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Your Book Review: Double Fold

Finalist #6 of the book review contest

Apr 30 48
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[This is the sixth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s
not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after
voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your
decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several
months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your
favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these
reviews, check out [8]point 3 here for a way you can help move the
contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]

If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to
see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago
Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such
as the New York “World,” odds are that you will be directed to a
computer or a microfilm reader. There, you’ll get to see
black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of
the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures,
barely decipherable.

The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these
newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another,
they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of
inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals
became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed,
or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As
a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the
Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased
to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.

When Double Fold by Nicholson Baker came out in 2001, it was described
as The Jungle of the American library system. After 20 years, the book
remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among
librarians. The reason for their belligerence is that Baker publicly
revealed a decades-long policy of destruction of primary materials from
the 19th and 20th centuries, based on a pseudoscientific notion that
books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust, coupled with a
misguided futuristic desire to do away with outdated paper-based media.
As a consequence, perfectly well preserved books with centuries of life
still ahead of them were hastily replaced with an inferior medium which
has, at the moment that I am writing this review, already mostly gone
the way of the dodo. Despite its notoriety among librarians, however,
Double Fold is little-known among the general public, even compared to
Baker’s other non-fiction and his novels.

This is a shame, since the mass destruction of books and newspapers by
libraries in the post-war era deserves to be better known as one of the
most egregious failures of High Modernism, comparable with the wackiest
plans of Le Corbusier. The story combines an excessive reliance on
simplistic mathematical models, wilful ignorance to the desires of
actual library-users and scholars, embracement of miniaturization and
modernization as terminal values, and an almost complete disregard of
19th century books as historical artefacts. Unlike industrial farms,
which can be broken up, and Brasília-style skyscrapers, which can be
torn down and replaced with something else, the losses caused by the
mass deaccessioning of books and newspapers from libraries were often
irreplaceable.

As part of the uproar that followed the book’s publication, the
Association of Research Libraries published an online [9]anti-Baker
FAQ, and in 2002, the book “Vandals in the Stacks?” by Richard J. Cox
came out, presenting an attempted refutation of Baker’s theses. I have
read both of these and discuss Cox’s arguments later on, but I must
admit in advance that I was mostly convinced by Baker’s argumentation
much more than by that of his opponents. Nonetheless, it is uncommon to
have a polemical book receive a book-length response, and anyone
interested in Baker’s thesis is advised to check out Cox as well.[10]1

***

Few ACX readers probably need an explanation of why 19th- and
20th-century history is interesting, or why it is important. Most major
economic, political, or technological decisions in the present hinge to
some extent on the understanding of modern history, the interpretation
of which depends on the work of historians. A historian will always
need to work with some kind of sources, which may be archaeological or
epigraphic, but for recent centuries, they will mostly be written
sources on paper – manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

To simplify, a historian might approach these sources in two different
ways. For some projects, she might consult a small number of
predetermined sources – e. g. when analyzing the US response to the
assassination of Franz Ferdinand, she would check what the major
newspapers wrote at the end of June 1914. In other cases, it is
necessary to comb through a large body of sources, without knowing in
advance which ones will be useful for one’s project – e. g. if our
historian analyzed the attitude towards violence in the US in the years
just before WWI, she would need to check out a large number of books,
newspapers, and ephemera from the time. For such a systematic search,
even trying out a bunch of keywords in an electronic database might be
inferior to simply leafing through the volumes themselves in a large
research library.

Even though it’s possible to make educated guesses about how much a
certain publication might be valuable to future historians – e. g.
Barack Obama’s memoirs are more important that a Walmart catalogue –
it’s very hard to predict what will be used by a future researcher and
what won’t. The best guess is simply that anything might be valuable at
some point. During the last two centuries, historians have broadened
their interest from an almost exclusive focus on political and military
history to things like social and economic history or the history of
women and people of color. To a historian in 1850, information about
the historical prices of bread, the use of cutlery, or the travel
speeds of different kinds of merchant vessels might seem like footnotes
to real history at best. A century later, Fernand Braudel used nothing
but information of this sort to [11]weave together a groundbreaking new
history of medieval and early modern Europe. It is reasonable to assume
that 21st- and 22nd-century historians will keep expanding their field
in similar ways.

