I asked Diane Kresh, head of the Preservation Directorate, whether there were any decisions that, with benefit of hindsight, she wished had gone differently. Any pieces of the collection that she would have liked to have seen retained that weren’t?
“As far as I’m aware, everything we’ve acquired we’ve retained, at least in my tenure here,” Kresh answered. What about serials, I asked—bound newspapers and journals and magazines? She said that the library had maintained the newspapers—they were just maintained on film. I don’t doubt Kresh’s sincere belief in the equivalence of microcopies and originals, but if a cop was told that some missing diamonds were still on display in the museum, they were just “maintained” as cubic zirconiums, the cop might arrive at a slightly different interpretation of the event. “I feel even with the newspaper example I’m comfortable with the decision,” Kresh told me. “And as for other collections, I’m not aware of any that we’ve gotten rid of.”
Kresh could so easily have said, “Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of books that we had that we should not have pulped after we filmed them. Their destruction was totally unnecessary and motivated in large part by a need for space.” And she could have added, “As a matter of fact, there is currently a dire space crunch in both the Jefferson and Madison buildings—we’ve got stuff piled on the floors, it’s a mess—and we’re getting rid of things right now that we would probably keep if we were willing to rent another warehouse to tide us over until our remote-storage facility in Fort Meade is finished.” Of course, Kresh is loyal to her employer and wouldn’t say anything like that; I shouldn’t have expected her to. But it would be true.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
Thugs and Pansies
The chief of the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress, Irene Schubert, contributed to an electronic discussion group a few years ago. In a case where some of a periodical’s run is brittle and some is not, Schubert wrote, the library would consider tossing it all out anyway: “Space is always a problem01 it seems, so we may get some encouragement to microfilm the entire run and discard the paper copies.”
I asked, ahead of time, to interview Irene Schubert as part of an appointed visit to the Library of Congress’s Madison building one afternoon. Diane Kresh told me that Schubert was unavailable. “If you have any issues,” she said, “you can give them to me.”
Kresh did, however, take me on a complete circuit of the library’s renowned conservation lab, which I hadn’t asked to see but was of course very glad to admire nonetheless. (“I wanted to start the tour by saying that we have the premier lab in the world,” said Kresh flatly.) The full-bearded senior rare-book conservator, Thomas Albro, was working on an elegant box for a fifteenth-century edition of Ptolemy’s Geography that he had just finished restoring. He had disbound the book, which was “inoperable” as a result of a bad rebinding in the nineteenth century—“shoddy work,” he said—and he had washed the paper to remove yellowed sizing (sizing is the layer of gelatin that papermakers used to keep inks from soaking in and spreading, or “feathering”), and he had beautifully rebound this treasure in pale leather. Elsewhere, I saw very old Japanese softcover books for which a staff member was making lovely cases with bone fasteners. One conservator was worrying about what to do about some yellowed Wite-Out on one of Bill Mauldin’s original drawings. Mauldin, a political cartoonist, published some of his work in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. The Library of Congress once had a run of Stars and Stripes; it has microfilm now. Nonetheless, Mauldin’s art is getting the most exquisite restoration treatment imaginable.
At another worktable lay parts of an enormous Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther: a conservator had gone over its surface with a tiny vacuum cleaner and painted over each of its letters with gelatin parchment size. In the Collection Care Section, the purpose of which is to deal non-violently with books from the library’s general collections, I admired the recently acquired pneumatic box-making machine, which stamps out custom-fitted boxes to hold books that in an earlier era would have gone under the lens, or to a commercial bindery to be reclothed in radiant pyroxylin (plastic-coated cloth). (The Library of Congress had a zealous rebinding policy for many decades—they sent books to the bindery rather than make minor repairs in-house, and thousands of ornate bindings were lost in consequence.)
All of this was genuinely impressive, and it helped to remind me of the befuddling divergence, in library language, between conservation and preservation. The two are no longer synonyms—in fact, they are more often antonymic, although library spokespersons have been known to rely on the lay confusion that surrounds their undisclosed redefinition. Conservation refers to the repair or restoration of the original object, the book or manuscript, the empirical, thumbable thing; preservation, on the other hand, though it may embrace the act of conservation, has more generally come to mean, in response to powerful euphemistic requirements, any act that carries on or propagates, in any chosen medium (e.g., the original pages, photocopies, fiche, film, tape cartridge, Microcard, diskette, CD-ROM, Norsam metal disk, and so on), the words or images of the original object. Thus preservation can mean dumping or other more remunerative forms of dispersal, whereas conservation never does, although of course conservational practices have at times caused unintentional harm. (The Scotch-taping of the Dead Sea Scrolls02 comes to mind.) Reversibility—the potential to undo what you or your predecessors have done—is a watchword of modern book conservation; book preservation, by contrast, is often irreversible, because the book is gone. “This cannot be emphasized03 too strongly—the filming process is often damaging and irreversible,” according to the primary textbook of the eighties, Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists. Often intentionally damaging and irreversible, one wants to add—for on the next page the textbook says: “It must be stressed04 that if you do remove bindings from bound volumes before filming, the quality of the film is usually improved, and the cost of producing the film is significantly reduced.”
