser degree is happening in a number of cities around the country — when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as high-traffic showplaces for information technology. Such transformations consume unforecastably large sums of money, which is why the SFPL found itself, just then — despite receiving a goodly percentage of the city budget every year as part of Proposition E’s “Preserving Libraries Fund”—essentially broke, with a one-million-dollar deficit in its operating budget, its new building annotated and beflagged with the names of major benefactors who enabled it, just barely, to open its doors in April.

One of these benefactors is the Pacific Telesis Group (parent to Pacific Bell, the phone company), a corporation that wants to become a “content provider” in the growing fee-for-service information business. Steven Coulter, a vice president at Pacific Telesis, is the president of the Library Commission; he is a proponent of the virtues of informational connectivity and public-private partnerships, and he is a masterful fund-raiser for the library. Kenneth Dowlin, the city librarian — hired away from Colorado Springs, where, as the head of the Pikes Peak Library District, he developed an early dial-up-access catalog called Maggie’s Place — also wants SFPL to become a sort of telecommunications utility: he told members of the American Library Association in 1992 that he envisions the library offering “electronic access to each home, school, and office by the year 2000,” and added, “We intend to generate revenue off of this pipeline.” He also said, “I will let the planning department ship documents for building permits over my system, but I get my five percent.”

The pipeline metaphor is a useful one, and it exerts an understandably powerful hold on the minds of many library managers these days, as everyone, in and out of the stacks, tries to figure out who gets to adjust the valves and calibrate the pressure gauges, and who will have the privilege of setting tariffs on the ideational flow. Last year, the entrepreneurial SFPL launched Library Express, a service that charged sixty dollars an hour to clients who needed, and could afford, a higher level of research assistance and document retrieval than the unpaying patron.

Not all observers like the privatizing tendencies in the public-library world, but it would be mere churlishness to point out the shortcomings of this self-proclaimed “library of the future,” the outcome of so extraordinary an outpouring of civic spirit and generosity, were it not for one thing: under Dowlin and his A-team (as he calls his cadre of chiefs and special assistants), the SFPL has, by a conservative estimate, sent more than two hundred thousand books to a landfill — many of them old, hard to find, out of print, and valuable.

“I’m sure that at least that many are gone,” one librarian told me. “I would guess that maybe a quarter of them, fifty thousand, should have been thrown out. But I would guess that at least a hundred thousand shouldn’t have been. And another fifty thousand that I just can’t guess. . I personally saw at least twenty or thirty thousand books when we were still in the old building that were boxed up and never made it back into the collection.” This man, like most of the staff members I talked to, doesn’t want me to quote him by name, since Dowlin has a way, some assert, of punishing dissidents by exiling them to branch duty (a charge the administration has denied). What the employees wanted me to know was that the library was undergoing a kind of brain surgery. In the words of one woman I interviewed, “Its EEG is going flat.”

The worst period of book dumping happened late last year, in the months before the library’s move to the New Main, as it is called — a large gray structure with a hole in the middle where the stacks should be. The construction was financed with more than a hundred million dollars in public money; the voters approved this munificent bond issue because the Old Main, they were told, couldn’t hold what it was being asked to hold — a research-level general collection, thousands of specialized periodicals, the Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing and the Development of the Book, the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor, city archives, newspaper archives, photo archives, and so on. When appeals went out for money to furnish and outfit the new building, more than thirty million dollars flowed in from private donors and “affinity groups,” representing gays and lesbians, several ethnic communities, and environmentalists.

From the outside, the building looks enormous — and inside, too, the visitor can enjoy sweeping expanses of carpeting, vistas of distant gift shops and security checkpoints, multi-story works of public art, the Chevron Corporation Teen Center, the BankAmerica Foundation Jobs and Careers Center, and uninterrupted sight lines in almost every direction. Throw back your head, and you stare upward through a “glittering void” (as its principal architect, James Ingo Freed, describes it) that extends to a conical cornea of white glass eighty-six feet above you. But space, from the point of view of an existing collection of books, means something quite different from floor space, or atrium space, or bandwidth in a telecommunications cable, all of which the New Main has in relative abundance. Space, to a book, means shelves: the departments of the library were supposed to get enough shelves to hold their collections, with plenty of room to grow. And yet most of the departments still do not have enough shelf space to hold what they have.

Even before the influx of hundreds of thousands of new books, bought with Proposition E money, some staff members had serious doubts about the building’s capacity. In 1991, when the administration passed around plans for the New Main, thirty-one library employees signed a letter contending that “of the 375,000 square feet promised, much of it will be all but useless. . Obviously the current plan for the new building is not meeting the needs set forth to voters to justify the expenditure.” But the gravity of the problem only began to dawn on the A-team late in 1995, when individual librarians began mapping potential book arrangements prior to the move. Tape measures came out, calculators were turned on, rules of thumb were invoked. Suddenly it was abundantly clear: the collection in the Old Main Library was not going to fit in the New Main Library. Kathy Page, chief of the Main, wrote in Progress Report No. 34, dated December 1995, “Several surprises and errors were discovered that are proceeding to be solved or mitigated.” How were the errors solved or mitigated? The collection itself was hastily reduced in volume. It was “weeded.”

Weeding is a term of art in librarianship, and it is a necessary part of what librarians do. If you have five copies of an old edition of Samuelson’s Economics, or of Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana, your librarianly obligation may be to reduce the number, so that there will be space for other books. The library sells them or gives them away — or even throws them away, if nobody wants them — so as not to be choked by the foliage of what was once heavily in demand but is no longer. But beyond such obvious examples, weeding a rich old collection such as San Francisco’s takes time and careful thought. If your potential weed is a little out of your main area of knowledge, you have to look it up in standard bibliographies. You must be mindful of the traditional strengths and weaknesses of your library, and the myriad secondary ways in which an out-of-date book may enlighten the historically curious. If the book under your eye is an old edition of something that has been republished, you have to ask yourself whether that old edition has some intrinsic merit — something about its annotation, or the eminence of its editor — that the new one may lack. And even then there are differences of opinion, of course. To quote from a book called Garden Friends and Foes, by Richard Headstrom, “If you were asked to prepare a list of weeds and compare it with one prepared by someone else, they would probably not be in complete agreement.”

Kenneth Dowlin himself offered a defensible theory of discarding to a questioner at a meeting in 1992. He said, “We have many books where we may buy two hundred copies of that book because there are thousands of people who want to read it. It makes no sense to keep all two hundred copies for the rest of our life. So at the time that the usage of that particular book drops, we will retain one, two, five, whatever the appropriate number is.” Except for the inflated figure of two hundred, that is a fair description of what went on before Dowlin took command, when the volume of junked books was relatively small. But what has gone on at the San Francisco Public Library over the last year was not weeding in this specialized sense. I found Garden Friends and Foes this spring, in a room near the shipping-and-receiving entrance in the Old Main Library — a windowless, high-ceilinged room, measuring maybe ten by twelve feet. It’s called the Discard Room. On most Tuesdays, until this past January, a Department of Public Works truck — a five-ton flatbed truck with wooden sides of the kind used to pick up brush and old washing machines — drove down to the Discard Room and two, sometimes three men threw the books, which were often tied with string in bundles of eight or ten, into the back. Sometimes the truck held other things, too, like an old chair or a shopping cart left on library property by a street person or hundreds of out-of-print phonograph records, and sometimes it just held books. When it was loaded (and it could hold perhaps 2,500 bundled volumes), the truck drove to a transfer station, where the books were shifted to big rigs, along with the rest of the day’s garbage, and then taken to a landfill. In fairness to the current administration, book dumping, on a much smaller scale, has gone on for decades. (The administration sometimes says that a surplus-property law forced them to throw away all discards until 1989, but it is also correct to say that it was not until 1989 that the library sought official permission from the city to sell some of its surplus books through the Friends of the Library bookstore.) Things got especially bad this past winter, however, when Kathy Page put out the call to all stations: Weed. Sometimes the crew arriving from the DPW would crack open the door of the Discard Room and close it fast, afraid that an eight-foot-high pile of books would collapse on them.

Here is what two librarians who had been part of a weeding team told me one Sunday at a coffee shop:

LIBRARIAN A: They said, “Get rid of as much as possible.” And they said, “Anything that doesn’t look like we should have it in the New Main Library, if it doesn’t look good, if it needs to be repaired. .” And then there was the question whether when you sent things to be repaired, was it actually being repaired, or were they tossing it?

LIBRARIAN B: There seemed to be a reluctance to send things to Repair because they [in Repair] were “overwhelmed.”

LIBRARIAN A: People were beginning to think, “Wait a second, these are just being tossed.”

LIBRARIAN B: Actually, we don’t know what happened, because the librarians weeded their areas but a senior librarian had the final word. We don’t know what she did.

LIBRARIAN A: She started putting everything on the same truck, and I said, “This is not to be thrown away, it’s not to be discarded.” She said, “No, just put it on.”

There are now no copies of Garden Friends and Foes on the shelves of the San Francisco Public Library. There are no duplicates of it at the University of California at Berkeley, or at Davis, Stanford, or UCLA. There are copies of a number of Headstrom’s other books in SFPL’s collection — he has written about spiders, lizards, birds, insects, and even a Complete Field Guide to Nests in the United States—but this sole copy of his work on weeds was weeded. Why? Its binding was slightly torn, and the weeders, as they are called, have at times been urged to weed quickly and in quantity, basing their decisions in large part on looks.

