Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  But the originals didn’t crumble into dust. Keyes Metcalf, a microfilm pioneer and the director of the libraries at Harvard, in 1941 predicted that the “total space requirements” of research libraries “will be reduced by paper disintegration.” Then five, ten, twenty years went by, and the paper—even the supposedly ephemeral newsprint—was still there. So librarians began getting rid of it anyway. If you destroy the physical evidence, nobody will know how skewed your predictions were.

  Vilified though it may be, ground-wood pulp is one of the great inventions of the late nineteenth century: it gave us cheap paper, and cheap paper transformed the news. “All that it is necessary for a man to do on going into a paper-mill is to take off his shirt, hand it to the devil who officiates at one extremity, and have it come out ‘Robinson Crusoe’ at the other,” wrote the founder of the New York Sun in 1837. But there were never enough shirts, and in 1854 rag shortages lifted the price of newsprint to alarming heights. The arrival of the brothers Pagenstecher, who in the 1860s imported a German machine that shredded logs to pulp by jamming their ends against a circular, water-cooled grinding stone, brought prices way down—from twelve cents a pound in 1870, to seven cents a pound in 1880, to less than two cents a pound in 1900. The drop gave Pulitzer and Hearst the plentiful page space to sell big ads, and allowed their creations to flower into the gaudy painted ladies they had become by the first decade of the twentieth century.

  There’s no question that wood pulps are in general weaker than rag pulps; and old newsprint, especially, tears easily, and it can become exceedingly fragile if it is stored, say, on the cement floor of a library basement, near heating pipes, for a few decades. But the degree of fragility varies from title to title and run to run, and many fragile things (old quilts, old clocks, astrolabes, dried botanical specimens, Egyptian glass, daguerreotypes, early computers) are deemed worth preserving despite, or even because of, their fragility. The most delicate volume I’ve come across (a month of the Detroit Evening News from 1892), though the pages were mostly detached, and though it shed flurries of marginal flakes when I moved it around, could nonetheless be page-turned and read with a modicum of care—there was an interesting article, with two accompanying etchings, about a city shelter for “homeless wanderers.” (Sinners slept on wooden bunks without bedding, while the newly converted got cots with mattresses, and a reading room.)

  Old newsprint is very acidic—and so? Our agitation over the acid in paper is not rational. Just because a given page has a low pH (a pH of 7 is neutral, below that is acidic) doesn’t mean that it can’t be read. There are five-hundred-year-old book papers that remain strong and flexible despite pH levels under five, a fact which has led one conservation scientist to conclude that “the acidity of the paper alone is not necessarily indicative of the state of permanence of paper.” It is difficult, in fact, to get a meaningful measure of how alkaline or acidic a paper actually is, since chemicals on the surface behave differently than those held within; the standard scientific tests (which often rely on a blender) don’t discriminate. It’s true that, all things being equal, pH-neutral paper seems to keep its properties longer than paper that is made with acid-containing or acid-forming additives; scientists have been making this observation, on and off, for more than eighty years. But saying that one substance is stronger than another is not the same as saying that the weaker substance is on the verge of self-destruction. A stainless-steel chair may be more durable than a wooden one, but the wooden one isn’t necessarily going to collapse the next time you take a seat.

  Can’t scientists foretell with a fair degree of certainty how long a newspaper collection of a given age will last? No, they can’t; there has never been a long-term study that attempted to plot an actual loss-of-strength curve for samples of naturally aging newsprint, or indeed for samples of any paper. Years ago, William K. Wilson, a paper scientist, began such a study at the National Bureau of Standards. For three decades he recorded the degradative changes undergone by a set of commercial book papers; then somebody decided to clean out the green filing cabinet in which the papers were stored—end of experiment. “That raised my blood pressure a little,” Wilson told me.

  In the absence of real long-term data, predictions have relied on methodologically shaky “artificial aging” (or “accelerated aging”) experiments, in which you bake a paper sample in a laboratory oven for a week or two and then belabor it with standardized tests. With your test results in hand, you can, by applying a bit of chemist’s legerdemain called the Arrhenius equation, come up with what appears be a reasonable estimate of the number of years the sample will last at shirtsleeve temperatures. But the results of these sorts of divinatory calculations, invoked with head-shaking gravity by library administrators, have been uniformly wrong, and they are now viewed with skepticism by many paper scientists. The authors of the ASTM Standards, for example, write that the use of the Arrhenius equation to predict the life expectancy of paper is “an interesting academic exercise, but the uncertainty of extrapolation is too great for this approach to be taken very seriously”; William Wilson points out that you can’t predict how long an egg will last in the carton by putting it in boiling water for five minutes. Paper has a complex and as yet ill-charted chemistry, with many different molecular and mechanical processes under way concurrently; one Swedish researcher wrote that it is a “naïve hope” to think that we can estimate “the life length of books by means of accelerated aging tests and [the] Arrhenius approach.”

