18. “I am happy to announce”: The memo, dated September 13, 2000, is from the head of the Library of Congress’s Processing and Reference Section to serials librarians; it refers to the library’s new program of asking certain publishers to stop sending the library items for copyright deposit.
19. Finnegans Wake: This story came from a book dealer. Verner Clapp and Luther Evans authorized the disposal of duplicates in the fifties, during a space crunch. Clapp noted on March 19, 1951, that he had visited the annex, deck 7, north, with Frederick Wagman and Luther Evans. “Agreed: To dispose of stuff from Dupl. Coll. by weeding good stuff, advertising the remainder & pulping if no bids are recd.” The library also throws away book jackets, except in rare instances, see lcweb.loc.gov/acq/devpol/bookjack.htm, June 15, 1999 (viewed June 2, 2000).
20. misshelved: Side-by-side duplicates make shelvers’ lives easier, and thus reduce shelving errors, because the copy remaining on the shelf offers a quick visual cue as to where a book is supposed to go.
21. A recent survey: White, Packaging the American Word. White created a random population of four hundred books sold by six American publishing houses between 1830 and 1914 to serve as a sample for her study of American bookbindings. She found that of these (“the rare books of tomorrow,” she called them) twenty-six percent had received an “inappropriate” rebinding, and about six percent were missing in inventory or Not on Shelf, even after special additional searches. Thirty-seven books had already been reformatted, and, of those, thirty-three were found to be “Reformatted (original destroyed)” while four were “Reformatted (original retained)”—thus, in her sample nearly ninety percent of the microfilmed books from these six American publishers had been destroyed. Nine books had been deacidified.
CHAPTER 11 – Thugs and Pansies
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01. “Space is always a problem”: Irene Schubert, “Re: Serials microfilming,” PADG (Preservation Administrators Discussion Group), archived on the CoOL website (CoOL stands for Conservation OnLine), palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/10/msg00023.htm, October 31, 1997. Paula De Stefano, head of preservation at New York University, also contributed to this thread: she wrote that generally she stopped at the copyright cutoff date, then 1922. (That’s one reason so many older obscure things that libraries would otherwise have left alone were sliced open and expensively emulsioned—they’re in the public domain.) Then De Stefano wrote: “Of course, any titles already available on film are bought and the hard copy is tossed to make room on shelves. Space is a huge issue here.” PADG archives, CoOL website, October 31, 1997, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/10/msg00022.htm. The current textbook of preservation microfilming says that it’s okay to throw out volumes that aren’t yet brittle, if you gain lots of space in doing so—hardly a preservational argument: “The institution may decide that filming long runs of serials, theses, or other coherent collections will so significantly ease space constraints that these items should be filmed as a unit even if some individual pieces are less suitable. For example, even if a few issues of a serial title were not acidic or not yet brittle, there would still be advantages in filming the entire run”—and getting rid of the paper. Lisa L. Fox, ed., Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists, 2d ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), pp. 105–6.
02. Scotch-taping of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Esther Boyd-Alkalay and Lena Libman, “The Conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Laboratories of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem,” Restaurator 18 (1997). The cellotaping, which caused “irreversible damage,” began in the late fifties in the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem; later, some of the tape was removed with trichloroethylene, and then the fragments were reinforced with lens tissue glued on with polyvinyl acetate or Perspex in solution. “As a result, the parchment glitters like glass and becomes rigid and fragile.”
03. “This cannot be emphasized”: Nancy E. Gwinn, ed., Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists (Chicago: American Library Association, 1987), chap. 2, p. 36. Wesley Boomgaarden originally drafted this chapter, according to the preface.
04. “It must be stressed”: Gwinn, Preservation Microfilming, p. 37. The textbook asks: “With the enormous volume of paper-based materials that require reformatting to preserve primarily the intellectual content, can the institution justify microfilming as only an interim measure, and thus retain great quantities of printed materials after microfilming?”
05. book conservators generally report: See, for example, the organization chart published in Peter Sparks, “The Library of Congress Preservation Program,” in The Library Preservation Program: Models, Priorities, Possibilities, ed. Jan Merrill-Oldham and Merrily Smith, proceedings of a conference, April 29, 1983 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1985), p. 71.
06. “With few exceptions”: David H. Stam, “Finding Funds to Support Preservation,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1940 made a grant to the New York Public Library that “would supply funding to make a master negative from which the income to be derived from future sales would amortize the original investment”—helping libraries to help themselves. Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”
07. “a lot of material from the Jewish division”: Phone interview with Wesley Boomgaarden, April 21, 2000.
08. “When my hard-working”: Wesley Boomgaarden, “Preservation Microfilming: Elements and Interconnections,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, papers from the RTSD Preservation Microfilming Institute, New Haven, April 21, 23, 1988 (Chicago: Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, 1989), p. 8.
09. “most of the filmed volumes”: Committee on Institutional Cooperation, “Coordinated Preservation Microfilming Project,” Annual Report 1995–1996, nova.cic.uiuc.edu/CIC/annrpt/ar95-96/cpmp4.htm (viewed September 25, 2000). This multiphase, NEH-funded enterprise was also called the Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project.