I hasten to say that many of the books in the Discard Room which I have personally checked do have duplicates on the shelves, or at least are represented by later editions of the same work. The 1983 Arco Civil Service Exam Book for Sanitation Workers, of which the library has twenty copies — I found it in the Discard Room two months ago under ten books about ethics and a mint Clarendon Press edition of Leibniz’s Logical Papers—makes sense to discard. (Question 67 on page 90 of Sanitation Workers asks you to choose the last phrase of the following jumbled sentence: “the book / the top shelf / of the bookcase / wanted was on / which she.” The answer is “of the bookcase”: “The book which she wanted was on the top shelf of the bookcase.” Not in the back of a DPW truck.) But here are some of the other books I left with, after one unannounced visit, which either have no record online at all, or say “Ask librarian for holdings information,” a phrase that is often, especially in the case of older circulating books, code for “I am a last copy, and I have been purged.” There is Crumbling Idols, by Hamlin Garland; a lovely little Knickerbocker Press book with color plates called The Way to Study Birds, from 1917; a 1907 edition of Rivers of North America, by Israel Russell, with a complete chemical analysis of a water sample taken from a hydrant in Los Angeles on September 8, 1878, along with similar results for other samples from the Hudson, the Cumberland Reservoir, the Mohawk River, and the Rio Grande; and Handbook for the Woman Driver, by Charlotte Montgomery, which devotes a whole chapter to “Clothes and Beauty En Route.” (“Dark glasses are a must.”) Studies of Abnormal Behavior in the Rat, by Norman Maier, was another last copy. (On page 19: “An electrified grill was interposed between the jumping platform and the canvas net. Now the rat was punished not only for staying on the platform, but also for jumping from the platform. As a control the same grill was used in the case of the female rat. This technique failed to produce neurotic attacks in either animal.” Give it time.)

Although the weeding continues, the good news is that since this past January no more books have been dumped. On January 29, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Andrew Ross and Phillip Matier published a front-page story headlined SF LIBRARY TOSSING THOUSANDS OF BOOKS and a picture of the Discard Room. “The ongoing crime was so apparent by then,” one staff member told me. “The blood was seeping under the door.” Since then, no book, to my knowledge, has been thrown away. (True, many thousands of recent unbound periodicals to which the library subscribes — serials with titles like Welding Design & Fabrication, Nutrition Reviews, Journal of Tribology, The Canadian Journal of Soil Science, Car and Driver, and Bee Culture—were secretly tossed into recycling bins this past February, March, and April; but no books were.) Instead, nonprofit and community groups are invited to tour a large room in the basement of the Old Main; the last public giveaway got rid of five thousand books. They have gone to other libraries, here and abroad, and to schools, prisons, and villages in Madagascar and Armenia. Every Friday this month the general public will have a chance to take whatever the charities don’t want. Deetje Boler, of the Gray Panthers, left this summer with about twenty boxes of books: works on labor history and birds; books by McPhee, Malamud, Herb Caen, and a first-edition Elizabeth Bishop. (They are holding them in trust, waiting for the library to come to its senses.) At least we can be thankful that the newer rejects will continue their lives somewhere, and not make up a semi-sentient layer in the ultimate closed stack — the sanitary landfill.

Dowlin, who is a respected figure among library managers, has announced that he is running for the presidency of the American Library Association next year. He narrowly lost his first race for the ALA presidency, in 1987: “TRUCKIN’ FOR THE FUTURE: Ken Dowlin for ALA President,” his campaign stickers said. In his role as ALA luminary, Dowlin (who spent six years in the Marine Corps before a part-time job driving a bookmobile diverted his interest toward library administration) sometimes quotes business theorists like Everett M. Rogers, whom he has called “my guru for change.” One of Rogers’s books lists four ways to transform an organization — by destroying it, by restructuring it, by changing the individuals within it, and by introducing new technology. In a 1992 ALA talk (part of a forum entitled “Electronic Reference in the 21st Century: Innovation Through People, Money, and Imagination”), after citing Rogers’s four ways, Dowlin went on to offer a fifth: “I can tell you what happens when you get an earthquake that puts five hundred thousand books on the floor. It’s a perfect opportunity to rearrange them.”

The Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 allowed Dowlin and the department managers, after closing the stacks to the public (in part for safety reasons), to combine departments, forming a template for the New Main. The literature and history departments were fused first. By the time the new building opened, the administration had, in spite of a petition signed by twenty-seven librarians, folded sports, recreation, and most of the sciences into a catch-all category now known as General Collections and Humanities. Cell biology, tree books, Elizabethan poetry, cookery, model trains, and pets were now all in the same group, and reshuffled librarians no longer necessarily had a close familiarity with the collection they oversaw.

Following the earthquake, Dowlin kept the library closed for two and a half months in order to complete this reorganization, even though some of his staff told him that they were prepared to open with at least partial services much earlier. Meanwhile large numbers of books were moving all over the place. A branch information memo, dated December 7, 1989, advised, “There will be no discard pickups until the discard room at the Main Library can be cleared. It is so full it has become a fire hazard.” Between 150,000 and 200,000 infrequently checked-out books (including a nice collection of old travel books) went to an abandoned medical building, where they were stored in hospital rooms. Some of the rooms had broken windows; most were without shades or curtains. Some three thousand books were damaged beyond repair from mold and water and were thrown away. Back at the library, thousands of books that had never been entered into the computer were taken to a room on the third floor in the north wing. They sat there for several months; then every department was asked to go through these “Not On File”s, or NOFs, and make decisions about whether they ought to be kept or “deselected.” The room thus came to be known as the Deselection Chamber. For a brief time during this period, according to one librarian, the DPW trucks were leaving with loads of books several times a week.

The NOFs that survived remained boxed for about five years, inaccessible, as cardboard sagged and collapsed, and bindings within gave way. They could have been reshelved, but they weren’t. They weren’t in the computer; they were “out-of-date material”—why spend money to reshelve them? Dowlin had already signaled his intention before the earthquake, when he told a reporter for the Bay Guardian that he planned to clean out what he called the “Augean stables” of the library. King Augeus, remember, had a problem with a backlog of ox dung, and Hercules managed this situation by redirecting the flow of a convenient river. One of Dowlin’s labors was to channel the river of federal earthquake-relief money toward his library. The FEMA grant application that his staff prepared requested money for (among other sensible things like physical repairs and book rebinding) a new computer system, in order to inventory earthquake-dislocated books. FEMA obliged with a large sum. The card catalog was frozen in 1991, and the library, with additional municipal and private funding, signed a multimillion-dollar lease agreement with Digital Equipment and brought its new catalog online.

Some books were repaired with FEMA money; others were simply thrown away. It wasn’t until a few months before the move to the New Main that thousands of damaged books — many of them rare — stored since the earthquake in a low-ceilinged nook known as the Mouse House, about a block from the library, went out for repairs. Rather than actually repairing these books, according to one librarian, the library devoted its resources to the routine repair of circulating books damaged after the earthquake.

Repairing old books in-house would take a more sophisticated preservation program than the library is willing to commit to, even though Dowlin has served on an ALA president’s committee on book preservation. An ensemble of new equipment for preserving manuscript pages — including an ultrasonic welder and a water-filtration and de-ionization system — remains unused (except for the welder, which is occasionally employed to make signs for the library), and many nineteenth-century works are shipped to a commercial service that shears off the decorated publisher’s bindings and encases the books’ interiors in plain cloth.

In the sixties, William Holman, then the city librarian, began an ambitious program of book buying (out-of-print as well as new books), with the intention of turning SFPL into a high-level research library — not quite as high-level as the New York Public, but worthy even so of San Francisco’s literary past, with pockets of eccentric comprehensiveness. Subsequent city librarians built on Holman’s hoard, until Dowlin arrived with an alternative vision. “First and foremost,” Dowlin wrote in a letter to the Chronicle not long ago, “SFPL is a public library, not a research facility.” It’s both, of course, and the books and scholarly journals stored in Brooks Hall — a vast, dusty space under the street which the library borrowed recently to store its overflow — belie Dowlin’s claim. The entire McComas Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy — including unbound copies of Amazing Stories going back to 1929—resides in this offsite mega-crypt, as do the locked-case books, each with an acid-free identifying tag, that used to be kept behind glass in the old history-and-social-sciences department: John Gould’s eight-volume Birds of Australia (a set of which sold at auction last March for over a quarter of a million dollars), for instance, and Bligh’s A Voyage to the South Sea. (Patrons who want to consult these materials must make a special request, and wait until the next day.) A librarian was surprised to discover Athanasius Kircher’s beautifully engraved fantasia on the Roman countryside, published in 1671, on a high shelf down in Brooks Hall. This is a book dealer’s paradise, sitting unprotected in the squalor of a storage area, near carpet remnants and construction debris.

Brooks Hall holds what it holds partly because there isn’t enough room in the New Main. But partly, too, its contents simply don’t accord with the altered conception — fashionable now among some circulation-sensitive library managers — of the public library’s true mission. In August 1992, Dowlin introduced the concept of “leveled access” in the humanities to the San Francisco Planning Commission. Leveled access involves offering the public, in Mr. Dowlin’s words, “a large, generally accessible collection that is designed essentially to be current material — if you will, a mass selection.” This mass of material would be supplemented by “focus collections” in selected areas, such as art and music. What nobody outside the library quite understood was that the leveling implicit in leveled access was apparently meant to be retroactive; in other words, that Dowlin’s plan would involve downsizing what had already been achieved, at considerable expense, by his predecessors.

