The more the word dust was repeated by library folk, the more real the idea became. Sidney Verba, Director of the Harvard University Library (and a member of the founding board of the Commission on Preservation and Access), pounded the broadloom before Congress in 1989:
If what differentiates humans from other species is the ability to use language, and if what differentiates civilization from pre-civilized forms of life is the ability to record that language by written words, then it follows that our essence as humans is contained in the written words we pass from generation to generation. These written words, entrusted to library collections, are turning to dust—and with that part of our lives is going as well.
In 1990, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Nature of Things aired an episode about brittle books called simply “Turning to Dust”; staff of the Commission on Preservation and Access “collaborated” (so its 1989 annual report stated) with the CBC during the development of the show.
Perhaps the most arresting document from those consciousness-raising days is a flyer produced by the American Library Association in 1990. On the front are three sequential photographs of A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh. (It appears to be a dummy book, not a real edition of the novel.) In the first picture, a few raggedy-edged pages poke out of the text-block; in the second picture, the front cover has developed three black lesions that look to have been made with a blowtorch, while cornflake-sized paper bits hemorrhage from the fore-edge; in the third picture, there is a cremational pile of fine dark powder and tiny fragments—only the vestigial word Dust is still legible. Below the three pictures are the words Going, Going, Gone. The sequence is a fictional simulation, needless to say; no book ever, anywhere, has spontaneously disintegrated in this manner—not in a research library, and not during a photo shoot for a publicity brochure. Inside the front flap, the American Library Association’s text informs us that “literally” millions of books are turning to dust, that more than a quarter of the books in libraries “may not survive the century,” that the one “tried-and-true” technology is microfilming; and we are urged to “let Congress know that money spent on book preservation is money well spent.” On the back of the flyer it says: “Funded in part by the Commission on Preservation and Access.”
CHAPTER 25
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Absolute Nonsense
Not only are people liable to spend more money on a problem when they are good and scared, but they are also more likely to accede to things that they would otherwise find abhorrent, such as mass-disbinding, if they believe that a state of emergency warrants them. Was it a state of emergency? Were millions of books turning to dust? I called up Peter Waters to get an idea of what he thought of Slow Fires and the embrittlement crisis.
From 1971 until he retired from the Library of Congress in 1995, Waters oversaw the training of a generation of conservators; he has been sewing, gluing, rehinging, resizing, washing, de-verminizing, and generally giving careful thought to paper and print and their future prospects for most of his life; and, like all great book conservators, he has eavesdropped on the history of papermaking through his fingertips. But Waters is also one of the world’s experts on book emergencies. His experience began in Florence1 in 1966, when the Arno’s sludge, admixed with “undesirable wastes,” filled the treasuries of the Biblioteca Nazionale. There were two major disasters in Florence, according to Waters—the first was the flood itself, and the second was the “extreme post-recovery damage” to the books resulting from the manner in which they were handled (piled wet to head height) and dried in their mud-beplastered state. (Interestingly, volumes of twentieth-century newspapers fared better than some two-hundred-year-old gelatin-sized rag-paper books in the tobacco dryers that officials used for some of the collection.) Waters was consulted about recovery efforts after the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, and after the 1988 inferno at the Russian Academy of Sciences Library in Saint Petersburg. He was called in to advise after a fire in 1978 at the Klein Law Library in Philadelphia—Klein was building a new library building; the entire collection was insured; Klein’s librarian, who “seemed to be in a total state of shock,” said he had “no plans” to enter the rare-book room for several days; when Waters and his colleagues finally convinced him to allow them into the room, they found that water from the fire hoses had risen to a height of three feet before it had drained away, causing the swollen books to burst from the shelves; many were “covered with mold to a thickness of at least a centimeter.”
I read Waters a passage from one of Patricia Battin’s articles, “The Silent Books of the Future: Initiatives to Save Yesterday’s Literature for Tomorrow,” published in 1991. “If swift and drastic action2 is not taken,” Battin writes, “the great voices of 19th century scholarship will be stilled far more effectively and finally than by war, flood, censorship or fire.” Then comes the parade of scary numbers: “80% of the materials in our libraries are published on acid paper and will inevitably crumble. The Library of Congress alone reports that 77,000 volumes in its collections move each year from the ‘endangered’ state to brittleness and thence to crumbs.”