Perhaps the best illustration of the constantly expanding area of
historical interest is the huge trove of medieval Jewish documents that
was discovered in the geniza at Cairo in the 19th century and mostly
brought to Europe. In the beginning, only Biblical texts attracted much
interest, especially ones that had been presumed lost in the original
Hebrew. Later, during the 20th century, the researchers suddenly became
excited by the documents left behind by medieval Jewish intellectuals –
previously unknown manuscripts of works by Maimonides and Judah Halevi,
some of them written in their own hand. A generation or two later, new
scholars looked into the everyday documents left behind in the geniza –
receipts, contracts, and IOU’s, and used them to construct a social
history of medieval Jews in Egypt. As Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
write in the book Secret Trash, there is only one constant in the
research into the contents of the Cairo geniza: whatever had been left
aside as boring and irrelevant by one generation became the cornerstone
of the next generation’s scholarly pursuits.

Microfilm

The story of Double Fold might be said to begin in the 1930s with the
advent of microfilming. The idea of photographing documents to make
them more portable had been around at least since the 1870s, but it
took 60 more years until microfilm technology was sufficiently advanced
to become attractive for libraries. The basic idea was simple: you took
pictures of every page of a book, put them together into a roll of film
stored in a small box, and when someone wanted to “read” the book, they
put the film into a large TV-like device that magnified the image onto
a screen, with a pair of buttons that you could use to navigate left
and right.

Baker claims that microfilm got a big boost during WWII, when it was
often used by spies to hide documents, and by the US government back
home to disseminate military information. This allure continued during
the Cold War years, and it helped that many of the librarians keenest
on microfilm were ex-military men who wanted to apply what they had
learned in the Army to their civilian jobs. Microfilms were small and
felt modern, but unfortunately, many of the advantages they presented
to the military were not exactly advantages for libraries as well.
Baker quotes Vernon D. Tate, an Army microfilm specialist who went to
become chief librarian at MIT:

Books may not be blown to bits or easily consumed by fire;
microfilms if capture is inevitable can be rapidly and completely
consumed, and as easily replaced through the making of prints from
master negatives.

Apart from being flammable, microfilms also had several more commonly
encountered disadvantages. Baker describes reading them as a
“brain-poaching, gorge-lifting trial,” especially when the images had a
poor resolution.

You feel as if you’re mowing an endless monochromatic lawn, sliding
the film gate this way and that, fiddling with the image rotation
dial and the twitchily restive motor switch. If you have a date and
a page number, you look that one citation up and leave; you’re
rarely tempted to spend several hours in the daily contextual marsh.
‘Certainly the patron’s desire to browse through back issues of
newspapers is almost completely gone – people rarely browse through
microfilm’: so wrote E. E. Duncan in Microform Review in 1973.

Not all libraries might have attached flight sickness bags to their
microfilm readers like a Canadian library mentioned by Baker did, but
it is telling that microfilm readers never became popular outside of
libraries and government institutions, despite having been in use for
over half a century. Baker mentions one scientific journal that was
published only on microfilm, which is actually still more than I would
have expected; I’m unaware of any book ever published exclusively on
microfilm.

Rebecca Rego Barry was [12]one of the researchers who benefited from a
treasure trove of newspapers that had been saved from dispersal by
Baker immediately before Double Fold was published. She used them to
sift through a decade’s worth of Herald Tribune, searching for articles
written by a columnist whom she was analyzing for her thesis. “Could
the articles be found on microfilm? Theoretically they could, with
another year and an extra set of eyes, if whoever had microfilmed it
had done a decent job in the first place.”

