Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  Many of the books may be gone, but their quotably quantified test results live on in the hearts and bibliographies of preservation managers, who by the late seventies began to have fantasies of sampling the paper in their own collections, in order to see how catastrophically degraded and grant-gettably reformattable it was. Most libraries don’t have MIT Fold Testers, though—and anyway you wouldn’t want to be cutting strips out of your library’s books with Barrow’s abandon; you need something quicker and less extreme, albeit variable and imprecise. You also want something that undergraduates and other low-wagers can do with minimal training. And that’s how the library world settled on the double-fold test.

  Anyone can do it. Open a book to a random page and fold its lower right corner in toward you, forming a triangle against the paper, until you feel it crease under your thumb. Then fold it back in the opposite direction until it folds against the far side of the page. That is one double fold. Do that until the paper breaks, or until you reach some stopping point, as specified by your library’s preservation department—one double fold, two, four, five. Double folding may seem oddly familiar to some, for it is how kindergarteners are taught to divide a piece of paper without scissors. Now, however, it is used to survey research collections in order to determine their “usability” and hence their fate.

  “Usable,” as it happens, is another piece of specialized preservo-vocabulary. A unusable book is not a book that you can’t use. “An ‘unusable’ record,”11 wrote Gordon Williams in 1964, “is one already so deteriorated the paper breaks when folded once. A ‘usable’ record is one with obvious signs of past use but that might be expected to last at least another twenty-five years if untreated and stored under average library conditions.” But that is just one of dozens of definitions and regional variations. Indiana University defines a brittle book as one that doesn’t survive three double folds followed by a gentle tug, while an extremely brittle book is one whose page “breaks off12 in your hand when folded once”—in such cases, “it is often best to withdraw, replace or reformat the item.” At Northwestern, staff members are urged to do the “four corner test”13 for brittleness, “because we might end up reformatting the item,” but they are advised not to pull the corner. At Cornell and Berkeley, a brittle book is one that doesn’t withstand one double fold. At Johns Hopkins, when I called, it was one-and-a-half double folds; i.e., “three half folds.” The Library of Congress also uses three half folds. Ohio State defines brittleness as a paper’s breakage “when a lower corner14 is folded back and forth four (4) times (the ‘two-double-fold test’).” It’s two double folds at the University of Maryland, too, “at a width of no more than 1/2 inch,” followed by “a very gentle tug”;15 books that fail this test are “in jeopardy when anyone16 simply turns the leaves.” David Lowe, who manages an NEH-funded microfilming project at Columbia University,17 explained his library’s procedure to me: “Three-eighths of an inch from the corner you fold once, then back under for a single double fold, and then try to tug gently. Then single folds after that up to a total of four single folds—so only twice, after the double fold. Four is the max. If it withstands four, we don’t torture it any more.”

  The University of Florida has an even tougher standard: “A book is considered18 brittle for University of Florida’s Preservation purposes, when the paper is weak enough to fail the ‘double-fold test’ at five [double] folds or less.” (Perhaps it’s five because of Florida’s humidity; you need to do more folding to get the results you would get up north.) A library staff member who encounters what is by this extreme definition a brittle book routes it to the Brittle Books Department, with a flag in it bearing the “dft result” (“dft” means double-fold test)—from there the marked book enters the twilight realm of “planned deterioration.”19 If and when20 the book produces a double-fold test number of less than one, it is withdrawn.

  This is of course utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami. If you wanted to test the effective springiness of a watch spring or a Slinky, would you bend a short segment of it back and forth until it broke? If you had a tree in your yard that survived storms by bending and dipping in the wind, would you consider cutting it into firewood because one of its twigs snapped when you bent it in two? Would you check the resilience, and hence the utility, of a diving board by counting how many times you could fold it back on itself before it failed? No, you would not. In fact, a diving board that you could double-fold ten times might be an unacceptably floppy diving board.

  The point is that if you bend an intentionally stiff-but-flexible item past the point of its return-memory, you will begin to break it, and that incremental breakage brings a separate set of physical processes into play, with their own plottable curves and points of final rupture. Klaus Hendriks, the paper scientist from Canada, wrote that “one cannot qualify a book page21 that can be turned over and read as being at the end of its lifespan, even if a corner breaks off after one fold. As long as no mechanical force acts upon it, it will survive a while longer. One will be able to read it and turn it over for years to come.”

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  A New Test

  Late one night, after the children were in bed, I began some random experimentation at the household bookshelves. My wife asked me what I was up to.

  “I’m—I’m performing the fold test,” I said.

  “Please stop breaking the corners off our books,” my wife said. “It can’t be doing them any good.”

