One interesting difficulty Sanders had was in getting some actual shots of the devastation of the “chemical disease.” “Librarians were very sensitive about showing me their really, really badly damaged books, because it didn’t seem right,” Sanders says. “I said, ‘You know, you can’t do a whole film on this without showing the seriously damaged books.’ So finally I got to film some, and they’re in there.” And yet there is in the film no shot of a book—one of millions of allegedly afflicted books that were said to be available to the film crew “in every nation, in every culture”—whose pages have slowly burned away or otherwise self-destructed to the point of unreadability as a result of acid hydrolysis. That is because no such population of books exists. There are some pictures of books with brown or yellow paper that is obviously acidic, paper that is fragile and edge-crumbled, that would fail the fold test; there are books in obvious need of care (or at least more attentive shelving), with loose, damaged pages that could do with a protective box or a librarian’s pink shoestring to keep them together. There is a shot of a row of intact old quartos onto which some paper looks to have been crumbled and sprinkled for dramatic effect. But there is no book or newspaper volume shown that wouldn’t stay right where it was, disclosing its intellectual contents to the careful-fingered inquirer, for centuries.
The movie’s melancholiest moment comes in a scene at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, in Andover, Massachusetts. A prep person in the film lab talks as she cuts open a very well preserved volume of the Portland Evening News. (An unusually valuable volume, by the way: one of the headlines is AMELIA EARHART’S PLANE CRASHES.) The prep woman explains: “As you can tell from the color of the newspaper, they’re turning brown, and they’re highly acidic. They’re burning up.” Suddenly the piteous atrocity of her task asserts itself for an instant: “It kind of bothers me to guillotine newspaper collections, because I know the actual papers are not going to go back on the shelves,” she says. Then she is able to reassure herself with the received ideology: “But to contain the information on microfilm is the ideal way to preserve the newspapers.”
Slow Fires was an enormous hit for its sponsors. It was a highly persuasive, credible (thanks to Robert MacNeil), tastefully photographed piece of intentional fear-mongering that targeted the various “donor publics” that Peter Sparks, Haas, and Welsh had in mind—not only legislators, who were invited to special screenings of the movie on the Hill, but right-minded, library-card-carrying TV-viewers who cared about books and history and, in the movie’s own solemn words, “the preservation of civilization itself.” (Peter Sparks appears in the movie, by the way, pointing out features of a brightly colored scale model of the diethyl-zinc plant, complete with little plastic people in lab coats.) It first appeared on PBS stations in December 1987, and it was re-broadcast twice in the United States thereafter; after seeing it on WNET, one anxious banker called and volunteered to “do anything to help4 save brittle books.” Slow Fires has been translated into Russian, Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish; it has appeared on TV in at least seventeen countries and at two of the directorates of the Commission of the European Community; it has made the rounds along with a “giant Brittle Books exhibit”5 created by Kent State’s audio-visual lab, and over the years it has enlivened hundreds of regional library conferences and library-school classes and scholarly get-togethers like those of the American Philosophical Association and the Medieval Academy. The title has been absorbed into the working language of librarianship: an exhibit entitled “Slow Fires at Harvard’s Libraries” carried the torch in Cambridge in 1991; while the all-important Association of Research Libraries prepared a briefing paper that read thus: “ ‘slow fires,’ triggered6 by the acids in paper, are spreading through research libraries, transforming book and journal collections into piles of paper fragments.”
In some libraries, according to Terry Sanders, the movie is shown to new employees as part of orientation and training programs. “I can virtually go into the library anywhere in the world and mention Slow Fires and suddenly I’m a celebrity,” Sanders told me. “I’ve written the Gone with the Wind of the library world.” Because the movie has been part of the basic training of a generation of librarians, many have come to accept what it says unquestioningly; and library-loving lay viewers, who have no independent way of verifying the film’s dismaying claims, can only defer to the professionals.
CHAPTER 24
* * *
Going, Going, Gone
Representative Pat Williams was one of Slow Fires’s first converts. Having heard Daniel Boorstin make a last plea for more federal money, Williams ended the subcommittee meeting by saying that he and his fellow committee members wanted to “help sound the alarm and see what we can do to fight these slow fires.” Soon afterward, Williams got in touch with Sidney Yates, the powerful Democratic congressman from Illinois who oversaw the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Warren Haas set up a screening of Slow Fires for Yates and his staff. “I’ve never been so impressed by a congressman making himself an expert in a very short time,” Haas says. “He’s a remarkable guy.”
