Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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