  Before the survey was suspended, I had found that Saintsbury’s Essays in English Literature, Thomas De Quincey’s study of Richard Bentley, Lessing’s Laocoon, and Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop flunked their fold tests. A few months later, I bought a book of essays by Edmund Gosse1 called Questions at Issue, published by Appleton in 1893. The more I read it, the more I liked it, and the more I liked it, the more I wanted to find out how it would rate in the eyes of a preservation administrator. I put my thumb to work on a lower corner of page 153, the last page of an essay called “The Limits of Realism in Fiction.” There was almost instant breakage—the corner fell away before it had completed the first leg of the double-fold cycle. If I were doing a survey of my collection, I would be forced to assign this book a dft result of 0.4 or so—a death sentence in some libraries. If I cut a strip out of page 153—which I am unlikely to do—I probably wouldn’t even be able to get it clamped and under proper tension in the MIT machine before it would break. This was the sort of book over which preservation people shake their heads and say, “It’s got one read left in it.” Or, in a sad but firm voice, “We’ve got just one chance to turn these pages, and it better be when they’re under the camera.” Untold numbers of books with fold-test results better than that of my copy of Questions at Issue have met their unmaker in windowless offices of preservation reformatting.

  And yet this was clearly a usable book: I was using it, and not gently, either. I don’t cover books with plastic sleeves; I pile them on the floor around my chair, and sometimes the piles topple. Any manual procedure that would conclude that my book was “unusable” or “unserviceable” was a flawed procedure. Klaus Hendriks was right, I thought—the existing tests are inadequate. To test a toaster you toast with it, to test a circuit board you run it for a burn-in period, to test tires you drive them on a test track, to test a heart muscle you put its owner on a treadmill. Suddenly something came to me: a new test for paper.

  You don’t have to be a scientist or a conservator to perform my “Turn Endurance Test,” and it’s nondestructive. The protocol is as follows. Open a book to a middle page. Lift the top of the page a little with your right forefinger. Now, when you’re ready, turn the page, as if you had just read it. Then, with your left hand, restore the page you just turned to its initial position. Turn the page, turn it back; turn the page, turn it back. Each turn cycle may be called one double turn, or DT.

  I pe
rformed a full-scale Turn Endurance Test on page 153 of Gosse’s Questions at Issue, the very page that had acquitted itself so poorly in a regulation fold test. I turned the page2 once. . . and nothing happened. The paper did not crack, disintegrate, or compromise itself in any way. Again I turned—and the paper was sound. I turned the page ten times—then twenty, then fifty. Each time, I let it return all the way to a point of rest on the right-hand page-block, so that in lifting it for the next cycle I would duplicate all the top-edge stresses of normal use. Each round trip took me about two seconds.

  After two hundred turns, I began to enjoy myself. It wasn’t tedious; I got good at it. At the beginning of each cycle, the title of Gosse’s next essay disclosed itself on the page beneath: “Is Verse in Danger?” (Gosse believes that it is.) I looked down at the lower corner I’d broken off and regretted that I’d done it, and yet if that lost corner indirectly saves a few books it will not have been creased in vain.3

  After four hundred double turns I stopped. Barrow claimed that the test for fold endurance simulated the to-and-fro bending of a leaf in actual use—but that can’t be right, since my fold-failing page 153 had just flexed eight hundred times (at two bends per cycle) with no hint of damage. Its top edge, where my fingerprint ridges caught and curled it back slightly each time to initiate the turn, was unmarked. Questions at Issue was (by definition) a very brittle book, if you compared it with brand-new paper, or old rag paper, but my ten minutes of research indicated that I would be able to read it four hundred times, which was plenty. There is, then, a broad infrared spectrum of serviceable frailty below “breaks at one-half fold” that the act of folding simply cannot sense. In the early sixties, Barrow once took a reporter4 for the Richmond News Leader down to his lab:

  “See,” he said, taking a yellowed book off a shelf of yellowed books. It was an old cookbook. “Printed in 1905,” he said, as page 282 came out in his fingers. We folded the paper over, then back. Two folds were all the paper could take. The page fell into two pieces, and the recipe for Chicken a la Terrapin was cut in half.

  The reporter was shocked, but we needn’t be. If Barrow hadn’t chosen to destroy yet another page in order to perform his parlor trick, the recipe for Chicken à la Terrapin would very likely be with us today. (And it would be an interesting recipe, too: a terrapin is a large freshwater turtle.)

  One root of the word “duplicity” is duplicitas, “double-foldedness.” The fold test, as it has been institutionalized in research libraries, is often an instrument of deception, almost always of self-deception. It creates a uniform class of condemnable objects—“brittle material,” or better yet, embrittled material (for somehow the em-prefix adds a further wiggle of worry)—whose population can be adjusted up or down to suit rhetorical needs simply by altering the number of repetitions demanded in the procedure. It takes no intelligence or experience to fold a corner, and yet the action radiates an air of judicious connoisseurship. Because it is so undiscriminatingly inclusive, and cheap, and quantifiable—because it can be tuned to tell administrators precisely what they want to hear—the fold test has become an easy way for libraries to free up shelves with a clear conscience. It isn’t that we’d like more space, one can almost hear them whispering to themselves, as they work the corners back and forth, it’s that the books are, sadly, doomed.