The “decent job” part turns out to be really important. Because you
need a machine to read them, microfilms are harder to casually inspect
for quality, which gave them the nickname “the invisible product.”
Baker enjoys listing examples of lazy operators skipping pages and
producing incomplete films, but the really big issue is technical. If
you aren’t very careful when developing the microfilm, “residual hypo”
– image-processing chemicals that weren’t rinsed away during processing
– will damage the microfilm and blur the text, often beyond the point
of legibility. Put all this together and you get to the number of 50%
of all received microfilms that were rejected by the Library of
Congress in the mid-1970s. The problem? Over half of these rejected
microfilms weren’t returned to the vendor, but were accepted into the
Library’s collection despite their faults, such was the hurry to
modernize.

Lastly, microfilms themselves don’t age very well. Just like paper,
there are different kinds of plastics being used for microfilm (as well
as microfiche, which is a lower-resolution version of microfilm, and
similar-but-abandoned technologies such as Microcards), and Baker lists
the ways in which each of them is sensitive to damage. The main form of
damage is fading due to prolonged light exposure, but even worse is
what can happen if all that focused light on a small strip of film
causes the temperature to increase too much, which can lead to the film
basically getting blotted out. Sometimes, all of this can lead to
ironic consequences, such as when Baker tried to consult the papers of
Verner Clapp, the number-two person in the Library of Congress during
the 1950s and one of the most passionate supporters of microfilm.

All Clapp’s notes are on paper, easily read today. Clapp’s CIA file,
on the other hand, is an unfortunate victim of the Cold War mania
for micro-preservation: it looks to have been inexpertly filmed at
some point, and it has undergone a severe fading, as microfilm does
when technicians don’t take care to rinse off the hypo fixative. The
copy that the CIA sent me is poignantly stamped with the words BEST
COPY AVAILABLE on almost every undecipherable page. Some of these
pages are, though uncensored, completely unreadable.

Of course, it would be easy for none of this to matter at all in 2021.
Despite its downsides, microfilm had the major advantage that it could
be copied at will, which made a bunch of rare items suddenly accessible
to libraries all over the country. Baker often stresses that he has
nothing against the technology as such, as long as it is used merely to
supplement paper collections. As it happens, however, this is not what
happened. What happened instead was that microfilm became part of the
plan to get rid of paper almost entirely.

Brittle paper

The second key part of this jigsaw is paper deterioration. Paper from
the 18th century and earlier usually ages quite well, the reason being
that it was produced from rags, i.e. old clothes and other discarded
textile. The upside of rag paper is that it was made from 100% recycled
material, while the obvious downside is that there is a limited supply
of old rags in the world. Around 1850, this led to the introduction of
wood-pulp paper. Wood is plentiful, but using it to make paper usually
required procedures that resulted in a slightly acidic final product,
and the acids slowly damage the cellulose fibers of which paper
consists. This is why paper made after 1850 often goes yellow over
time, and is much more brittle than either ancient or modern rag paper.

Before reading Baker’s book, I had heard the story about the inevitable
slow decay of wood-based paper a bunch of times, and it was almost
always told as a categorical truth: wood-based paper is trash, it will
literally fall apart sooner or later, and the only way to really
preserve it are semi-experimental treatments to remove the acids from
the paper. I usually scratched my head at this, since I know from my
own collection that there are lots of different kinds of paper. There
are plenty of 100-year-old books on wood-pulp paper which look
brand-new, or else the paper is slightly yellowed at the edges but
otherwise OK, or perhaps the paper has gone entirely yellow and is
obviously brittle, but as long as you treat the book well, it isn’t
going to fall apart, and you can read it a number of times without any
major damage. I always thought that I’m somehow affected by
survivorship bias, and didn’t give the matter too much consideration.

It wasn’t until I read Double Fold that Baker gave me the answer to
this conundrum. Yes, Baker contends, paper does go brittle over time,
but the reaction proceeds much more slowly without oxygen and light,
which means that a closed book on a shelf will age at a negligible rate
(loose sheets of paper exposed to the air, however, will quickly turn
yellow). Also, once the chemicals on the surface of the paper have
reacted with the air, the overall reaction will slow down and the book
will age more slowly, rather than more quickly, as the time progresses.
Most importantly, paper can be brittle in the sense that it will
quickly tear, or fall apart when crumbled, but this isn’t relevant to
the way books are used in a research library. As long as you use a
19th-century wood-paper book as you’re supposed to (that is to say,
just as carefully as you would consult a 19th-century rag-paper book),
it will survive without much trouble. There’s no reason why a somewhat
brittle yellowish book couldn’t still be on the shelves a century from
now.