The staff understood, though. Some approved; many didn’t. On December 6, 1989, William Ramirez, then chief of the Main Library, wrote a memo to Mr. Dowlin describing staff concerns over the events that followed the earthquake. Staff members, he wrote, “believe that current and planned actions will: Decimate the collection [through] weeding, discarding materials from the collections — both circulating and reference — which make this library unique.” The staff believes that these actions will, Ramirez went on, “move us in the direction of changing this library from a strong reference, research resource and service center to an undistinguished ‘popular library.’” Ramirez retired the next year. But a number of Dowlin’s employees have continued to resist his vision. When asked to sort books in their departments into those that circulated within the past two years, and those that had not, they did not sort. When asked to weed, they have not weeded. A branch librarian wrote me that she sometimes goes around with a due-date stamp, furtively stamping into currency books that she feels are imperiled. Employees have saved thousands of books on the sly, quietly transferring them from one department to another, and hiding them in their lockers. They reintroduce these books when the danger has passed. They call it “guerrilla librarianship.”

One day last May, after a few hours of note-taking in Brooks Hall (nobody challenged me when I came and went, but I took nothing, for the books I was looking at weren’t discards), I went back to the New Main building, negotiated its catwalks and stairways, and entered a staff-only door on the lower level. (The door was slightly ajar, foiling its magnetically actuated lock.) Under several Plexiglas ceiling bubbles that held surveillance cameras, I hurried through the hallways until I came to what I was looking for — the all-important sorting room of the library of the future. In the old library, returned books slid down a chute into the sorting room in plastic bins: a simple, durable system. In the new library, a motorized conveyor belt pulls the books down the chute one at a time, and when they jam, they get hurt. It’s as if you sent your clothes down to the luggage handlers in the airport without putting them in a suitcase. Hundreds of books have been torn and injured this way. Someone has taped up a postcard of a pained-looking Ezra Pound right over the opening out of which the books slide; the staff must poke the chute with a broom handle to keep the flow going.

The old sorting room could hold tens of thousands of books on its shelves; the new sorting room has no installed shelving. It was supposed to work on the “Federal Express model”: everything would absolutely, positively get reshelved overnight. But because the plan depended on the creation of a new, lower-paid class of employee called a “shelver,” which the union has opposed, and because there is no money at the moment anyway, books can take more than a month to get put back where they belong. (In staff areas, book trucks line the halls; at least forty thousand books currently await reshelving.) Hard-pressed book handlers until recently took the books that poured off the conveyor belt and flung them, as if they were dealing cards, into one of several mounds on the floor. I looked in and saw a sign taped to the wall that said “800s,” which in the Dewey system means books of literature: under it was an enormous spreading berm of books. Then I was gently and politely reprimanded by a security guard for being in a restricted area.

The sorting room is like the entire new building, in that it has built into it a contempt for, or at least an indifference to, literary culture and its requirements. As one staff member told me: “De facto, this is not a good book building. There’s not enough room for books, there’s not enough staff to get the books back on the shelves, there’s not enough staff to check the books out — however it happened, it’s an absolute disaster.”

I first told this story in the auditorium of the New Main Library last May. (I spoke at the invitation of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Librarians’ Guild.) Since then the library has responded to my at-times intemperate criticisms, and to the resultant coverage in the press, in a variety of ways. In the August issue of Library Journal, Dowlin is quoted as saying, “The building is doing exactly what I wanted it to do.” At a Library Commission meeting in July, Kathy Page, chief of the Main, said that the library had withdrawn more than a hundred thousand books from the entire system — the branches as well as the Main — in the period from January 1995 to June 1996, but she contended that the weeding was standard procedure. (Indeed, she said much weeding has yet to be done.) Librarians had been asked to do a thorough weed before the move, she said, but only so that the movers wouldn’t have to carry things no one wanted. She said that all last-copy discards were now reviewed by a Main Library subject specialist, and complied with what she called “the bible”—the library’s Collection Development Plan, which assigns a rank from 0 (not collected) through 6 (comprehensive) to every area of the library’s holdings. (For example, subjects like life sciences, general philosophy, and Italian literature are assigned a Level 2, “introductory material” rating, which may explain why I found so many old books about birds and ethics in the Discard Room, and why old Italian novels were in discard piles last month.)

A few days after I gave the speech, a member of the board of the Library Foundation told me I was a pawn of the employees’ union; later, when the San Francisco press picked up on the story, I became a sort of weirdo cultist, a “ringleader” who, in the company of a band of converts, was launching an attack on the library for personal glory. (“With some Rogaine and a few weeks’ more growth of his salt-and-pepper beard, the 39-year-old Baker might pass for Rasputin in tweed,” wrote a journalist for SF Weekly. “Soft-spoken, tall, and intense, Baker seems to hold an almost mystical sway over a ragtag collection of feisty librarians and disgruntled activists.”) In July, a letter signed by representatives of a number of the fund-raising affinity groups went out to every member of the library staff. The letter accused one librarian, Toba Singer — who had written an op-ed piece for the Examiner critical of the library’s corporate sponsorship — of homophobia and racism, and it accused me of anti-Semitism, because I had used what were, the letter charged, Holocaust references by mentioning the so-called Deselection Chamber and by calling the book purge a “hate crime directed at the past.” I and the audience that “cheered [me] on” were, according to the letter, “intellectually dishonest, disrespectful to the library staff, and insulting to all Jewish, gay and lesbian, and other individuals who suffered the actual Holocaust.” Over the next several weeks, this letter began to appear on the desks of newspaper and radio editors.

Late in August, two librarians decided to measure the shelves of the old library in order to get a more accurate number for the oft-disparaged old building’s capacity. Walter Biller (a historian) and I came along, tape measures a-dangle: it was impossible to resist this last chance to tour the old floors. We measured the card catalog, and we read the legend high on the wall to the right of the entrance to the catalog room: HANDLE A BOOK / AS A BEE DOES A / FLOWER / EXTRACT / ITS SWEETS BUT / DO NOT / INJURE IT.

The four of us spent several hours at our work, nervously listening for footsteps, and then we locked up and left. Unfortunately, the librarian in charge of coming up with the spreadsheet didn’t, in her haste, note down one of the crucial numbers for the seven floors of the north stacks and relied instead on a faulty diagram that was taped on the wall; her newsworthily high preliminary numbers were then immediately leaked to a reporter. OLD LIBRARY HELD MORE BOOKS, SAY CRITICS, read the headline of the front-page article in the Examiner; and then, a few days later, FOUR CRITICS OF LIBRARY MUST EAT THEIR WORDS. Mortifying though it was, the episode had the unforeseen effect of prompting Kathy Page to write a constructive memo to all employees, which said, among other things, “The unhappy fact remains that we have less storage capacity in the new building than we had planned for and less than we need.”

I have been able to speak only a few words to Dowlin, Page’s boss, directly. At the end of May, he consented to an interview with me, provided I sent him, three days in advance, a list of questions. I mailed off the list; then, a few days before we were to meet, he (understandably) canceled the appointment, because, in the words of his likable secretary, “we are being sued.” In the Library Journal piece, Dowlin is quoted as saying, “I’m not convinced Mr. Baker understands the people of San Francisco and what they want. There are some people who disagree with what I wanted to do, but they’re about six years too late.” Dowlin told the reporter for SF Weekly that my account of the library’s extreme weeding was “bullshit,” and that my writing was “crap.”

Long ago, the library kept a “Withdrawal Register”—it appears on a WPA list of city records in the ’40s — but nothing like that is available now. (In the words of one librarian, “The card catalog is the mute witness to all of this destruction.”) As part of another public-records request, now Exhibit D of Baker v. San Francisco Public Library, I asked for “all records, including lists, card files. . computer records and printouts thereof, of books withdrawn, discarded, dumped, weeded, given away, sold, pulped, or otherwise removed from the library’s collections from 1987 to the present.” In the same letter I wrote, “Surely there is a record of the disposition of millions of dollars’ worth of city property.” The library administration’s official response, via the city attorney’s office, was “No list or compilation exists for books discarded or destroyed since 1987.” There was, however, a thirty-two-megabyte computer report entitled “Purge of Items Declared Withdrawn,” which principally covers items removed from the collection between January 1, 1995, and April 1, 1996. That report has never been printed out, for it would fill almost five thousand large-format computer-paper pages. It includes only things that were deliberately withdrawn, nothing missing or stolen; and it does not include NOFs, which were never in the computer. It took me two and a half hours to download it from the library’s file server. Kassim Visram, a systems analyst, ran some frequency analyses, which indicate that there are about 146,000 non-paperback books in the file — along with many phono disks, periodicals, cassettes, and so on. Amazingly, there are columns in the report headed “Last Copy” and “Last Main,” under each of which there appears either a “yes” or a “no” for each book; Visram could thus produce a file made up entirely of last-copy discards. I downloaded that smaller list of more than 17,000 books and sorted it again several ways myself. Some of the discards are not troubling — the departure of yet another edition of Gone with the Wind doesn’t represent an irreplaceable loss. But the last copy of Darwin’s The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (in a 1901 edition) caught my eye; and I saw more than a thousand Chinese books, hundreds of books in German and Italian, and an appalling number of research-level monographs in the sciences. History was hit particularly hard in my sample, especially (for some reason) history published by the Cambridge University Press: listed were the last copies of works by Sir Herbert Butterfield, Henry St. John Bolingbroke, William Stubbs, C. V. Wedgwood, and Lewis Namier. There were last copies of hard-to-find books by Muriel Spark, Goethe, and William Dean Howells.