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  Great Magnitude

  The eighties became the decade of the Barrow-inspired statistical-deterioration survey. Stanford University1 set the pattern in 1979 by subjecting the corners of four hundred books to three double folds (three, followed by a gentle pull, just to be sure), with additional demerits for bad bindings, crumbly margins, and poor paper color—they found that twenty-six percent of the books had “deteriorated.” In 1984, the Library of Congress cut strips from the fore-edges of twelve hundred of its books and mounted them on MIT Fold Testers; a statistical consultant found that twenty-five percent had fold values of less than one, meaning that “in the judgement of experienced2 Library of Congress personnel in the preservation field” (i.e., Peter Sparks and his crew), these books “should be preserved by microfilming rather than deacidification.”

  And then in 1985, in the pages of College and Research Libraries, came a monster from New Haven. It was called “The Yale Survey:3 A Large-Scale Study of Book Deterioration in the Yale University Library.” A team of interns (salaried by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation) performed double-fold tests on an incredible 36,500 books. The corners were to be “folded four times, and the crease pinched on each fold,” an appendix confides—pinched, just to be sure. “Of the books surveyed in the main Sterling [Memorial Library] stacks, 44.7 percent did not survive the four-fold paper test—a percentage that represents between 1,351,600 and 1,420,420 books.” What were we to conclude from these huge numbers? “These findings signal the need for expanded replacement and reproduction programs”—more microfilming. The current preservation librarian at Harvard, Jan Merrill-Oldham, was one of the team of dedicated folders.

  The Yale survey was executed with care and thoroughness, and it’s worth studying. If we look at its results in a slightly different way, they argue for the astonishing fortitude of acidic paper, not for its endangeredness. A few years before the publication of the survey, Gay Walker, Yale’s head of preservation, delivered a paper to preservation administrators that described the environmental conditions in the Sterling stacks. There were, she said, “major problems with the ventilation system.” There was no air-conditioning, and humidity levels in the summer were extremely high. Worse than that, heating problems raised wintertime stack temperatures into the nineties and dropped the humidity to ten or fifteen percent. “Water leaks occurred4 from time to time and a pigeon’s nest with eggs could be found now and then on the upper floors,” Walker informed her colleagues. “It seemed that the Sterling stack tower was purposefully built to serve as a giant aging oven—planned deterioration indeed!”

  And yet, according to the survey report (which doesn’t spell out these environmental rigors), even after decades of being dry-baked, summer-steamed, leaked on, bird-nested, and even occasionally read, the Yale collection wasn’t doing too badly: “Surprisingly, the percentage of books needing immediate treatment was much lower than we had believed,” the surveyors candidly admit. Their advance guess was that thirty or forty percent of Yale’s books would need attention, but that proved, they wrote, to be an overestimate—an overestimate, that is, unless the surveyors redefined the needing-attention category “to include all books with brittle paper” (those, in other words, that failed their mystical manipulation), whether the books actually needed attention or not. Without the fold test, Yale had no marketable preservation crisis.

  And marketing was the key, it seemed, because marketing pulled in money. At the same preservation conference at which Gay Walker recounted the sorry state of Yale’s Sterling stacks, Peter Sparks gave a brief pep talk called “Marketing for Preservation.” Charities, he told his fellow folders, raise an “amazing” amount of money every year—over forty billion dollars in 1979. But the competition was keen:

  To get a piece of the action,5 an organized, systematic approach must be devised to convince donor agencies that one’s cause is worthwhile. Library preservation is a salable item; one must simply formulate an approach that will convince donor publics to invest substantially in this cause.

  What was the systematic approach going to be? How could library leaders repackage the idea of mass microfilming in such a way that it would leap to a top spot on the worthy-cause roster?

  Warren Haas, Verner Clapp’s successor (after a brief interregnum) as president of the Council on Library Resources, had been meditating on these questions for a long time. He was a deep believer in Barrow’s Deterioration of Book Stock, Causes and Remedies, and an equally deep believer in microforms. (Microforms haven’t returned the favor: Haas’s undergraduate thesis6 on British book censorship is ava
ilable on microfiche, but the copy I got through interlibrary loan was faded to the point of unreadability, although I was able to print legible pages by changing the print setting to “negative,” so that the type stood out white on black.) In 1972, the year of Verner Clapp’s death, Haas chaired a committee on preservation for the Association of Research Libraries, and wrote its final report: Preparation of Detailed Specifications7 for a National System for the Preservation of Library Materials. (The work was supported by a grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.) Haas proposed that a consortium of big libraries embark on a “planned program of microfilming” that would include “collective ownership of any master negatives produced as part of any text preservation project.” The ownership of the masters was a matter of some concern to a library director like Haas, because, as he explained, “much master negative microfilm8 made from volumes in research library collections, at times even at the sacrifice of the original volume, is now in commercial film vaults.” The microfilm business had boomed—companies were selling enormous motley collections on “ultrafiche”9 (very high reduction microfiche) to libraries who needed to build up their title counts fast. (In a later CD-ROM era, such a product would be called “shovelware.”) Haas’s consortium would in effect become a micropublishing and reprinting concern to rival commercial micropublishers; the marketability of collections they microfilmed, Haas believed, “should weigh heavily10 in initial preservation program designations, both for the potential income and the high level of program visibility.” But before they could get their consortial shutters clicking, they would need money. A program of the scope that Haas envisioned would require, he wrote, “federal financial support11 of great magnitude.”