Thence to crumbs? What did Waters think of that kind of talk? “Well, unfortunately I think I have to say that it’s absolute nonsense,” Waters said. “The truth of the matter is, you have to go and look very, very hard indeed to find really crumbled books.” Waters does not question that books become brittle with age; he does question the notion that a diagnosis of brittleness means the end of a book. “Only if the collections are physically abused will they start breaking up,” he told me; the phenomenon of “yellow snow,” associated with oversewn bindings, should simply move us to handle books with more care, even enclose them in protective boxes. (Peter Waters’s son Michael Waters designed a computer-controlled box-making device to enclose thousands of fire-damaged books in Saint Petersburg at a cost of roughly a dollar per boxed volume; the Library of Congress’s custom-box maker is also one of the younger Waters’s machines.) “If books are protected in boxes, and left in good order, even in the normal environmental conditions of a library, there is no mechanism—not chemical or physical—for them to crumble. It simply can’t happen.”
Waters has reviewed the statistical deterioration survey of the Library of Congress’s collections and found that its data fail to support the endlessly repeated estimate of seventy thousand (or seventy-seven thousand) books going brittle yearly—never mind Battin’s “and thence to crumbs” fillip at the end. “You’re still going to meet a great number of people who believe that time is running out, or has run out, and that all this material is going to crumble,” he told me. “And there really is not one single piece of hard evidence to support it.”
Waters calls Slow Fires “that ridiculous movie”; of the phrase “slow fires” itself, Waters says that it “misrepresents the real-time state and conditions of the Library of Congress’s collections” and that it has “given birth to ignorance as to the survivability of so-called brittle book material.” He has been saying these things publicly for years. In a 1992 speech entitled “The Deterioration of Library Materials: A Doomsday Inevitability or a Manageable Preservation Challenge?” delivered while he was still at the Library of Congress, he said:
Let us first dispense with the most commonly held belief, which in my opinion has led to panic and uncontrolled and ineffective reformatting policies throughout the United States. It is, that once paper reaches the brittle condition, it will not survive. There is no basis in truth or scientific evidence to support this belief. Brittle book material can and will survive for an indefinite period of time, if they are physically protected and not abused by stack attendants, readers, poor housing conditions and administrative policies that ignore or write off their existence. (Emphases in original)
As an example of the longevity of extremely weak paper, Waters instances the Library of Congress’s dime-novel collection. These books were printed on groundwood pulp; for years they were stored in p
oor conditions (high heat and humidity). The collection now contains, Waters says, “some of the most brittle material that you could ever wish to see. Now the whole collection has been boxed, and if I could live for five hundred years, I would still expect them to be in the condition they are now, providing they’re not physically abused.” (The boxes also serve to caution dime-novel researchers to handle the paperbacks carefully.) Waters writes: “Here is a crucial question—does any library have a substantial inventory of losses caused by brittle books crumbling to dust? I think not. Total loss is much more likely from theft and vandalism.”
But in 1980, Peter Waters unwittingly supplied one of the reformattisti’s most potent images, printed in the Smithsonian Magazine and subsequently in The New York Times Book Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and on the cover of American Scientist. When Smithsonian was doing a piece3 on the opening of the Madison building (“called by some a monstrosity”), they sent a talented photographer named Yoichi R. Okamoto to take pictures. One of Okamoto’s tasks was to document the problems of preservation; he showed up in Peter Waters’s office in the Adams building. “He was talking about what he’d been told about brittle books,” Waters recalls, “and he said, ‘Is there some way you can demonstrate this?’ ” So Waters manually “scrumpled up” a page into a handful of fragments—as his old boss Frazer Poole4 had done in many a brittleness demonstration before him, and as William Welsh was to do some years later in Slow Fires.