If all this is true, how come we’ve come to believe that wood-pulp
paper is terminally endangered and turning to dust? Baker’s answer is:
bad science. Most of what we know about the long-term fate of paper
comes from studies on accelerated aging, where researchers usually
treated paper at high temperatures (i.e. baked it in an oven) until it
broke down completely, and then used the Arrhenius equation or its
derivations to extrapolate how long it would take for the same process
to occur at room temperature. Of course, this is just a model, and it
has a substantial downside that it was never actually tested against
reality; as Baker pointed out (and Cox doesn’t object to anywhere in
his refutation), there had never been a study performed over a longer
period of time that would actually demonstrate how paper ages
naturally, and how much strength it loses over decades in the library,
rather than minutes in the oven.

Accelerated aging tests are difficult to do on each book individually,
so in order to quantify the fragility of their books, librarians came
up with a much simpler test – the “double fold” test from which Baker’s
book takes its title. To do a double fold test, you take the corner of
a book, fold it, press down the fold, unfold the paper, and fold it
again to the other side. You keep doing this until the paper snaps. For
each pair of folds that it endures, it gets one unit of double fold
value (dfv): e.g. if it breaks after the first fold, it has a dfv of
0.5. Each library has its own threshold of how few folds a book must
endure to become officially brittle, but the official implication of
the fold test is always the same: a book with a low fold value is at
the end of its lifespan, and the only thing we can do for it is some
sort of palliative care, if not euthanasia.

Baker will have none of this. He agrees that while the fold test
captures some aspect of paper quality, it doesn’t have much relevance
to the expected lifespan of books, or the number of uses they can
endure before some sort of catastrophic collapse. Instead, Baker
proposes, half-seriously and half-in-jest, a new means of testing the
durability of books: “the Turn Endurance Test.” You take a book, open
it in the middle, and flip the page, as you would when reading. Then
you flip it back. Baker applies both tests to a book from 1893 which he
happens to be reading at the moment. The double fold test produces a
value below 0.5 – a death sentence in most libraries. The Turn
Endurance Test, however, shows that the same book can endure hundreds
of turns of a single page without any kind of damage.

That’s not how the librarians saw it, though. Baker chronicles how the
rhetoric about brittle paper progressed during the 1970s and 1980s and
became increasingly extreme. At first, brittle paper was endangering
the long-term survival of modern books. Then, it was an immediate
threat to their survival. Then, the books weren’t just falling apart
anymore: they were literally turning into dust. By the late 1980s, the
catastrophic rhetoric had reached its apex: “10 million books in major
American libraries will not survive this century” was written in 1988;
“more than a quarter of books in libraries will not survive this
century,” in 1990, ten years before the century’s end. Needless to say,
they did survive – or rather, would have.

As long as the books were merely described as brittle and fragile, one
might still propose to save them through the traditional means:
restricting access, careful handling, and conservation, combined with
non-destructive imaging to reduce the number of researchers who needed
to consult the originals. However, if these books were literally on
their death bed, about to disappear into thin air no matter what we did
for them, then…well…there was no reason why we should do anything more
for them. We might as well chuck them out.

Shelf Space and Book Destruction

The 1988 film Slow Fires, which turned its director Terry Sanders into
a household name in American libraries, was one of the cleverest pieces
of anti-paper propaganda ever made, and Baker devotes considerable
attention to it. The movie starts slowly, with scenes of crumbling
marble inscriptions and papyri, accompanied by sorrowful music,
followed by clips from interviews with famous scholars, all of whom
emphasize how much they value working with primary sources. In the
following scene, we are led through the Florence library in the
aftermath of the destructive floods of the river Arno, and through the
ruins of a nameless burnt-out library, accompanied by more of the same
solemn music. A sensitive viewer might have shed a tear at these
scenes, and it looks obvious that this is a movie about the value of
preserving our cultural heritage, and the importance of historical
artifacts.

