Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 20 – Special Offer

  * * *

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

  accreditation: Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”

  shady entrepreneurs: Veaner, “Crisis in Micropublication.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 21 – 3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars

  * * *

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 22 – Six Thousand Bodies a Day

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 23 – Burning Up

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER 24 – Going, Going, Gone

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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