Okamoto said, “Well, supposing you blew it?” They went out to the corridor with several books and began blowing around fragments. Okamoto wasn’t satisfied with these shots and returned to take more. “Although I shall go down in history as destroying books at the library,” Waters says, “it was a great photograph.” When it appeared in Smithsonian (full page and in color), the caption somewhat misleadingly read, “ ‘Brittle book’ flies apart as conservator Peter Waters blows on it. Slowing decay is major Library job.”
The brittle book in the photograph would not have flown apart if Waters hadn’t first reduced it to cornflakes by hand. “I scrumpled it and blew the remains,” he says.
CHAPTER 26
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Drumbeat
Peter Waters is not alone in his opinion that the brittle-books petitioners, most notably the Commission on Preservation and Access, used Rachel Carsonesque language that was, in Waters’s words, “designed to dramatize a situation, which can lead to funding support, rather than depicting an accurate reflection of the state and rate of collections deterioration.” Paul Conway, Yale’s head of preservation, calls it “the Henny Penny school,” where you say the sky is falling, “and then it turns out to be something else.” Conway explains: “There were principled people who felt that the way to build national money is to focus, focus, focus and raise the issue to the national agenda. So it became a political process, which is focusing and narrowing, where voices are raised and attention is gained. If you take that logic to its extreme, you have to build a crisis state. You read the literature from the late eighties, you get this constant drumbeat.” Fire. . . calamity. . . crumbs. . . endangered. . . chemical disease. . . dying patients. . . facing extinction. . . dust. Patricia Battin at one point even wrote of “millions of rotting books,”1 a counterfactualism of brazen repulsiveness. She probably plucked it from Slow Fires, which talks of books “rotting on the shelves.”
But it was the earnest avowal that books were “turning to dust” that really enlisted sympathy outside the library world, because “dust” as a terminal state is so siftably granular, so irreclaimably fragmented, so impossible to copy. What was words is now dust. The phrase certainly worked on me. Even though I had spent a fair amount of time in library stacks around the country and had never encountered a book that could be described as having attained a near-dustlike (as opposed to dusty) condition, I believed that millions of these books, or at least thousands of them, must be hidden away in places that visitors never saw. I trusted that library authorities were saying something that was close to the truth.
But it seems they weren’t. I had lunch with two learned booksellers, Ian Jackson and Peter Howard, who between them have examined hundreds of thousands of library discards from all over the world, as well as private caches in attics and sheds and all kinds of hot, inclement places. I read them some sample dust-passages, along with a statement from the Commission on Preservation and Access’s 1992 annual report that offered “the fact that over twenty-five percent of the world’s great collections was embrittled and lost to future scholarship.” Lost to future scholarship? Peter Howard blinked and said, “Seems like nonsense to me.” Ian Jackson observed that late-nineteenth-century South American book-paper was some of the worst he had come across; its manufacture was influenced by the German chemical industry, which created, Jackson said, “the horrible paper that browns.” He gave as an example the hundred-odd volumes produced by a Chilean scholar, José Toribio Medina, between 1880 and 1930, books that “remain the bedrock of South American bibliography.” They were all reprinted in the sixties, because the original paper couldn’t hold up to heavy reference-room use: it was brown and fragile. “The paper is just—it’s worse than German,” Jackson said. And yet even copies of Medina in the original exist and are collected. Jackson owns thirty thousand books, most from the acid-paper era; in his life he has run into “a few dozen”—not thousands or hundreds—that have reached what he called the Wheat Chex stage.
Since German paper seemed to present unusual problems, I also talked to Helmut Bansa, editor of Restaurator, an English-language conservation journal published in Munich. Bansa said that books can become so brittle that they can be handled only with the “utmost care.” “But they will not embrittle to dust,”2 he said. “This is not true.” Nor has he ever seen (and this is a very important point) a book that could not be copied. “The worst state is if you have a sheet of paper and you turn it around an angle, let’s say, of ninety degrees, then it will break. This is the worst state I’ve ever seen.”