  In a way, however, all surviving newspaper collections, in and out of libraries, are taking part in an immense self-guided experiment in natural aging—an experiment that confutes the doctrine of newsprint’s imminent disintegration. Peter Waters, former head of the conservation lab at the Library of Congress, told me that he sees no reason why old ground-wood pulp paper can’t hold its textual freight for “a hell of a long time” if it is properly stored. He notes that most of the cellulose-sundering chemical reactions that can happen to a book or newspaper volume seem to take place in the first decade or so of its life; fifty years of handling paper (Waters is a master bookbinder) have taught him that the rate at which paper loses strength decreases significantly over time—the curve of observed decay levels out. There is a very good chance, then, that a volume of the New York World that is doing okay at age ninety will be in pretty much the same shape when it is a hundred and eighty, assuming someone is willing to take decent care of it.

  The British Library’s papers had escaped the Blitz and the agenbite of their own acidity, but their keepers craved the space they occupied. English law requires that the library preserve British newspapers in the original but makes no such stipulation for foreign papers, and in 1996 the library quietly announced its intent to rid itself of about sixty thousand volumes—almost all the non-Commonwealth papers printed after 1850 for which they had bought microfilm copies. (The microfilm, much of it shot in the United States decades ago, is of varying quality—some good, some not good, all on high-contrast black-and-white stock, which wasn’t designed to reproduce the intermediate shades of photographs.) The announcement appeared as an inside article in the newspaper library’s newsletter; it was written up not long after as a short wire-service story—“British Library Giving Away Historic Newspapers.”

  In 1997 the library selected for discard more than seventy-five runs of Western European papers and periodicals, from France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They were able to place a number of these titles with national and university libraries; others they planned to sell or throw away. (I first found out about these developments in 1999; library officials still have not provided an accounting of where everything went.) Baylor University in Texas asked for, and got, eight runs of important French and Italian papers from the 1850s on, some of which will become part of their renowned Armstrong Browning collection, since Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning likely would have read those papers in their expatri
ate years.

  Very few people knew any of this was going on. Although I interviewed a number of American newspaper librarians and dealers, I heard nothing of it; and even well-connected heads of libraries within England—such as David McKitterick, librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, who serves on an advisory board of the British Library—were not informed of the “overseas disposals project,” and learned of it only late in 1999, when word began to get out. McKitterick objects to the “very quiet way” in which the deaccessioning was handled (at the very least, other British libraries should have had a better-advertised chance at the papers, he says), and he is troubled by what is on the lists; he mentions, for instance, the newspapers of pre–Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, and occupied France. “I’ve now talked to a number of scholars about this,” McKitterick told me, “and they’re absolutely furious. When you replace a broadsheet newspaper with microfilm, you effectively kill stone dead much of what it meant at its time. Film can’t deal adequately with illustrations—and yet they were discarding the great French illustrated papers of the early twentieth century.”

  But library administrators had other things to think about than illustration and scholarship. “Increasing pressure on the storage facilities at the Colindale site” was the justification for their desperate act. One of the finest libraries in the world was unable or unwilling to buy, build, retrofit, or lease a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse anywhere in England that could hold their unique international collection.

  With Western Europe taken care of, having freed up thousands of linear meters of shelf space without any political trouble, the British Library then moved on to papers from Eastern Europe, South America, and the USA. They sent out notices of availability to the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society, of Worcester, Massachusetts. The Library of Congress rejected everything, but the American Antiquarian Society, which owns a famous collection of early papers (bound in black with gold trim), took several titles, mainly covering the era of the Civil War and immediately afterward. “The redcoats are coming!” librarians there said, shelving the red-spined British volumes next to their black ones. Richard Bland College in Petersburg, Virginia, claimed several nineteenth-century runs. John Blair, head of the history department, says he would have taken more of the British Library’s collection if his college had had more space; Blair remembers working as a stock boy in a large Massachusetts library in the fifties and hauling home dozens of unwanted newspaper volumes. “They just junked them,” he said; he has used them for years in his classes. Blair likened the clearing out of newspaper collections to the overeager tearing up of track as the railroads went into decline. “Now maybe they regret losing some of those rights-of-way,” he said.

  No other libraries expressed interest in the huge remaining mass of U.S. material. The plan, blessed by the British Library’s board, was to offer to dealers whatever libraries left unclaimed; anything dealers didn’t want was to be thrown away: “Material for which we cannot find a home will be offered to dealers for sale, or as a last resort sent for pulping.” Brian Lang, the director of the British Library, reiterated this plan in a letter to me: “The intention is that runs of newspapers for which no bids have been received will be pulped.”