So all conservation is preservation, but not all preservation is conservation. And here’s a troubling organizational fact: book conservators generally report05 to directors of preservation departments. This is true even though a book conservator’s training is a slow apprenticeship, over many years, while the preservation administrator needs but an extra year of library-science courses to earn the right to decide, or help decide, what to do with a stackful of artifacts about which he or she might know almost nothing.
Complicating matters further, the manager of the library’s reformatting lab (the microfilm and/or digital lab) also usually reports to the director of preservation. Thus the top person, the preservation administrator, or P.A.—who more often than not (although there are exceptions) has had no bench training and has only a slender acquaintance with the manual repair of books—has jurisdiction over two labs whose aims are in opposition to each other. The conservation lab wants to save the book; the preservation lab wants to “save” the book. The conservation lab costs money and progresses deliberately, item by item, sewing, gluing, restoring (although small fixes take only a matter of minutes)—and all of its work must go back on the shelf. The microfilming and digitization labs seem fast, because the planetary camera’s white über-flash and the scanner’s green underglide occur hundreds of times an hour, as on a production line, and though these departments have high overheads, they also make money, sometimes packets of it, through federal grants, state grants, foundation grants, and the selling of copies—and not everything that gets imaged has to go back on the shelf. (The New York Public Library had agreements with “various commercial publishers and micropublishers,” according to former director David H. Stam: “With few exceptions,06 the income and royalties from these publications have been put back into the library’s preservation programs.”)
So the P.A. presides over one department that pays at least part of its way with outside money and one that doesn’t; one that helps the
library with its storage problem and one that doesn’t. If you were a P.A.—a real cost-sphinctering conehead (not all are, of course)—with the managers of those two departments beneath you, of whom would you feel fonder? When you moved up to a senior post, whom would you promote to your old job: the chief of the microfilm lab, who steadily pulled in money, or the chief conservator, who seemed only to be able to spend it? More than a few former spine-whacking micro-managers are now preservation administrators.
In the early eighties, Wesley Boomgaarden briefly ran the preservation-microfilming operation at the New York Public Library, where his crew filmed more than two million pages, or ten thousand book and journal volumes, per year (“a lot of material from the Jewish division,”07 Boomgaarden recalls, “a lot of material from Slavonic”); now he is the preservation officer at Ohio State. In 1988, writing in the pages of an anthology called Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, Boomgaarden nicely captured the tension that existed between preservers and conservators:
When my hard-working08 preservation microfilming staff wheeled truck after truck of brittle volumes into the conservation laboratory each week—to use their “low tech” power cutter in the process of cutting off spines to make filming easier, faster, cheaper, and better—they were villified [sic] by the conservation shop staff and called “thugs” who were destroying books in order to save them. And, because of the accusers’ pitiful statistics in conserving those minute numbers of dainty things—we “thugs” in turn labeled our conservation studio colleagues as “pansies.”
“That was a long time ago,” Boomgaarden now says. “We’ve learned so much since then.” In a recent big preservation project that Boomgaarden led, “most of the filmed volumes09 [were] retained in the collections.” About five to ten percent of what is currently microfilmed at Ohio State is, by Boomgaarden’s estimate, thrown out—an improvement, at least. One crucial difference between then and now is that Ohio State has an enormous new remote book-storage facility; its space crisis has abated.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
Really Wicked Stuff
I was very glad to meet the talented people in the Library of Congress’s conservation lab, to be sure, but since I was trying to learn more about past and present microfilming practices, I was disappointed that Preservation Reformatting was not on the tour, too, as previously requested. I did get a chance, however, to have a talk with the library’s chief scientist, Chandru Shahani, a friendly man in a gray suit. On one side of the table, Dr. Shahani and I sat discussing things like the fold test for paper strength and the predictive value of accelerated-aging experiments; on the other side sat Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple. Kresh was Shahani’s boss; Dalrymple was a formidable woman from the library’s Public Affairs Office whose job, as far as I can tell, was to obstruct inquiry. The two women monitored the interview, saying nothing, taking a note from time to time.
But this didn’t seem to cramp Shahani’s style, and presently we came to the subject of mass deacidification—another consuming interest at the Library of Congress over the past three decades. Before 1850 or so, papermakers passed their freshly made webs of paper through tubs of animal gelatin, which added the necessary ink-resisting layer to the page. But the gelatin smelled bad, and, more important, its application was a separate, costly step. Then they learned that they could pour some new liquids and powders into the pulp vat, before the material was squeeze-dried into paper, that would leave it with ink-fixing properties similar to those of gelatin sizing. They mixed in rosin, distilled (as is turpentine) from pine sap, and aluminum sulphate (alum), which helped the rosin migrate to the outside surface of the newly formed paper and stay there. This technique was called “vat sizing” or “engine sizing,” because it happened right up front in the rag engine. The alum-rosin additive worked very well, but rosin contains abeitic acid, and alum creates sulphuric acid; and those various acidities, through branching sequences of chemical reactions (with air, with water, with lignin, with bleaches, with starches, clays, and other additives)—reactions that nobody, not even Dr. Shahani, understands very well—weaken the fibrous mat of civilization-sustaining cellulose.