In the scene that follows, we enter a preservation department of a
major library, where the microfilming of a rare 1920s bound newspaper
is just underway. The worker explains the microfilming process to us,
while she slowly slashes the volume’s binding and proceeds to cut up
individual pages and feed them into the filming device.

Wait, what?

The process in question is called guillotining a book, and according to
Baker, it was the logical outcome of the paper brittleness myth,
combined with the passion for microfilming. What made these two deadly
was a secret ingredient – the desire to free up shelf space. There were
few librarians in history who did not at some point complain about the
lack of space. However, this particular problem always had two
different solutions: either increase space, or reduce the number of
books. For large research libraries, the first option was always the
default one, since it was obvious that with the growth of human
knowledge, the number of books necessary for future researchers would
grow as well.

All of this changed after WWII. In a wave of futurist ideology that
swept across US libraries, it suddenly wasn’t desirable anymore to keep
expanding and piling up paper. Just like computer-manufacturers kept
trying to compress their machines, a good modern library was suddenly a
library that kept miniaturizing. If not literally to get smaller over
time, the library of the future should at least try to keep its size
constant, no matter how large the influx of new publications might be.
Of course, this meant that even in the largest US libraries, there
would be increasingly little room for paper publications.

Baker quotes Fremont Rider, a poet-cum-businessman-cum-librarian who
pioneered Microcards (the unsuccessful precursors of microfilm) and
whose work had an immense influence on later Librarians of Congress. A
library which has outgrown its building could simply buy another
building, wrote Rider, but alas, increasing storage space is just “a
tacit confession of past failure” – hence, librarians should feel
ashamed of themselves for relying on such low-tech solutions. He then
introduced the concept of a Microcard, and stated that, with this
technology, “for the first time in over two thousand years, libraries
were being offered a chance to begin again.” Such a technological shift
would produce a saving in storage costs which “came gratifyingly close
to 100%” – assuming we got rid of all the books, of course.

It didn’t require a huge leap of logic, then, for Rider to propose that
Microcards should be made by cutting up the books in question before
filming them, since there won’t be a need for these books afterwards.
Baker follows Rider’s intellectual genealogy through Verner Clapp at
the Library of Congress, who wrote a eulogy to Rider in a 1964 library
science textbook, and through the network of Clapp’s own disciples. One
of Clapp’s protégés, John H. Ottemiller, wrote pointedly in the 1960s
that the library of the future has a “need for putting greater emphasis
on the discarding of materials rather than their storage.”

Of course, microfilming a book isn’t free, and microfilming an entire
library can be much more expensive than just storing it somewhere.
After a major cost-benefit analysis came out in 1957 which disfavored
microfilm, Clapp responded by having the Library of Congress commission
its own study in 1961. The conclusion he got was that assuming a
library could sell enough copies of its microfilm, the process would
pay for itself – but only if they sped it up by cutting up the books
and filming them page-by-page. Consequently, microfilming could be
performed without any downsides – none, that is, “except the
destruction of the text”.

Thus sprang into action the ominously named “preservation by
destruction” (a phrase actually used by its proponents, not my or
Baker’s invention). Baker likes to point out the Orwellian way in which
modern-day book destroyers hijacked the very language of book
salvaging. The microfilm departments in libraries were named
“Preservation Departments,” in the vein of “Ministry of Peace” and
“Ministry of Love.” Of course, the public was mostly unaware that the
primary task of a Preservation Department is to cut up books and trash
them afterwards. Inside the library, there often arose tensions between
the people working in conservation departments, whose job was to
carefully restore old books, and those in “preservation” departments,
whose job was to destroy them. Baker speaks with an employee in a book
conservation department, who recalls that the microfilmers were often
referred to unflatteringly as “thugs” – in return, the book restorers
got themselves the nickname “pansies.”