According to the Automation Services Department, there was at least one earlier purge report, run in 1995, covering discards from some point in the past through the end of 1994. That purge report was itself purged, however; it doesn’t exist on any backup tape or disk. “That’s a report that hasn’t existed on the system for a long time,” I was told. “We did do a purge of withdrawals in May of 1995, but generally we don’t keep those files around for very long, because once they’re withdrawn and gone, there’s really no need to keep a history of that.”

I can’t agree.

(1996)

If Libraries Don’t Do It, Who Will?

Remarks Delivered at the Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony for the

Library Service Center, Duke University Libraries

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. I’ve never commemorated the opening of a building before, and I must say it’s an enormous pleasure and an honor to be here, standing in front of this large beige building, to talk about the storage of paper. Paper storage has been on my mind a great deal lately, because last year I started a little library that has in it twenty or thirty tons of bound newspapers, all sold off by the British Library. When the sale actually went through — I didn’t want it to go through, I wanted the library to keep the papers — but when it did, I began to have yearning thoughts about storage. I would drive by some undistinguished steel-sided building, painted some shocking color, and I’d spot those beautiful words FOR LEASE on it, and it would call out to me: storage. I saw a FOR LEASE sign on a converted mill one day and I called the number; the developer said, “I can show you the mill, but I’ve got something better for you. I want to show you something that is a dream space, top of the line, and I know it may be more than you can do costwise, but I just want you to see this and I want you to think about it.” I said okay, and my wife and I took a drive with the developer to a navy base, and we parked in front of an enormous stone building with towers and parapets. It looked like a gigantic medieval fortress. What was it? It was the navy prison. There was a vast rusting cell block with prison cages that went up many stories, and a crumbling men’s room that in its bleak ruination stretched back into the shadows, with maybe thirty sinks along one wall, none of which worked. I was very tempted — but in the end, it just didn’t seem like the right place to keep the last surviving twentieth-century runs of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World.

So I now know, more than I ever did before, about the deep and abiding joy that comes from having enough space — and even now I sometimes feel a slight envious resentment rising within when I cruise down a big highway near New York City and I see buildings that have fifty truck bays. What are they holding? They’re holding cheese products, or truck parts, or Happy Meal toys, or Pentium computers that will be scrap in five years. They’re not holding books. One tank depot or tire warehouse would hold everything that our national library has been sent, free, by publishers and has rejected every year. Our national library says that they don’t have enough space, and they are unwilling to lease space, even though they’re willing to budget 94 million dollars for digital projects.

So here we have a building that has one purpose — to store books — books that we can carry around, flip through, and read just as they were meant to be read by their creators. There’s a cherry picker machine inside, a state-of-the-art cherry picker, that lifts a book retriever up thirty-two feet, where he or she gets the book out of a cardboard tray and comes down with it. And there will be two and a half million books in here. The cost was seven and a half million dollars — so this brand-new place cost about three dollars a book to build. Very few of the books that are going in here have been digitally scanned — and here’s the dramatic comparison. To store a nineteenth-century book, it costs three dollars a book, plus an estimated seventeen cents a book in maintenance and staffing; to scan a nineteenth-century book, it costs a hundred dollars a book. And the book doesn’t even need batteries! Not that it’s a bad thing to take digital pictures of books, as long as the picture-taking doesn’t require that the book be cut out of its binding — the electronic versions can be extraordinarily useful. The point is that offsite book storage, even traditional storage in call number order, is cheap, and any scanning or microfilming we do should be done with the expectation that the original book go back into the collection when the copying is done. And it’s compact, too—2.5 million books go in here, and across the street, an even bigger building is devoted to doing the laundry. Besides being things of intrinsic beauty and interest, books are marvelously compact.

Now there are some futurists, some central planners, who don’t agree with any of what I’ve just said. There’s a man named Michael Lesk, of the National Science Foundation in Washington, who is in charge of giving away millions of dollars in federal grants for digital library projects, who told me that he routinely says to libraries, hey, maybe you shouldn’t repair your library building, you could scan everything in that building, and let the building fall down, and you would save money. Lesk refers to an analysis by a library director from Minnesota who claims that libraries would save about 44 billion dollars over the next one hundred years if they digitally scanned about twenty million books and got rid of more than four hundred million duplicate books. Our libraries would be better off, in other words, if they dismantled about 95 percent of their accumulated collections, according to this analysis. Many — not all, but many — in the digital library world believe that the destruction of local research collections will help hurry us toward the far digital shore. They inflate the cost of keeping things, and they denigrate the durability of paper, because it’s distressing to them that it is so inexpensive to store what was long ago bought, cataloged, and shelved.

Research library collections grow. That’s what this fine building recognizes. Your children’s feet grow, and you buy them new shoes — the bigger feet do not represent a “growth problem” but a developmental fact, something to be proud of. For the past half century or more, though, growth has been an embarrassment to some Washington visionaries. They were swept by a kind of Cold War fervor of informational reform, and they wanted all growth to stop. Libraries would reach a certain fixed size, a few million volumes, and then the weeding parties would gather and the microcopying would crunch down the excess, and when the microfilm spools themselves took up too much room, then they could microcopy the microcopies at ultra-high resolution, and crunch things down more, and the stacks would function like a vast trash compactor, squeezing the words. Because words were squeezable, weren’t they? They were disembodied astral presences that had nothing to do with the ink that formed them or the paper that they were printed on or the bindings that held the paper together; they could be “reformatted”—preserved by being destroyed — because they were immaterial; the books would still exist, they would just not exist; they would be there, but they wouldn’t be there; you could hold your head high and say you had the finest U.S. newspaper collection in the world, when in fact you had gotten rid of 90 percent of it and replaced it with microfilm, much of it unchecked for quality.

What was the source of this thinking? There was one especially influential person some of you may have heard about. His name was Fremont Rider, head librarian at Wesleyan. Rider’s first book, published in 1909, was about the amazing discoveries of spirit rappings and table turnings and levitation — he felt these things deserved serious study and that the tables did in fact turn. He wrote pulp fiction and he was the managing editor of Library Journal, and when he went bankrupt in 1929 after a manic episode in which he spent a small fortune founding a high-society supper club on Long Island, he wrote an indignant pamphlet in which he said that people were fed up with being indebted to banks, and they wanted a new deal. He sent the pamphlet to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Roosevelt shot him back a letter with a handwritten note saying you’re right — keep it up! — and then a few months later Roosevelt, in his nomination speech, pledged himself to a New Deal for the American People. So Fremont Rider was an influential person — and his new deal for librarians was this: make or buy microcopies of your book collection, sell off the book collection to dealers at scrap prices, and you will make, in his words, “an actual cash profit on the substitution.” You’ll enrich your library by getting rid of its books. Rider got the Librarian of Congress and the Deputy Librarian of Congress and the head librarian at Michigan and the head librarian at Harvard and other big-time leaders all over the library world to blurb his book and serve on his Microcard committee. It’s a mathematical fact that book collections double every sixteen years, Rider said (he was wrong about that), and if we didn’t start buying Fremont Rider’s Microcard reading machines and selling off the collections, the stacks were going to overrun the entire square footage of New Jersey. Building a storage warehouse was, according to Rider, “a confession of past failure”—it was unmanly, somehow.

This way of thinking continues in some circles, and it was very powerful in the 1980s, when the Library of Congress had high hopes for its optical disk pilot project, which could, according to the Deputy Librarian, squeeze down the library’s three buildings to one. But the optical disk pilot program didn’t work out — nobody uses those big platters anymore — and over the past decade or so, some enlightened librarians have begun to accept the fact that the easiest way to keep a research collection is to keep the research collection. There is no shame in growth — it is not a confession of failure. Putting up shelves sufficient to hold what’s there is the crucially important primary task that research libraries must fulfill — they must do this because no other institutions, public or private, can be depended on to keep these things — the obscure things, the cumbersome things that even though they’re used only once in ten years or thirty years or fifty years are valuable because they are what people published and read. To a researcher, the fact that something is little used is a positive attribute — if a photo editor for a documentary on, say, Ellis Island pages through a forgotten autobiography and finds a picture that has never been reproduced before, she is overjoyed, because the picture is interesting, and because it is unused. We till around in great collections looking for things that have lain unnoticed — the urge to search through obscurity is basic to scholarship. And if the research libraries don’t keep it — don’t keep copies of the stuff that we as a people publish — nobody else is going to do it. It just won’t happen. We can’t depend on businesses to save our past. The New York Times has kept no run of its own paper, for instance.

We understand why fragile old flags and old presidential letters are valuable as things — we don’t believe that taking a snapshot of Plymouth Rock amounts to a “reformatting” of Plymouth Rock, and after some long and painful decades of urban renewal we’re doing better with old mills and train stations. There are very nice postcards of Whistler’s painting of a woman in a white dress for sale in museum giftshops, but Whistler’s woman in white is still on the wall. Storage! That’s what this building is about. Keep it cool, keep it dry, but above all — keep it. Nice going, Duke.

(2001)

Reading the Paper

An Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting

of the Bibliographical Society of America

Early one morning not long ago, I put on my coat over my pajamas and went out to the end of the driveway to get the paper. It was in a blue bag that said “The New York Times Home Delivery Service,” and “Warning: Keep This Plastic Bag Away From Children.” The bag’s knot was untiable — tied by the deliveryman in the knowledge that each recipient would tear it open and pour out the newspaper, which I did when I got inside. The paper was curled around itself, and when I opened it and began paging through it I could feel in every section the timed-release coolness that is always associated with newsprint. You keep getting outside air on your hands as you read. Newsprint is its own insulation. A single page makes a rattling sound when you turn it, but the whole issue is quiet, muffled by its own layered pulp.