I also talked to Peter Jarmann, a bookbinder and conservator at St. Bonaventure University, south of Buffalo, who has perfected a technique called “quarter-joint binding” that allows books to open flatter (while facedown on photocopiers, say) with less damage. Jarmann has encountered books, especially those with oversewn bindings, that are so brittle that their pages cannot be turned without breaking them out of the binding. Has he come across any books that are turning to dust? “I think they’ve slowly discovered that this idea that they’ll all turn to dust is a myth,” he said. “The books get weak to a point, and they kind of stop at that point. And whether they break out of the binding kind of depends on the binding. They’re more likely to fall apart in a stiff binding than in a binding that gives.”
John Dean, head of preservation at Cornell, told me that his library has the usual problems with flakes of paper at the photocopiers and that their Southeast Asian collections are extremely delicate. “But as far as actually, literally turning to dust,” Dean said, “I must confess I have never really seen that phenomenon myself, and I don’t think any of the research has actually demonstrated that this is the case. I think that that particular rhetoric is a metaphor, and it may be an attention grabber, I’m not really sure.”
I brought up the dust question with Robert McComb, the former paper scientist from the Library of Congress. McComb said: “What they were afraid of is if they even took the book off the shelf and put it on a book cart, it might start falling apart. There have been a few examples of that. I didn’t say a lot, but there’s been a few.” He’s seen exactly two books that “when you opened the covers a little bit they just broke into hundreds of little pieces.” McComb says he once came across a book in which a piece of bacon had been used as a bookmark. “How long it had been in there, Lord knows, but wherever that bacon grease had gone, that paper was exceedingly fragile.”
I asked Ellen McCrady, who edits the Abbey Newsletter, the periodical of record for U.S. book p
reservationists and conservators, about the Commission’s notion that we must convene a vast communal filming bee right now because millions of books will crumble over the next twenty years. “I think they leapt at that solution and oversold it,” McCrady said. “Pat Battin was gung ho on microfilming, and to her this was the solution. I used to resent that. She used to call it ‘preservation.’ Microfilming is not preservation. Microfilming is microfilming—it’s copying. She was overstating her case, and associating herself with higher things, and so on.” McCrady believes that microfilm ought to be used to save things that would not otherwise survive, but Battin took it too far. “If you want to be a leader, you have to have credibility, and you shouldn’t distort reality in order to gain the favor of the masses. It’ll backfire.”
CHAPTER 27
* * *
Unparalleled Crisis
Lots of microfilming—that was the important thing. Get as much under the camera as possible, as soon as possible, using “a comprehensive mass-production strategy.”1 And yet Battin’s “major attack”2 on the brittle-books problem was not just about microfilm. There was also the deacidificational thrust and the alkaline-paper thrust. To further the cause of deacidification, the Commission on Preservation and Access hired Peter Sparks, who was by then looking for work as a freelance consultant, to write a slim study called “Technical Considerations in Choosing Mass Deacidification Processes.” And that was about it.
The alkaline-paper thrust, on the other hand, was a commendable attempt to convince publishers to use (in a slight misnomer) acid-free paper: paper that had not merely a neutral pH when it came off the roll, but an extra dose of Rolaidsian additive mixed in, a buffer or “alkaline reserve” which would counteract any hydrolytic toxins that the fibers might secrete or otherwise encounter in their golden years. In adopting this goal, the Commission nudged its way into a campaign already in progress, headed by Ellen McCrady, who had for years argued for the use of acid-neutral paper; her Abbey pH pens are used by librarians as a quick check of acidity. (The pen line comes out a pale purple if the book is alkaline, yellow if it is acid.) Allied alkaline forces were able to celebrate a victory sooner than anyone could have foretold, mainly because stricter EPA regulations were compelling papermakers to redesign their plants in order to reduce the acidity of manufacturing effluents. March 7, 1989, was the big day for acid-free paper:3 urged on by Vartan Gregorian and a writer named Barbara Goldsmith (who later joined the board of directors of the Commission on Preservation and Access), a group of authors (including Robert Caro, Joan Didion, and Kurt Vonnegut) and publishers (including Harper, Random House, and Simon and Schuster) pledged that they would publish first printings on acid-free paper. (Actually, some of the publishers had gone acid-free for hardcovers several years before.)