Once the system was in place, it fed on itself. The logic was as
follows: a library that bought a microfilm imaging device needed to use
it as much as possible, in order to recoup the costs. Part of the
profits came from sales of microfilm to other libraries, but a more
certain profit came from the reduction in storage costs. Of course, if
the books were going to be discarded anyway, it was hard to resist
cutting them up to reduce filming costs even more. And if everyone
involved believed that the books were terminally brittle anyway, there
was no need to feel bad about any of this – they were on the death bed
anyway, and if they only had one use left in them before they
spontaneously disintegrated, then that last use better happen in the
microfilming department.

How did Slow Fires get away with showing the dismemberment of rare
items to the public? By pretending that nobody wants to be doing any of
this. “Nobody likes microfilm,” says one of the scholars interviewed by
the crew. In another shot, the historian Barbara Tuchman explains how
she did research on one of her books by combing through old microfilms
– she would have much preferred working with paper books, but given
that she only had microfilm on offer, she accepted this as a fact of
life and pulled through. Even the worker who is filmed cutting up the
old newspapers indulges in a moment’s reflection. “It kind of bothers
me to guillotine newspaper collection, because I know the actual papers
are not going to go back on the shelves,” she notes. The hesitation
does not last for longer than a few moments, though: “but to contain
the information on microfilm is the ideal way to preserve the
newspapers.”

Of course, it wasn’t the ideal way. Baker’s frustrated attempts to get
America’s chief librarians to explain their discarding policy feel like
an endless progression of motte and bailey. The motte is that
terminally endangered books need to be microfilmed to preserve their
intellectual content; the bailey is that libraries should ditch paper
books and switch to microfilm in order to modernize and miniaturize.
Baker notes that several newspapers, such as The New York Times,
produced a few special durable rag-paper editions every day,
specifically for libraries. All for nothing: the libraries ended up
ditching these volumes nonetheless. Patricia Battin was the president
of the national Commission of Preservation (!) and Access and one of
the most ardent supporters of microfilm:

’Yes, I’m sure that there are books that were microfilmed that
probably were not that brittle,’ Battin says now. ‘We had great
debates among the populace as to whether you took the collection
approach or the individual-copy approach, and decided for the
initial filming grants that the collection approach made the most
sense.’ To me she quoted the French adage: ‘The best is the enemy of
the good.’ Of course, the bad can be the enemy of the good, too.

What did we lose?

Baker spends a considerable amount of time proving that microfilming
was a losing proposition in the financial sense. He’s probably right,
but few people care about financial malpractice in libraries enough to
read 300 pages about it. Instead, 20 years after its publication, the
value of Double Fold hinges entirely on the value of historical
material that was lost from US libraries during the microfilm craze,
and that is difficult or impossible to replace. So, what did we lose?

1) Even though microfilm was almost exclusively a black-and-white
technique, a lot of the material discarded in favor of microfilmed
copies was in color. A major part of Baker’s book is the story of how
he saved a large amount of historic newspapers that had been put on
auction by the British Library and were, in many cases, the most
complete print runs still in existence. Among these was the New York
“World,” an illustrated turn-of-the-century newspaper which once had a
readership of one million and which had catapulted Joseph Pulitzer into
fame and fortune. Many of the issues Baker acquired were possibly the
last in existence, and in Double Fold, Baker poignantly juxtaposes
pictures of the original full-color illustrations with the same images
in the microfilmed editions of World (black-and-grey blobs, barely
recognizable as illustrations).

Notably, Cox argues in “Vandals in the Stacks?” that trashing these
illustrated newspapers had been a mistake and that librarians should
have kept them around in the original. He also argues that discarding
things should be a necessary part of being a librarian and that
librarians are perfectly capable of judging what needs to be discarded
and what doesn’t, without the interference of outsiders like Baker. He
doesn’t seem to be aware of any contradiction here.

2) When libraries each have their own copies of a certain book or
a newspaper, there is a high degree of redundancy involved. Major
newspapers in particular would usually print several editions a day;
each library would only end up receiving and storing one of these. More
importantly, each library would randomly lack a few issues here and
there, but you could probably find these in the next library if you
needed them.