Because newspapers are such patchworks of visual miscellaneousness, we read them differently than we read books, which are, except for an occasional excursion to check a footnote, linear experiences. The newspaper’s front page is both binding and title page at once, and it offers its above-the-fold headlines first, so big, often, that you take them in without even knowing you’re reading them — and then the underworld below the fold comes up out of the shadows into view with a quick turn of the wrist. Next the unfolding begins, and once you open up a section and hear the rattly sounds of the singled-out pages, the rest of the world falls away — the newspaper is so big now that it becomes the landscape. Your eye loops and leaps, lighting on a photo and then dropping to read the caption and then circling to find the article that is associated with it; and you jump from page one to an inner page to finish the article, and then hop across to the adjacent page while you’re there, where you notice an ad with a funny image and an article that looks interesting that is continued from page one, and so you return to page one. And when you turn the page, you don’t turn it as you would turn a book page — you close the whole paper and hand off the right-hand page to the left hand — and then you open the paper again. And at the top of every page is the date: all this happened now.

That constant assertion of nowness is precisely what is so appealing and instructive about old newspapers, yellowing and fragile though they may be. Great libraries turned the newspapers into books — big, heavy books with, in some cases, vellum corners and marbled boards — by binding fifteen or thirty consecutive todays in one. And then the policy changed, beginning in the ’50s, and the libraries got rid of most of their twentieth-century newspaper collections — meaning that the remaining runs are unspeakably rare, rarer than early Chaucers or Dantes. We are very close to losing our own twentieth century. So what I’ve been doing is opening volumes up and taking pictures of pages that interest me. Like a microfilmer of the 1930s, I’ve set up a digital imaging workstation, which consists of a wooden pallet on the floor over which I’ve put a sheet of plywood and some foam core and some white banner paper from Staples. For lighting I use the clamp-on utility lights that you can buy for five dollars apiece at the hardware store; these are supported by an old coat tree and a cast-off intravenous drip-bag stand on rollers. I could use the tripod to steady the camera, but I don’t, because you have to be able to make tiny angle adjustments that are clumsy with a tripod. I just bend over the open volume and frame the picture and hold my breath and try not to quiver at the wrong moment and I end up with a reasonably good four-megapixel digital picture. Now, a four-megapixel picture is better than a three-megapixel picture, and it is in color, but the resolution isn’t as good as 1940s black-and-white microfilm. But even if I had a four-hundred-megapixel camera, and could record from five feet up the ink-slippage marks on each Linotyped line, and the faint fuzz of paper-hairs that fringe a tiny tear in the margin, would I feel that I had successfully reformatted the pages and could now throw them away? Of course not. I like old things because they are old — their oldness and their fragility is part of what they have to say. They hold the record of the time in which they were printed, and the record of the years that have passed between that time and now. The copying of an old thing is, or should be, like the publishing of a scholarly edition, an act of homage to the physical source from which one is working — a way of saying thank you for holding the riches you hold.

So anyway, I’ve been taking lots of pictures; I enjoy doing it, because when you take a picture of something, you are forced to think about only it for a little while. You draw a mental frame around it, with the help of the camera’s viewfinder, and everything else recedes, and after a minute or two, the thing that you’re photographing takes on a fetching particularity — one page in a universe of possible pages. As a result of this camerawork, I have done a great deal of a certain kind of newspaper reading, and I am full of little ill-digested snippets of knowledge about 1898 and 1903 and 1939—and a feeling has grown in me that is difficult to convey. It’s a sort of primitive amazement at how incredibly much has gone on. So much has happened. Massive numbers of named people have done an enormous number of things — some good, some horrible — and each good or horrible thing is potentially interesting. My head is crawling with old headlines — SUSAN B. ANTHONY SAYS THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN POLYGAMY, from the front page of the New York World at the turn of the century, or ONE WOMAN AND A THOUSAND RATS, also from the World, about a woman who raised rats and guinea pigs to sell to laboratories. And from the Chicago Tribune in 1909, HOW SUFFRAGE MADE ME BEAUTIFUL. Around 1900 there was a tiny, two-paragraph article entitled WILD EYED MAN ATE STAMPS. A man became deranged and ate some stamps — that was the article.

I have read articles on opium dens in New York and on how John D. Rockefeller acted in church, and I’ve come across stories by P. G. Wodehouse and F. Scott Fitzgerald, poems by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Frost and Dorothy Parker, essays by Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, war dispatches by Stephen Crane, and I have a better notion of the grain of the past, the texture and rhythm of events, which is, I think, a prerequisite to doing many kinds of history. But I’m not a historian. I’m just someone who thinks that what historians do is important, and that they ought to be able to consult, if they have a mind to, what we as a nation published and read, and read in huge numbers.

Is there any publication that has had so wide a readership — that has entered so many people’s lives at precisely the same time? Somewhere between half a million and a million copies of a big-city paper like Pulitzer’s World, or the Chicago Tribune, went out every day. A million people read the Tribune’s headline from 1945, BOMB FOUR DOOMED JAP CITIES, and saw its front-page color cartoons, with their drawings of the Jap Buster Bomb. If you look at that page on microfilm, it seems to come from very long ago. It is lost in a rainstorm of scratches. Its words are heard through static, its immediacy is destroyed, and you think therefore that the people who read that paper must have been entirely different creatures than we are. But they weren’t.

Again, think of the number of copies. Life magazine had a huge circulation at midcentury — five million — but that was five million copies per month. The Chicago Tribune printed six times that many copies every month. And each daily issue had much more in it — more brute wordage, more advertising, more miscellaneousness, more rough edges — than Life. Not that Life isn’t fascinating, of course. But there are hundreds of bound runs of Life magazine in research libraries today. No long runs of the Chicago Tribune survive in libraries, and none of the twentieth-century New York World, and even the New York Times, especially the real Times, and not the rag-paper library edition, which though it cost more for libraries to subscribe to wasn’t nearly as well printed, is on the edge of total oblivion. Hands placed all those tiny want ads, each representing some particular human want, the stories were typeset piecemeal by hundreds of compositors, and when they heard “Give it away” they knew to space out the remaining lines of Linotype so as to use up the rest of the column, and when the composing was done, the compositors clamped their three-hundred-pound forms tight and watched them roll away. All the editors and composers could proofread at high speed upside down and backward. Pulpy paper squashed over the forms, making a mold for more molten lead, and the curved plates were clamped to the presses and the paper began writhing through, twenty million or more sheets cut and folded each day, leaving those softly fluted edges that a newspaper has, and then bundlers tied them and truckers drove off into the city with them and they went out, hitting the sidewalk near the newsstand with a whoomp of something heavy — a big cube of todayness. Every day it happened. No matter what is in a newspaper, even if every word is untrue, we know for sure that these particular words and drawings and pictures happened — were published — on that day — and that is a precious sort of elementary knowledge to have.

(2002)

The Times in 1951

Written for the 150th-Anniversary Issue of the New York Times

Being a backward-looking person, I was curious to know what the New York Times was like in 1951, on its last big birthday. I happen to have handy an original bound run of the newspaper from that era, in all its wood-pulp bulk and glory — a set of daily papers which once looped and cavorted through the groaning machines that dwelled in the basement of Forty-third Street, in an atmosphere heavy with ink mist and paper dust. I pulled out some of the old volumes, set them on a long table and began turning my way through them.

1951’s pages are bigger than today’s by about the width of a current column. The passage of time has dyed them a champagney hue; as they slowly rise and fall they bring to mind the intermittent wingstrokes of some great hovering bird. There are fewer photographs and more monochrome Lord & Taylor fashion watercolors, signed by now-forgotten commercial artists like Karnoff and Hood: these are deftly blurry, like Japanese sumi paintings of twigs and birds. Only in the magazine section, in the ads, are there four-color illustrations: “It’s HELLMANN’S the WHOLE-EGG Mayonnaise!”

But what strikes one first about the publication of fifty years ago is how much it looks like what we read now. The delivery trucks and printing presses have disappeared from Forty-third Street (the New York edition is now printed in stylishly automated factories in Queens and New Jersey); reporters no longer chain-smoke at their Underwoods, or shout “Copy!”, or play cards, or place bets with Frenchie, the in-house bookie (who wore a beret and an ascot), or slip over to Gough’s, the bar across the street. But the Sulzbergers’ broadsheet has nonetheless remained faithful to its typographical traditions. And Al Hirschfeld’s pen, I was pleased to see, was there on the theater pages — precise, frolicsome, full of genius, then as now.

What was the news in 1951? Well, there was the Korean War. Lists of killed and wounded appeared on page three in small type; in April, after General Douglas MacArthur made one too many unauthorized remarks about the necessity of bombing China, President Truman relieved him of his command in the Far East. The uproar was immediate. The Daughters of the American Revolution were deeply troubled; there was talk of impeachment; private citizens took out ads protesting the president’s shameless act. The Times’s editorialist, however, sided with Truman. “In this controversy this newspaper has taken an unequivocal stand in favor of the Government and against General MacArthur,” it said on April 17; there was no need for another world war, and Truman was right to assert “the supremacy of the civil government over any military authority.”

MacArthur’s farewell speech to Congress, though, was good — the Times found it “eloquent and deeply moving.” Lots of people saw it live, thanks to all those Emerson and Philco and Magnavox TVs that were advertised every day in the paper. “It was extraordinary television, whatever a viewer’s political feelings,” wrote Jack Gould, the Times’s TV critic. Gould was particularly struck by MacArthur’s forceful comb-over: “He parted his hair low on the right side and had brushed it almost directly across his forehead.”