  Chapter Two

  ORIGINAL KEEPSAKES

  from DOUBLE FOLD

  I didn’t want the newspapers to be dispersed by dealers or “pulped” (awful word), so I hastily formed a non-profit corporation called the American Newspaper Repository, and, when it was clear that the auction was going to go forward whether I liked it or not, I submitted bids. A dealer from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Timothy Hughes Rare and Early Newspapers, also bid on the papers, as it turned out. Hughes owns a medium-sized, pale blue warehouse, tidily kept, filled with rows of industrial shelving; on the shelves rest about eighteen thousand newspaper volumes. He is an undemonstrative man with a small mustache, honest in his business dealings, who was formerly on the board of the Little League Museum in South Williamsport. His usual practice is to “disbind” the newspapers—that is, cut them out of their chronological context with a utility knife (you can hear the binding strings pop softly as the blade travels down the inner gutter of the volume)—and sell the eye-catching headline issues (Al Capone, the Lusitania, Bonnie and Clyde, Amelia Earhart) or issues containing primordial Coke ads or Thomas Nast illustrations, shrink-wrapped against white cardboard, at paper shows (where buyers gather to look over vintage postcards, baseball cards, posters, and other ephemera) or through his printed catalog or website. His father, jolly and self-effacing, is a retired sharpener of band-saw blades, as was his grandfather; now his father and his brother, along with an amiable ex-schoolteacher named Marc, are employees of the company, filling orders, moving pallets of incoming volumes around with a forklift, writing catalog copy, and gradually working down the inventory, almost all of which came from libraries.

  If American libraries had been doing the job we paid them to do, and innocently trusted that they were doing, over the past five decades—if they had been taking reasonable care of our communal newspaper collections rather than stacking them in all the wrong places, and finally selling them to book-breakers or dumping them in the trash outright (an employee of one Southern library recently rescued from a Dumpster, and successfully resold to a dealer, a run of Harper’s Weekly worth ten thousand dollars)—then the British Library’s decision to auction off millions of pages of urban life, although it would mark a low point of cultural husbandry, would not have been such a potentially disastrous loss to future historians. Fifty years ago, after all, there were bound sets, even double sets, of all the major metropolitan dailies safely stored in libraries around the United States.

  But that is no longer true. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library once owned Pulitzer’s New York World complete, for instance, and Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Tribune Company once owned sets of the Chicago Tribune. They don’t now. (“I’m sorry to say and appalled to say that they were tossed,” an employee of the reference department of the Chicago Tribune said to me. “It was before my time.”) At Columbia University (whose school of journalism Pulitzer founded), at the New York Public Library, and at the Library of Congress, you can flip through memoirs, biographies, scholarly studies, and original holograph letters of Joseph Pulitzer, works that describe his innovations in graphic design and recount his public squabble with Hearst over The Yellow Kid, a popular color cartoon that first appeared in the World in the 1890s—a squabble that begat the term “yellow journalism.” But the World itself, the half-million-page masterpiece in the service of which Pulitzer stormed and swore and finally went blind, was slapdashedly microfilmed in monochrome and thrown out by the New York Public Library, probably in the early fifties. Columbia said good-bye to its World at some point thereafter; the New-York Historical Society did so around 1990. The University of Chicago library, under the direction of micro-madman Herman Fussler (former lead librarian and information specialist for the Manhattan Project), produced a bad copy of the Chicago Tribune in the fifties as well. The Library of Congress was quick to clear its shelves of the World and most of the Chicago Tribune and replace them with copies of the NYPL’s and the University of Chicago’s microfilm; and copies of that very same mid-century microfilm—edge-blurred, dark, gappy, with text cut off of some pages, faded to the point of illegibility on others—will now have to serve for patrons of the British Library, too.

  All the major newspaper repositories—the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, for instance, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, both of which once had collections of national importance—have long since bet the farm on film and given away, sold, or thrown out most of their original volumes published after 1880 or so. Nearly all major university libraries, state libraries, and large public libraries have done the same. Even the great American Antiquarian Society, having decided some years ago to narrow its foc
us to publications before 1876, is arranging with Timothy Hughes to swap long runs of some small-town papers—the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Sentinel from 1888 on, for example—for older titles that they want.

  The Kansas State Historical Society, founded by a group of newspaper editors in 1875, had, until a few years ago, an unusually fine out-of-state newspaper assemblage, including a pre-Civil War file of the New York Tribune, a long run of the Boston Investigator, and a large number of otherwise impossible-to-find Western and territorial papers. Then the society put up a new building that was smaller than it should have been and, in 1997, had an auction. One observer told me that the lots that Kansas ended up selling were so unusual, so valuable, that a group of buyers got together ahead of time to divvy things up, so that the bidding wouldn’t go completely insane. It was “once-in-a-lifetime stuff,” this observer said. The next step, according to Patricia Michaelis, the director of the library and archives division, was to dispose of most of the society’s comprehensive collection of original Kansas papers printed after 1875, offering them first to institutions and then throwing out the leavings. Michaelis believes that the original papers are doomed anyway: “They’re just inherently going to crumble apart, no matter what you do to them, because of the acid content.” About half of the people who use the library come for the newspaper collection. Do they like the microfilm? Michaelis laughed. “Well, it’s the only option we give them.”