Conversely, the whole point of microfilming was that only one library
produces the microfilm and then sells copies to all the others, which
can now happily discard their own print runs. Since Library of Congress
regulations officially declared a microfilmed print run of a newspaper
complete even if it was missing “a few” issues for each month, this
means that plenty of officially sanctioned microfilmed print runs had
holes in them. If a certain issue wasn’t in the possession of whoever
had done the microfilming, it would slowly disappear from the record
entirely, as everyone else would get rid of the bound volumes in favor
of microfilm.

It’s interesting that Cox’s book is centered on a refutation of this
single point. His main argument is that libraries can’t keep everything
– even keeping a single copy of every historical US newspaper (or other
publication) in some library or other in the USA would be so taxing as
to be literally impossible. He doesn’t explain how libraries managed to
find enough money to do exactly this up to the 1950s (despite the US
being a much poorer country back then, and with a much smaller
percentage of GDP diverted to public services). In the end, he forfeits
his entire argument when he mentions in passing that working in
Austrian libraries is relatively tedious because they hold so few items
in microfilm. Indeed, at least in Europe, librarians seem to be
managing the impossible task of storing a few copies of every
historical publication quite well.

3) Obviously, an image does not in any way preserve the material
aspect of the paper or the binding. If you’re researching the different
kinds of paper used for newspaper production in the 19th and 20th
centuries, you’re out of luck. Baker mentions two particularly annoying
examples. The first was a newspaper edition from 1830 which claimed to
have been printed on an experimental run of wood paper, decades before
wood-pulp paper became common. Ironically, the newspaper in question
was mentioned in a famous 1940s textbook on papermaking, but the author
of the textbook was unable to do any chemical analyses, since the
librarians jealously guarded the volumes and wouldn’t let him take any
samples. When Baker rang up the library in question in the 1990s, they
told him that they had ditched the newspapers.

The second example is even more interesting. In the 1850s, the US
imported rags for paper production from Egypt on several occasions, and
several journalists at the time reported that the deliveries had
consisted of mummy wrappings. At least one newspaper, the Syracuse
Daily Standard, proclaimed to its readers that it was being printed on
[13]mummy paper. This could in principle be verified by molecular
analysis, but unfortunately almost all the libraries which had carried
print runs of the Daily Standard had thrown them away. It’s possible
that this helped us avoid the mummies’ curse, though in my opinion,
getting recycled a second time made them even angrier. Maybe having
lost so much historical material was part of the curse.

4) Most notably, an old book or newspaper isn’t just a source of
information, it’s also a historical artifact. A downside of Baker’s
book is that he largely accepts the terms of the game as dictated by
the librarians, and focuses on the informational value of the destroyed
volumes. It’s not that libraries were completely oblivious to the
inherent value of old books, but rather that they established a
dichotomy: on one side, there was a small number of “rare” books with
obvious historical value, such as inscribed first editions and
Renaissance-era books, and on the other side, there was the mass of
ordinary books, which were supposed to have value exclusively as
vehicles for words and pictures.

Baker counters that this is a wrong way to look at books, since there
is no clear demarcation line anywhere: every book is, to an extent,
both text and artifact. If nobody counters the idea that a pamphlet
from 1700 should be preserved for its own sake, even if there is a
perfect electronic copy available, then the same should also hold for a
rare pamphlet, book, or newspaper edition from 1900. In fact, Baker’s
problem is that he doesn’t have much material to argue against, since
the great proponents of microfilm had mostly been so oblivious to this
issue that they didn’t even bother mentioning it.

He does, however, manage to find a quote by Patricia Battin, which
could serve as the epitome of the High Modernist mindset in American
libraries: “the value, in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the
book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” Everyone
might have hated microfilm, everyone might have preferred working with
the original historical artifact – but as long as the value of the
artifact wasn’t satisfactorily established, there was no reason why not
to trash it.

***

At the time when Baker was writing Double Fold, microfilm as an
information medium was already on its way out, and most American
newspapers and books had already been transferred to microfilm anyway,
which means that it wouldn’t have made much sense for anyone to
microfilm them again. Microfilming was quickly giving way to
digitalization, but it was fairly easy to produce digital copies from
microfilm (rather than from the paper originals themselves). Why not
let bygones be bygones then, especially since Baker himself admitted
that the destruction of books and newspapers had abated during the
1990s, thanks in part to the “abolitionist” campaign of a few scholars
and librarians, led by Thomas Tanselle, a professor at Columbia.