Whether MacArthur was in charge or not, the Korean War had to continue, many at the paper believed. The alternative was withdrawal, “throwing in the sponge before the knockdown,” and that would have “intolerable political, moral and psychological consequences,” according to a military analyst for the Times. Couldn’t nuclear weapons help somehow? In an article headlined ATOMIC DEATH BELT URGED FOR KOREA, the paper quoted from a letter to Harry Truman from Congressman Albert Gore Sr. The congressman suggested that the United States “dehumanize a belt across the Korean peninsula by surface radiological contamination.” The belt, Gore said, could be “regularly recontaminated” until the Korean problem was solved; such a show of nuclear force would be, according to Gore, “morally justifiable under the circumstances.”

In September the U.S. Army announced plans to test tactical atomic weapons on front-line combat troops at Frenchman Flat, Nevada. Following up, the Times’s science writer, William Laurence (who had been an observer on the Nagasaki bombing mission) wrote a story entitled A HYDROGEN BOMB NOW SEEN AS SURE. Some well-placed fusion bombs could “blanket an army in the field,” Laurence said, “and raise havoc with its personnel and equipment, as well as with its morale.” The weapons, properly used, could nullify a superiority in manpower, “such as, for example, the hordes of Russia.” By November a labor union was complaining that its members had been shut out of work on the billion-dollar hydrogen-bomb factory (“the largest construction project the world has ever known,” according to one of its managers) that DuPont was building near Augusta, Georgia.

DuPont had other big launches that year as well. At a press event, a company representative showed off a suit made of a new miracle fiber, Dacron. The suit had been worn by a businessman for sixty-seven straight summer days without needing pressing. “To keep it clean,” reported the Times, “the owner went swimming in it twice and at thirty-two days of wear it was washed in a home washing machine.” A men’s clothing store, John David, advertised a tie made of 100 percent Dacron: “DACRON is rated, along with cellophane, Nylon and neoprene rubber as one of DuPont’s greatest technological achievements,” said the ad. The tie was, according to the ad, “a sure conversation starter.”

A conversation of sorts had started between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t going all that well. At a November United Nations conference in Paris, the Russians, trailing badly despite some bomb secrets obtained through the Rosenbergs (who had been sentenced to death in April), condemned the “mad armaments race.” Vishinsky, the Soviet foreign minister, proposed a ban on all nuclear weapons and the destruction of existing stocks. Secretary of State Dean Acheson offered some halfhearted counterproposals, saying however that the Atlantic community was “building its strength.” This prompted the Times’s James Reston, wise in the ways of diplomacy, to conclude that the practical purpose of the U.S. proposals was “not to end the ‘cold war,’ as the Allies proclaimed, but to wage the ‘cold war’ more effectively.”

With increasing bomb-consciousness came civil defense. The Trucking Industry National Defense Committee ran a full-pager to point out that if the United States were attacked, railroads would be a primary target. “The Trucking Industry can’t be bombed out of existence because it doesn’t move over fixed road beds. Because it isn’t concentrated. Because it is instantaneously mobile!” Armed men in jeeps began a round-the-clock protection of New York City’s reservoirs, equipped with “two mobile laboratories in which quick water analyses will be made in the event of an atomic bomb attack.” An NYU professor of psychology suggested that hymn singing would help allay panic among bomb survivors. At 7:30 p.m. on November 14, over a hundred thousand participants staged a gigantic civil defense drill. Two atom bombs were assumed to have gone off — one over Bushwick and Myrtle Avenues in Brooklyn, and one near the Manhattan-Bronx line, “devastating a large area of both boroughs.”

But in the event, no bombs fell, and New Yorkers carried on as they had. In four out of seven of the new model rooms in the furniture department at Bloomingdale’s, designers had chosen “restful pale blond color schemes.” Peacock feathers and the color green were back in women’s hats. Rachel Carson’s first book, The Sea Around Us, was an up-from-the-deeps best-seller. Salinger’s first novel, Catcher in the Rye, was “rambunctiously fresh and alive,” in the opinion of a Times book reviewer. A movie called I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. contained “ugly bugaboos” and “reckless ‘red’ smears,” said a Times critic; another critic liked Howard Hawks’s monster movie The Thing, warning however that parents “should think twice before letting their children see this film if their emotions are not properly conditioned.”

“Let Me Greet You Personally At My Restaurant,” said Jack Dempsey, at the bottom of page two, on April 20; in June, Jake LaMotta, fighting as a light heavyweight, was “battered into a sick and gory spectacle” at Yankee Stadium — General MacArthur was in the audience. “Do you ever wish your child were going to a nudist camp?” was Macy’s attention-grabber, promoting its extensive summer-camp outfittery. Two women ran unsuccessfully for seats on the AT&T board — there were “a number of Rip Van Winkles” in the company, according to one stockholder. Automatic ten-number dialing, using area codes, was introduced in New Jersey. Bus stops moved to the far sides of city intersections, and parking meters appeared in Manhattan. The Yonkers Police Department hired ten women to serve as traffic officers at school crossings at a rate of four dollars a day. Ex-King Zog paid for an estate in Syosset with a bucket of diamonds and rubies. The runoff from Long Island duck farms was killing beds of bluepoint oysters. Dashiell Hammett got six months in jail for refusing to reveal who had contributed to a pro-Communist bail-bond fund; “I think I dealt with him in an extremely lenient manner,” said the sentencing judge. When a ring slipped from the finger of the daughter of the governor of Assam, in India, and fell into a lake, the governor had the lake drained in an attempt to recover the ring, causing “a storm of protest.”

Someone stole four thousand ball bearings. There was a surplus of sweet potatoes in New Jersey; the Department of Agriculture was advising housewives to serve them often. An inedible cake in the shape of Winged Victory atop a Roman temple was a prizewinner at the Salon of Culinary Art. Stopping Joseph McCarthy was “the most important single political job that has faced Wisconsin in many years,” said Henry S. Reuss, a Milwaukee lawyer and Democrat who wanted a seat in the Senate. An intentionally soporific phonograph record called “Time to Sleep” was determined to fall within the control of the Pure Food and Drug Act. An ad announced a free home trial of the sensational new Polaroid camera—“Takes and Prints Finished Pictures in One Minute!” Ten cases of major psychiatric illness were observed to follow heavy doses of certain steriods. Roy M. Cohn, the assistant United States attorney, arrested some dealers in “hot tea”—marijuana. Attorney Cohn said that one marine with a distinguished war record “fell into the hands of these people so that his health and his entire life has been ruined”; the accompanying picture showed Police Commissioner Murphy dumping a shovelful of drug packets into the furnace in the basement of the police headquarters annex.

Old newspapers can pull you in deep very quickly. For a little while, as I turned the pages, the headlines and columns expanded and pushed aside all the rest of history — ungeneralizably rich and busy and full of telling confusions. On January 1, 1951, Anne O’Hare McCormick, the foreign affairs columnist, wrote, “News is the destroyer of illusions and the ultimate policy maker.” I found myself agreeing with her.

The newspaper covered its own birthday, of course. On September 18, 1951, the Times, in a forgivable burst of pride, printed dozens of congratulatory messages — President Truman praised the newspaper for its “generally fair and accurate” reporting, the City Council passed a laudatory resolution, the American Polar Society cheered, and Cuba’s Diario de la Marina wrote: “May you continue your brilliant and efficient life as the pride of the American Press.” Even the archrival Herald Tribune paid tribute to the Times’s “high standards of dignity, thoroughness and accuracy.”

There was more the next day: MESSAGES OF CONGRATULATION CONTINUE POURING IN ON 100TH ANNIVERSARY, reads one headline. The New York Post offered a “warm typewriter toast”: “You would not want us to pretend that we always love you but as Americans and as journalists we can hardly imagine living without you.” Fifty years on, the Post is still right.

(2001)

Take a Look at This Airship!

Introduction to The World on Sunday,

by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano

Joseph Pulitzer, the fretful, sleepless, Hungarian-born genius who, at the close of the nineteenth century, created the modern newspaper, understood Sundays better than most people.

When you got up on Sunday a hundred years ago, in the age of the six-day workweek, and you had a moment to rest and to feel the restlessness that attends rest, what did you want? News? Did you want headlines about Washington and Tammany Hall and Albany? Well, some, but not so much. You definitely wanted a newspaper: you wanted the comfort of a fresh floppy creation that had required the permanent marriage of tankfuls of ink and elephantine rolls of white paper in order to proclaim the elemental but somehow thrilling fact that this very morning in which you found yourself, despite its familiar features, was incontrovertibly, datably, new.

So, yes, you wanted a Sunday newspaper, but what you wanted from it wasn’t really news — it was life. You wanted romance, awe, a close scrape, a prophecy, advice on how to tip or shoplift or gamble, new fashions from Paris, a song to sing, a scissors project for the children, theories about Martians or advanced weaponry, maybe a new job. You wanted to be told over and over again that your city was a city of marvels like no other, but you also wanted to escape for a few minutes to the North Pole or South Dakota or the St. Louis World’s Fair, or to take a boat trip down the Mississippi. You wanted something with many sections that you could dole out to people in the room with you. And you wanted imagery — cartoons, caricatures, “gems of pictorial beauty”—layouts and hand-inked headlines that made your eyeballs bustle and bounce around the department-store display of every page. And that’s what you got when you spent a nickel and bought Joseph Pulitzer’s Sunday World.