With such a magnificent launch to the idea that microfilm was the key to the survival of civilization, it seemed a fair bet that Congress would increase its funding to the NEH’s Office of Preservation. But how much would the increase be? To make sure the campaign continued to gain ground, Haas decided that he needed somebody doing full-time advocacy work at the Commission on Preservation and Access, which he formally spun off as a separate non-profit charity, with the help of a million or two from the Mellon Foundation, while he continued to run the Council on Library Resources. Late in 1987, he brought in a woman who would prove to be a more determined brittle-book reverberator than any who had come before. She was Columbia University’s librarian and vice president for information services, Patricia Battin. “She will emerge,”1 said one of her colleagues at an awards ceremony in 1996, “as one of the most important figures of the second half of the twentieth century.”
Warren Haas knew Patricia Battin’s aptitudes well—in 1974, at Columbia, he had hired her away from SUNY Binghamton’s small library; several years later, he left her in charge of Columbia’s huge library system when he went to Washington to take up foundation work. “She’s sharp as hell,” Haas told me. “She’s a good manager—an extremely good manager—very articulate, and has for a long time been one of these people who look twenty years in the future, understanding that print and digital information are all part of the same game.” In the early seventies, when at Columbia, Haas had gotten the Council on Library Resources to hire some efficiency experts at Booz, Allen and Hamilton2 (a consulting firm that had done mechanization studies for various libraries in the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army) to come up with a plan for reorganizing the Columbia library’s administration and readjusting its position within the university. The result of this consultational scrutiny was that Haas became the first library director who was also vice president for information. “I had the computer center under my wing,” Haas says.
But in Haas’s era, computing and library management, while joined at the top, remained more or less functionally independent of each other. As personal computers began to appear in the early eighties, Patricia Battin (who had already bought a million-dollar mainframe system in her role as an executive at the Research Libraries Group), decided that it was time to bring her subordinate divisions closer together. In her 1984 article “The Electronic Library—a Vision for the Future,” she is at pains to say that “the personal computer3 does not mean an end to books,” but she goes on to describe the requirements of the “wired scholar,” and she calls for “merging the Libraries and the Computer Center to provide an information infra-structure to stimulate the continuing autonomous use of information sources.” In practice, that meant buying more databases and new hardware, fusing library and computer budgets, and spreading around IBM seed money as part of
something called Project Aurora—“which is the dawn,” she explained to me. About the partnership with IBM, she now says, with some justice, “This is what the vendors had done from time immemorial. They get their feet in the door by giving you all this free stuff and then you become indebted to them for ever—‘indentured’ I guess is the word.”
Even with IBM’s self-interested help, however, Battin’s vision of the scholarly future would have major start-up costs. And Columbia was not rich at the time; in fact, one of the tough-love things Battin did as university librarian was cut almost a tenth of her workforce. “It was hard because. . . the whole online automation started, and so forth, and so we were really trying to transform operations as well as reduce expenses,” she told me. Naturally, there was tension—“opposition everywhere” is how she summed it up to me. Some of her staff didn’t understand the new Scholarly Information Center that she and IBM had brought into being: they asked where it was. Battin told them, “There isn’t any center, it’s in your mind.” And some faculty “failed to understand the kinds of unattractive decisions that have to be made.” Libraries are, Battin observed to me, “the lifeblood of scholarship and instruction, and when you start tinkering with somebody’s lifeblood, they’re not going to like it.” In particular, she says, “the scientists were on me all the time because we weren’t moving fast enough, the humanists were on us all the time because we were destroying the book—which we weren’t.”
Columbia had space problems, too. (“Everybody has space problems,” Battin says.) She finally convinced the board to buy a five-million-dollar building on 131st Street in Manhattan to use for book storage (the fact that it was off-limits to patrons caused some fussing from the faculty), but she also tried to get the president and the provost to understand that they must amortize the book budget just as they amortize computers, “because every time you buy a book, you buy a space cost.” (Fremont Rider’s old point.) Battin never quite says that her notion of the library of the future was premised on the elimination of a good part of Columbia’s old book collection—instead she says, in her essay on the electronic library, oblique things such as: “We expect the preservation medium of the future to be optical disk”; and, “The basic shape of our collections4 will change as we develop programs for shared collection management and shared preservation.”
Battin—very tall, square-shoulderedly elegant, with (in the eighties, at least) large rectilinear glasses similar to those Joyce Carol Oates used to wear in pictures—was an enthusiastic early digitarian, but, like Haas before her, she did not spurn traditional microfilm, either. In 1983, she told her preservationist peers that Columbia’s library had four microfilm cameras going full-time; the library depended on “outside funding and cooperative projects for an active assault5 on our large collection of brittle materials.” On her arrival at Columbia, she had been horrified by what she called “yellow snow” in the stacks—the wisps and shards that crack off the margins and flutter down from inside the bindings of wood-pulp book-paper and old newsprint. (An ill-fated technique of commercial rebinding called oversewing,6 which arrived in the twenties and by the mid-1930s had been incorporated into the specifications for library binding—a technique that knits together the back of the milled-off text-block by means of dozens of angled needle-punctures, effectively perforating the inner margins—is a major cause of yellow snow.) Such fragments have been a fact of library life for many decades (“scraps of faded, rusted, brittle paper7 litter the floor and present insistent questions,” said the Bulletin of the New York Public Library in 1929), but Battin, freshly arrived from SUNY Binghamton’s young and relatively small collection, was not prepared for what she found. “It was so shocking,” she told me; in yellow snow she found evidence of a silent post-industrial cataclysm. It led her to propose that “we will not add to our collections8 any material in poor condition, regardless of its intellectual content,” since “it makes no sense to spend an enormous amount of money on materials that are simply going to deteriorate.”