Baker was worried that unless we quickly learned something from the
mistakes of the postwar decades, we were bound to make the same
mistakes again, and even more egregiously so. It is possible to scan
microfilms to produce digital editions of books and newspapers.
However, because of all the problems outlined above, from poor
legibility to deterioration of film over time to missing pages or
incomplete print runs, we often prefer to use the original source once
again. The librarians who lobbied for their collections to be
microfilmed loved to emphasize that this was a lasting solution, but a
mere couple of decades later, Baker notes, we might have to do
everything all over again. The only difference is that in the postwar
decades, there were still a lot of historical books and newspapers
around to cut up and microfilm, whereas at the time that Baker was
writing his book, many of these publications had remained only in a
single copy, or even disappeared in printed form entirely. Guillotining
books is unnecessary in order to acquire a good image, but it had
already been unnecessary in the 1950s and 1980s, and that didn’t stop
librarians from practicing it nonetheless. Baker was worried that if we
guillotined newspapers and books again during digitalization, we would
be destroying even the last few survivors of the post-war carnage.

Even more importantly, for every book that librarians guillotined
during microfilming, several other copies of the same book were ditched
by other libraries around the country after they had bought the
microfilm produced by the first library. In some cases, these books
were sold and thus preserved by collectors (although in the case of
bound newspapers, even when these were sold, they were usually cut up
and resold piecemeal by the buyers, which means that they ended up
dispersed beyond anyone’s ability to collect a full print run ever
again).

Many other books were, however, simply trashed. As a combination of
bizarre rules, bureaucratic stubbornness, fear of publicity, and simple
inertia, it’s apparently very rare for American libraries to simply
donate discarded books to the public. Sometimes the books are sold, but
usually they are thrown into the dumpster, regardless of their value.
Baker mentioned the case of a researcher who tried to take home a copy
of a rare book after it had been guillotined and filmed by the Library
of Congress; she was told that this is against the rules, and the book
was trashed. On the antiquarian book market, copies of the same book
are worth around $2000. Judging by what librarians [14]themselves
[15]write [16]online, the dumpster has apparently remained the default
option for getting rid of discarded books to the present day.

Twenty years after the publication of Double Fold, the frequency of
library books being guillotined for imaging is probably lower that it
was in Baker’s time, or at any point of WWII, with the main reason
being that there are relatively few books around that haven’t yet been
imaged by someone. It’s generally cheaper to pay for someone else’s
scans than to do the scanning yourself. However, the very ubiquity of
online resources also provides an incentive for libraries to continue
purging their collections and trashing the unwanted material. There are
[17]plenty [18]of [19]reports [20]of [21]major [22]libraries
[23]trashing [24]their [25]books, though the public seldom learns which
books were trashed, and how valuable they might have been.

In this sense, all of Baker’s warnings – the losses we face when
discarding a variety of paper editions of the same publication, and
replacing them with a single digital copy – are still very up-to-date.
The only difference is that because libraries nowadays contain so much
material that was printed, from the late 1980s onward, on acid-free
paper, the brittleness of paper is less useful as an excuse for
large-scale deaccessioning. Instead, the main excuses nowadays are lack
of space, the presence of digital copies, and the claim that nobody
will ever need these books again, anyway. Double Fold provides plenty
of reasons why these books and newspapers will continue to be sought
after, and why the copies will never be perfect substitutes of the
original.

[26]1 Unfortunately, only part of “Vandals in the Stacks?” is actually
spent refuting Baker’s arguments. Instead, Cox goes off on a number of
tangents, including a long refutation of an unrelated essay by Baker
from 1994, several complaints about Baker not discussing archives and
archivists in Double Fold (Cox is an archivist by profession), and an
entire chapter of Cox’s own professional autobiography, whose relevance
to the topic of the book is never explained.
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