So, the thinking went, if you could find a way to tame the acids in books en masse, using some magical process of dipping or gassing, you would help library collections stay healthy longer—and you would get to use a great deal of very expensive machinery, besides. Beginning in the late fifties at Verner Clapp’s Council on Library Resources, and then later at the Library of Congress, there evolved a two-roads-diverged book-treatment plan: inoculate, through some sort of chemical treatment, the books that were still relatively healthy, and microfilm and destroy those beyond redemption.
The father of modern mass-deacidification was a former clothes-factory foreman named William James Barrow, whom we will meet a few chapters on. For now, we need to know only two words: diethyl zinc. Diethyl zinc (or DEZ, as it’s jauntily acronymed) was the active ingredient in a patented technique developed at the Library of Congress in the early seventies. You arrange your acid-beset books in milk crates, spine down, up to five thousand of them at a time, and stack the crates in a ten-foot-high retrofitted space-simulation chamber that bears some resemblance to a railroad tank car; then you shut the round door at the end, suck out the air, and let the miracle DEZ fog creep in. “The beauty of this process,” Chandru Shahani told me, “was that diethyl zinc, being so reactive with water, would go seek out water, wherever it is. It would just go, shoosh, just like that. It would penetrate a closed book.” If all went well, the diethyl zinc would bind with oxygen in the water and turn into zinc oxide. Zinc oxide is a mundane, mildly alkaline substance; it is used in cosmetics and as a vitamin supplement; it would remain fixed in the paper’s fibers as an “alkaline buffer,” ready to obliterate any acidity that might ripen in time.
Early on, the library hoped their ingenious invention would lead to “licensing arrangements01 to the private sector”—that deacidification would perhaps subsidize itself—but things didn’t quite work out; and as Dr. Shahani began recounting what happened at the Goddard Space Flight Center, where there were “mishaps” in 1985 and 1986, I thought I sensed Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple beginning to fidget. Diethyl zinc is a colorless liquid, but it is not exactly odorless—for one thing, your nose would promptly burst into flame if you opened a test tube of it and took a sniff. It is not at home in our world: it ignites instantaneously and fiercely on contact with air, and it explodes on contact with more than trace amounts of water.
During the conflagration, it releases a terrible smell. “Oh, the odor02 when it burns!” said Scott Eidt, a retired chemist who worked with diethyl zinc at Texas Alkyls in the eighties. Ahti Koski,03 who did his graduate work on the pyrolysis of diethyl zinc, reports a smell “best described as similar to burning chicken feathers in a rubber boot,” but he cautions that this might be a by-product of other reactions occuring along with the burning of DEZ. Heavily diluted (so that it will fume but not inflame), diethyl zinc functions as a polymerization catalyst—meaning that very small amounts, mixed with other chemicals, will cause some species of rubber or plastic to form out of their molecular constituents. That has been its primary civilian use.
The technical term for things that burst into flame on contact with air is “pyrophoric,” and pyrophoric substances are, naturally, of interest to the military. Richard Smith, inventor of a rival (and unpyrophoric) deacidification method called the Wei T’o process—named in honor of an ancient Chinese god who protects books from harmful forces such as bookworms, thieves, and fire—suspects that diethyl zinc was employed in the early days of the space program. “In the late fifties04 and early sixties,” Smith told me, “most of America’s rockets didn’t get off the launching pad, or they got just a few feet up in the air and they fell over. Do you remember seeing pictures of those? One after the other. I’ve always thought that the reason that they had so much trouble is that they were using diethyl zinc as their
ignition material. I think that this stuff was definitely involved in our early failures in space.”
I haven’t been able to verify Smith’s launch-failure theory, but there is no question that both German and American propulsionists have experimented on and off with diethyl zinc since the thirties, putting a slug of it near the outgoing nozzle to kindle a blastoff, or squirting a little into a ramjet engine to give their payload a high-altitude boost and increase its range. Ballistic-missile engineers05 at places like Rocketdyne, Aerojet, and the University of Texas tested diethyl zinc and other hypergolic06 fuels—that is, fuels that light themselves. According to Robert McComb, one of the scientists who worked on the deacidification process at the Library of Congress, “Diethyl zinc had been used back in the sixties in some rockets for air augmentation and things like that, but it—um, I’m getting into confidential information—but anyway it was not publicized per se.” Before moving to the library, McComb was employed by the Allegheny Ballistics Laboratory, a Navy-owned missile- and ordnance-testing center operated by Hercules, Inc. (manufacturer of TNT, missiles, bombs, tanks, black powder, and what-have-you); Hercules and Stauffer Chemical were co-owners of Texas Alkyls, the chemical factory that made the library’s diethyl zinc.