An active assault—that was the sort of aggressive zest Battin brought to her work at the Commission on Preservation and Access. She gave the Commission “full-time energy,” Warren Haas told me, “and a point of view that was exactly right. You just have to talk to Pat to understand Pat. She’s a great animal.” Her organization’s tax-exempt status prohibited her from lobbying on behalf of legislation, in the strict legal sense, but she could and did get the heads of twenty of the largest research libraries in the country to write letters expressing their deep concern over brittle books, and she could and did (as she told me) “work with Mr. Yates’s office giving him the kind of information that he needed as to how severe this problem was.” And she could, of course, write speeches, which she gave across the country and around the world, showing the incendiary Slow Fires as she went.
Some years later, in an awards-acceptance ceremony sponsored by an IT firm, Battin claimed that she owed her success to “affirmative action and the old boy network.”9 But in this she did herself an injustice. Battin owed her success to the missionary intensity of her desire for informational reform, and to her capacity for exaggerative repetition. Her knowledge of paper’s deterioration and of the techno-preservational alternatives to paper came for the most part from people like Warren Haas, William Welsh, and Peter Sparks, but she had the convert’s desire to convince and conquer. With the help of a little word, dust, she scaled the heights of funding.
Until Battin came to Washington, librarians (with the exception perhaps of Peter Sparks) had not prominently claimed that books were turning to dust. It wasn’t true, for one thing. Slow Fires alluded to the idea, but only in passing, and there had been a March 1987 piece by Eric Stange10 in The New York Times Book Review, based on interviews with Welsh, Sparks, and others, entitled “Millions of Books Are Turning to Dust—Can They Be Saved?” But Stange was a print journalist, not a librarian, and he tells me that the title wasn’t his idea anyway—editors came up with it. Battin, however, with an authority derived from nearly ten years as director of one of the country’s great book collections, used dust boldly, repeatedly. In one of her early communiqués from the Commission on Preservation and Access, in June 1988, she outlined the specifics of the cooperative microfilming plan that she and the NEH had just presented to Congress. Twenty libraries would each microfilm 7,500 of their volumes every year for twenty years, for a total of three million volumes—the three million being “the estimated number of volumes11 it would be important to save in order to preserve a representative portion of the 10 million or more volumes that will turn to dust by that time.” Robert M. Hayes had estimated that 11.4 million books were going to enter the “at-risk” category in the next twenty years—now suddenly ten million of them were going to turn to dust.
In a publication called Change, Battin wrote that “approximately 25 percent of the world’s great collections are already brittle and turning to dust because of the alum sizing introduced into paper-making around 1850”; in a 1989 piece for Educational Record called “Institutions Have Moral Responsibility to Preserve Great Book Collections,” she mentioned those “university librarians who have long witnessed and attempted to stay the crumbling pages of books as they slowly turn to dust.” The 1990 annual report for the Commission added the red-flag adverb literally: “Books, along with other paper-based materials, are literally turning to dust because of the chemically unstable acid-based paper that became popular in the mid-1800s.”
Battin’s articles went out to libraries around the country, accompanied by a leaflet written by one of the Commission’s interns: “Ideas for Preservation Fund Raising: A Support Package for Libraries & Archives.” Here is its first paragraph:
Have you seen a first edition12 copy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, or perhaps a 1847 edition of her sister’s Jane Eyre? They are most likely in the same condition as Milne’s 1926 Winnie the Pooh and Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World: Dust. . . . Each copy slowly destroyed as it sits quie
tly unnoticed in the literature section of your library. (Ellipses in original)
Have no fear—the first editions of the Brontës, Huxley, and Milne are doing fine. The statements in this passage are so untrue that they induce a kind of blinking awe. Once the dust delusion took hold, it seems to have neutralized any scruple of restraint among its proponents. They just started making things up.
The Commission was also a clearinghouse for inspirational fund-raising publicity. They copied and distributed, for instance, an article from the University of Tennessee’s alumni magazine that begins: “A slow fire is burning13 in Hodges Library. It’s destroying books that can’t be replaced. There isn’t any smoke, nor are there flames. But thousands of books are crumbling into dust, fatally burned by the acid in their own pages.” The article, “Goodness Gracious, Great Books Afire,” ends with a request for checks made payable to the Library Preservation Fund.