The World—the self-described “greatest newspaper on earth”—was actually three newspapers, the morning World (published Monday through Saturday, often with a political cartoon by Walt McDougall or C. G. Bush on the front page), the Evening World (carrying boxing news and sports scores, with a more raffish flavor throughout), and “THE GREAT SUNDAY WORLD,” which weighed as much as a small roast beef. Together these three Worlds were, in their days of triumph, seen simultaneously by more people than any other publication, with the possible exception of the Bible. Mornings and evenings, hundreds of thousands of fresh World issues groaned out from the basement levels of Pulitzer’s imposingly gold-domed skyscraper onto every New York street corner and trolley stop; in 1899, despite some competition from interloper William Randolph Hearst, the World claimed on its front page, believably, that it had achieved the “largest circulation ever reached in one year by any newspaper.”

The Sunday World was the real prodigy of physical dissemination: it sometimes sold half a million or more copies, and it went all over the country. In 1908 Adolph Ochs, publisher of the smaller, soberer New York Times, wrote admiringly of the World’s “phenomenal and prodigious success”; another newspaperman, Frank Munsey, said of Pulitzer: “He came here as a whirlwind out of the West, and overturned and routed the conservativism then in vogue as a cyclone sweeps all before it.”

The peculiar thing, however, is that out of all this cyclonic activity, next to nothing survives. Libraries, suspicious of low and pandering art, collected and bound for safekeeping only a few complete original runs of mass-circulation newspapers such as the World—they preferred the New York Times and the Evening Post, papers that carried “real” news with less splash and dash. And then, in the ’50s, intrigued by new techniques of photographic miniaturization, libraries began to replace the few runs of popular papers that they did possess with monochromatic copies made on inch-and-a-half-wide strips of clear plastic: microfilm. (You can see reproductions from a microfilm copy of the Evening World used as wallpaper in many Subway sandwich shops.) Almost every American library that could afford to swapped a new plastic copy for the heavy, space-consuming wood-pulp original — even two of the greatest, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. They threw out the bound volumes or, later, sold them to scrap dealers who razored out cartoons, automobile ads, and historical dates, and used the rest as quarry for the “original Newspaper of the Day You Were Born.”

So the reproductions that you see in this book — the art by Bush, J. Campbell Cory, Richard Felton Outcault, Charles Saalburg, George McManus, Marius de Zayas, Dan Smith, and Louis Biedermann; the writing by Mark Twain, Robert Peary, and others — come from what is one of the very last, perhaps the last, set of original copies of the turn-of-the-century New York World in existence — certainly the last in such pristine condition. The set came from England: lucky for us, the British Library, in 1898, as the Spanish-American War loomed, felt that Pulitzer’s World was an essential source of opinion and reportage, and librarians there began subscribing to the World and (just as important) began binding it into durable, red-spined, gold-lettered volumes. For decades, foresightedly, through various financial upheavals and geopolitical reshufflements, they kept these volumes safe on shelves. Then, in 1999, feeling the pinch after opening an expensive new building, the library’s managers made quiet plans to offer much of its foreign (i.e., North and South American and Continental European) newspaper collection to other libraries, and to auction off the unwanted residue to dealers. I was in the midst of writing a book about the particulars of the losses attributable to microfilm — the crudity of the microcopying itself, the perishability of early acetate film, the bogus science predicting acidic paper’s imminent doom — when I learned of the British Library’s disposal plans. So I went to England and asked them to keep the American papers. I said that they were rich and rare — which they certainly are — and that I knew that they held, for example, true “first editions” of the writings of Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Robert Benchley, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, Thomas Edison, William Faulkner, and hundreds of other writers, some named, some anonymous. I said that their foreign newspaper collection was just as valuable as, and considerably rarer than, just about any acknowledged rarity in their possession — rarer, for example, than the justly treasured output of Renaissance printers such as Aldus, Plantin, and Wynkyn de Worde. A century ago, newspapers like the World, the Chicago Tribune, the New-York Tribune, and many others were everywhere and were read by everyone; now they are almost nowhere: their historico-artifactual resplendence and indispensability was, it seemed to me, beyond dispute. Not only that — so I argued — but if we ever wanted to make better reproductions of the newspapers than microfilming offered — if we wanted to make digital or even old-fashioned analog reproductions in color, for instance — we would need the original pages to work from: you can’t make a sharp, continuous-tone color photograph out of a fuzzy, high-contrast black-and-white microcopy. So I said to the librarians in England.

But my anti-sales pitch wasn’t successful — the British librarians had gotten some interesting faxed-in bids from a Pennsylvanian dealer by the time I visited, and, it seemed, they simply wanted his money. And I knew what that meant. It meant box-cutter butchery and plastic-sheathed, issue-by-issue dispersal, and I concluded that the only way to save the collection was to raise the money to buy it and ship it to leased quarters in the United States. So my wife and I — my wife being Margaret Brentano, the editor and caption writer of this book — formed a nonprofit organization, grandiosely named the American Newspaper Repository, though it was really just the two of us overseen by some kindly advisers, and we bought more than six thousand volumes of American newspapers (a volume being anywhere from two weeks’ to three months’ worth of daily issues), plus another thousand wrapped bundles, most in extraordinarily good condition, all formerly owned by the British government. The cost, including two long runs that we ended up buying from a dealer who had outbid us, was approximately $150,000; the collection arrived in several shipments in 2000.

And that’s how we came to be standing at tables in a large chilly brick mill building in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, paging with wonderment through Pulitzer’s almost-lost World. The mill space we had rented, for two thousand dollars a month, was the size of two, maybe three, tennis courts, with rows of battered, factory-blue metal columns running down it and an inflatable black bat strung near a fire door at the far end. In Pulitzer’s day, and well before, the building had held enormous, noisy, oil-dripping looms (which looked somewhat like newspaper printing presses), but when we got there the place had become extremely quiet. Over near the loading dock, the Humpty Dumpty Potato Chip Company stored boxes of barbecue-flavored snacks in metal cages; above us was the ever-shrinking presence of Damart, the French maker of silk underwear, latterly brought low by Asian competition. One of the mill’s upper floors was jammed with cast-off hospital equipment — evil-looking gurneys and examination tables, failed heart monitors, vintage monster-movie X-ray machines — all trucked there by a man of mystery and energy who purportedly assembled medical clinics in third-world countries.

A former Damart employee volunteered to build a wall for us and install lights: suddenly we found that we had a huge still expanse with a sign on the door that said AMERICAN NEWSPAPER REPOSITORY. I put up a few dozen extra-long window shades, because newsprint is better off in the dark, but the late-afternoon sun slipped in along the edges of the window frames and striped the floor with long, dusty blades that crumpled over the backs of volunteers — students, teachers, librarians, my own children — as they unloaded pallet after pallet of newspaper volumes and sorted them into yearly piles by title and date. (The British Library had shipped them to us in semi-random order.) We bought ten-foot-high industrial shelving till we ran out of money. Our shelved run of the New York Times was impressive; like a steam locomotive and its tender, it ran down much of the length of the room. Occasionally, students of history or journalism would come and browse through issues, taking notes, sitting on old hospital chairs, or some scholar would visit in search of a specific article or image or theme.

And the World? We loved its heavy, vellum-cornered volumes, which smelled faintly of acid paper: 1898 began on the upper left of the shelving, at the very top; one range over, there were the fat monthly tomes from 1903 and 1906 (for some reason I became particularly fond of the year 1906), and then the teens, and then on the other side of the shelves (near windows that, if you peeked under the shades, looked down on the Salmon Falls River), the run ran on through the World’s more sophisticated, literary period, when it invented the crossword puzzle, published Dorothy Parker and A. J. Liebling, and exposed the misdeeds of the Ku Klux Klan. Over several months, Margaret went through every World volume from 1898 to 1911, the year of Pulitzer’s death. “Take a look at this airship!” she called. “You’ve got to see this Biedermann!” She found scenic wonders and oddities everywhere, marking them with strips of paper, but especially in the Sunday issues, where the World’s editors and illustrators and writers were obviously having a fantastic time — cackling to themselves, we imagined, as every week they published another vaudeville revue of urban urges and preoccupations. The world should know about the World, we felt. Why should an artist such as Dan McCarthy, who gave us “The American Sky-Scraper Is a Modern Tower of Babel,” be totally forgotten? You can go to a museum to see the paintings of Ashcan School artist George Luks, but his disturbing newspaper drawings of 1898, “The Persecution Mania” and “All Is Lost Save Honor,” exist only on microfilm, as far as I can tell, apart from these pages. The World’s innovations in page design, in color “electrogravure” printing, in puzzles and children’s illustration, in teasingly elaborate charts, and in swervy, swoopy typography are everywhere evident to a modern eye; perhaps it’s time to take a preliminary step toward restoring the Sunday paper to its rightful place in the history of American vernacular art.

In the fall of 2003 David Ferriero, then librarian at Duke University, offered to take the entire collection to Duke, where it now safely resides under the care of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. But before we packed it back up onto pallets and loaded it onto trucks (five tractor-trailer loads, as it turned out, a hefty gift), we wanted, like proud parents who send their grown child off to college, to take some pictures — not just digital snapshots, either, but real pictures. I first rented, then bought, a view camera and a lens, and I rigged a five-foot-high copy stand out of an old tripod and some cast-iron pipe, and Margaret and I began photographing the pages from the World that you see here. We have left the papers exactly as they were originally arranged, that is, in strict chronological order, because one of the delights of the World, as of all newspapers, is that it is as utterly miscellaneous as it is date-bound. We have not cut anything out, needless to say — the pages emerge from their respective volumes just where they were sewn by the British Library (then called the British Museum) a century ago. It’s time to call an end to the razoring-out of beautiful things for the sake of copying them.

Joseph Pulitzer was all but blind when the art in these pages was first published: the more his own sight dimmed, the more imploringly colorful his paper became. He was too high-strung to appear in public — he was never seen at the World’s ornate offices, overlooking City Hall — and he lived mostly on his yacht, where he could get around by feel, traveling from port to port and managing the newspaper via a team of readers and abstractors and long-suffering plenipotentiaries. Through them he kept a close hand on his beloved creation, giving it, he said, every moment of his waking time. In 1898, when the reproductions in this book commence, Pulitzer had just bought a new high-speed color printing press from Richard Hoe & Company. The new press was “all important,” Pulitzer wrote; he ordered his editors to “impress this novelty on the public mind as the greatest progress in Sunday journalism.” Which they did. “Like rainbow tints in the spray are the hues that splash and pour from its lightning cylinders,” said one ad announcing the coming of the new press. It was, said another, “THE MOST MARVELOUS MECHANISM OF THE AGE”—and in some ways it was, for it allowed each citizen, rich or poor, to gain entrance, every Sunday, into a private museum.

So the pictures in this book begin in 1898, with the Spanish-American War. And they close in 1911, the year that Pulitzer died. The Sunday World always wanted to surprise: it exaggerated and sought the bizarre angle and turned small news into big news — but its exaggerations now have truths of their own to tell us. We hope you will find, as we did, that looking at these time-tanned pages gives a sense of the exuberance and modernness and strangeness of the turn-of-the-century city that no history book can easily supply.

(2005)

Sex and the City, Circa 1840

A review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in association with the American Antiquarian Society (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

On April 9, 1842, the Whip, a weekly New York newspaper that pledged to “keep a watchful eye on all brothels and their frail inmates,” carried an article about chambermaids. Chambermaids were women of flesh and blood, according to the article, “with the same instinctive desires as their masters, and much of their time is necessarily passed alone, in remote apartments, which usually contain beds.” Accompanying the article was a drawing: a chambermaid gripped the long wooden handle of a warming pan that projected rudely from between a tailcoated gentleman’s legs.

The Whip was, along with three other newspapers — the Flash, the Rake, and the Libertine—part of what is now called the “flash press”: a short-lived public outburst of suggestive talk, threatened blackmail, bare-knuckle boxing, and ornate vituperation that swept through New York in the early 1840s. For nearly 150 years, the flash press was all but forgotten by historians — before it was rediscovered by Patricia Cline Cohen, of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In the late 1980s, Cohen was at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, researching a book about the sensational murder of Helen Jewett, a nineteenth-century courtesan. The antiquarian society had, as it happened, just bought a large private collection of flash papers from the son of a sportswriter and boxing promoter. Cohen, fascinated, began paging through the issues, taking notes. She told another scholar, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, now of Loyola University in Chicago, about what she’d found, and Gilfoyle cited the papers in City of Eros, his 1992 history of New York prostitution. Soon word got out in academia, and now, as the historiography of paid sex has come into vogue, the flash collection is one of the more heavily used holdings in the society’s priceless antebellum hoard.

Cohen, Gilfoyle, and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz — a historian at Smith College and the author of Rereading Sex, a study of erotica — have together produced The Flash Press, the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen’s recent historical novel Heyday—and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War — will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

The primogenitor of the flash press was a brilliant, doomed wretch from Boston named William J. Snelling. Snelling’s mother died when he was six; his father was a war hero and a heavy drinker. After dropping out of West Point, Snelling spent some time living among the Dakota Indians, later writing about them with affection and sympathy in Tales of the Northwest. He returned to Boston, went to prison for public drunkenness, worked up that experience into a book — and then, fired by literary ambition, attempted to create the great American Dunciad: a long poem called Truth, in heroic couplets, attacking many of the minor poets of the day and praising a few. After fifty pages of sharply turned iambic insults, Snelling exhaustedly wrote:

Now have I thump’d each lout I meant to thump,

And my worn pen exhibits but a stump.

After Truth, what? Versifying, Snelling wrote an editor, had gone flat for him. “I can only write in the excitement of strong feeling,” he said. He was living in New York by then, still drinking heavily and spending too much time in the Five Points neighborhood north of City Hall, where members of the frail sisterhood were to be found. Out of this experience he and another editor created Polyanthos, in imitation of scandal sheets from Britain.

And then, in the summer of 1841, came Snelling’s great innovation, the Flash. It was a normal-size weekly newspaper of four pages, set in the usual (i.e., absurdly, illegibly, rag-paper-conservingly tiny) type of the day, with a fancy masthead depicting a dogfight, a leggy ballet dancer, and other racy tropes. (In the back of Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz’s book, you can see a foldout reproduction in miniature of the front page of one issue.) The paper was edited by Snelling, under the pen name Scorpion, along with two other men, Startle and Sly. Startle was George Wilkes, a snappy dresser and man-about-town who had been arrested for bawdy-house rowdiness in 1836. Sly was George Wooldridge, who ran the Elssler Saloon at 300 Broadway, which sold pickled meats and other delicacies — these could be had in private rooms, “where visitors can sit without observation.” Startle and Sly supplied the gossip and tips on brothel life, and Scorpion worked his caustic belletristic magic to produce a paper that was devoted, as it proclaimed, to “Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures.”

The weekly — sold for six cents by vocal newsboys and carrying advertisements for the Grotto and the Climax eating houses, cheap dress coats, midwifery, and antisyphilitic nostrums like Hunter’s Red Drop — was an immediate success, and almost immediately it got into trouble. In the issue of October 17, 1841, appeared one in a series of articles called “Lives of the Nymphs.” The article told the story of a rich, successful courtesan, Amanda Green — the tall, full-formed daughter of a dressmaker, who was abducted by a man in a coach and plied with champagne. “At the crowing of the cock she was no more a maid,” said the article. Abandoned by her gentleman abuser, she took up with a German piano tuner — after which there was no recourse but a life of open shame. “May those who have not yet sinned, take warning by her example,” the Flash reporter piously wrote. “She is very handsome. She resides at Mrs. Shannon’s, No. 74 West Broadway.”

In the same issue as Amanda Green’s memoir — the details of which were furnished by “Sly” Wooldridge — was an attack written by Snelling on a Wall Street merchant named Myer Levy. Levy had an enemy, a stockbroker named Emanuel Hart, who fed Wooldridge some specifics of Levy’s past, which Wooldridge passed on to Snelling, who dashed off a long, calumnious piece alleging that Levy had worked as a “fancy man” for a prostitute and asserting that he was, among other things, lascivious, sordid, and crapulous.

Levy complained to the New York district attorney, who promptly charged the three proprietors of the Flash with criminal libel and, in a separate charge, with obscenity. Wooldridge turned state’s evidence and got off. He soon founded a new paper called the True Flash, which attacked Snelling: “His best effusions now are the mumblings of a sot,” said the article. “What has he left but to crawl his way through the world, leaving his slime behind him.” Snelling went to jail briefly on the obscenity charge (the ramifications of which are nicely elucidated in The Flash Press), and then, remarkably, when he emerged a few months later, he and Wooldridge made up and joined forces again in a new paper, the Whip—which was like the Flash but slightly racier and a little more careful about libel.

The burst of published indecorum reached its peak in the summer of 1842—indeed, as the authors of The Flash Press show, the use of the very words “licentious” and “licentiousness” in American periodicals rose from about 1,500 instances in 1830 to 3,000 in 1842, plummeting again thereafter. By that summer, there were two more flash rags, the Rake and the Libertine, and a printer and cartoonist named Robinson was busy selling dirty drawings with titles like “Do You Like This Sort of Thing?” It was all too much for James Whiting, the district attorney, who began issuing indictments right and left. The Flash and the Whip managed to continue in the face of legal troubles and editorial turnover until 1843, threatening malefactors with exposure, interviewing half-naked women in the park, excoriating sodomites, and writing up the beauties and the dress designs to be found in the richest bordellos. (One personality, Mary Walker, wore crimson embroidered silk: “Praxiteles never chiseled a more exquisite form, and Canova would have died in the vain endeavour to mould a bust like her own,” the Whip reported.)

Then it was all over. Snelling left for Boston, where he rejoined his third wife and became editor of the Boston Herald. He was “the father of the smutty papers,” said a writer in the Rake. “What would any of us have been without him?” Snelling died broke but legitimate in 1848, mourned as a pillar of the Boston scene.

Recently I drove to Worcester to see these papers in the original. There they were: large, light-brown scholarly objects, protected by acid-free folders, stored on cool shelves with brass rollers — full of strange lost scandal. In some fragile issues — those saved by the Queens College professor Leo Hershkowitz from masses of historical documents discarded by the City of New York in the 1970s — there are notations and cartoonish pointing fingers drawn by District Attorney Whiting himself, as he contemplated possible grounds for indictment. In one issue I read an editorial: “The Flash is known all over the Union,” it said; “at the South it goes like wildfire.” Like Al Goldstein’s weekly Screw, which flourished more than a century later, the flash papers told a nervous young reader what was out there — where to go, how to act, and what to expect. “The Sunday Flash and its successors gave male readers paths to navigate the city without being conned or embarrassed as a greenhorn,” Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz write. “Even a shy fellow who stayed in his boardinghouse could imagine himself as a blade making a sophisticated entry into a brothel parlor.”

Thanks to the preservation efforts of the American Antiquarian Society and the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York’s long-past illicit life. Oh, and the drawing of the chambermaid and her warming pan is on page 101.

(2008)