CHAPTER 12 – Really Wicked Stuff
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01. “licensing arrangements”: The phrase appears in the testimony of Peter Sparks before the Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, House of Representatives, Oversight Hearing on the Problem of “Brittle Books” in Our Nation’s Libraries, March 3, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 105.
02. “Oh, the odor”: Scott Eidt, phone interview, April 25, 2000. Edward Frankland, the great nineteenth-century chemist who discovered diethyl zinc, wrote in his diary of his early experience with a related compound (dimethyl zinc) that when he exposed the new substance to air there was a “violent action” and a foot-long flame, followed by a “gas of a most insupportable odour.” Colin A. Russell, Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy, and Conspiracy in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 79.
03. Koski: Ahti A. Koski et al., “Studies of the Pyrolysis of Diethylzinc by the Toluene Carrier Method and of the Reaction of Ethyl Radicals with Toluene,” Canadian Journal of Chemistry 54 (1976).
04. “In the late fifties”: Richard D. Smith, whose Wei T’o process was slighted by the Library of Congress for years, published a thorough critique of diethyl zinc in Restaurator, in which he said that it had been tried as an ignition agent for Apollo-Saturn rocket, an assertion that some rocket scientists confirm. Smith’s excellent study is, however, prefaced by several paragraphs of hoo-ha about “the history of modern civilization deteriorat[ing] into dust.” “Deacidifying Library Collections: Myths and Realities,” Restaurator 8 (1987).
05. Ballistic-missile engineers: John J. Rusek, Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Purdue University, phone interview. See also John D. Clark’s entertaining Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 9, 13. Also George P. Sutton, Rocket Propulsion Elements: An Introduction to the Engineering of Rock
ets, 3d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 252.
06. hypergolic: The term “hypergolic” was first used by German rocket scientists. Clark, Ignition, p. 14.
07. “high-energy aircraft and missile fuel”: Hawley’s Condensed Chemical Dictionary, 12th ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), p. 397.
08. “During the war”: In 1944, the Army was considering the use of pyrophorics, but they had not yet proved “of practical value.” “They are difficult to control and constitute a great storage hazard,” wrote Brigadier General Alden H. Waitt of the Chemical Warfare Service. “However, there are a number of substances that ignite spontaneously on contact with the air, and methods may be devised for making practical use of them.” Gas Warfare: Smoke, Flame, and Gas in Modern War, 2d ed., Fighting Forces ed. (Washington, D.C.: Infantry Journal, 1944), p. 52.
09. “encapsulated flamethrower”: Interview with Allen Tulis, April 4, 2000. Later, the Air Force picked up on the idea of a pyrophoric flame weapon, adapting it for air-to-ground use, but they chose a slightly less reactive compound called triethyl aluminum in place of diethyl zinc. Triethyl aluminum also bursts into flame on contact with air, but it’s cheaper. Tulis worked on chemical demining and fuel-air explosives, as well.
10. rupture eardrums: For a description of blast injuries related to fuel-air explosives, see United States Department of Defense, “Clinical Presentation of Primary Blast Injury,” Virtual Naval Hospital, www.vnh.org/EWSurg/ch05/05ClinPresPrimBlast.htm (viewed September 25, 2000).
11. its own voraciously combustive chemistry: See G. von Elbe and E. T. McHale, Annual Interim Report: Chemical Initiation of FAE Clouds, report by Atlantic Research Corporation to Bernard T. Wolfson, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C. contract no. F49620-77-C-0097 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1979). The report is marked “Approved for public release; distribution unlimited.” Von Elbe was a bomb designer with a Ph.D. from Berlin; he wrote a paper on “The Problem of Ignition” in the Fourth Symposium (International) on Combustion (Combustion and Detonation Waves), held at MIT in 1952 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1953).
13. Dr. John Lee: Much of the Air Force’s FAE research is still restricted; Dr. Lee, however, holds a relevant unclassified patent. John H. Lee, “Chemical Initiation of Detonation in Fuel-Air Explosive Clouds,” U.S. patent no. 6,168,123 (December 1, 1992), which lists diethyl zinc as one of the liquid initiators.
CHAPTER 13 – Getting the Champagne out of the Bottle
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01. a grant from the Council: Nancy E. Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation,” College and Research Libraries 42:2 (March 1981).
02. unhappy time at a pesticide company: Kelly told me that the plant would get a boatload of white arsenic from Europe and make a big pile of it in a warehouse. Then, in the heat of summer, managers would hire men off the street to shovel it into the reactor to make pesticides like calcium arsenate and lead arsenate. The men “were sweating like pigs, and they’d get arsenic dust all over them,” Kelly said. “Inside of about two weeks, they’d be unable to work because of arsenic poisoning. The plant said, ‘It’s okay, just go ahead and work, you won’t get hurt.’ Finally they couldn’t work any more so they just laid them off and got some more in.” Kelly left the company after nine months.
03. thirty and seventy pounds of liquid DEZ: The DEZ was initially diluted with a solvent (which “provides increased safety in the handling of the agent,” according to Williams and Kelly’s patents) but later used in its undiluted, neat form. John C. Williams and George B. Kelly, Jr., “Method of Deacidifying Paper,” U.S. patent nos. 3,969,549 (July 13, 1976) and 4,051,276 (September 27, 1977).
04. “thoroughly acidified”: John Williams, phone interview, April 2000.
05. General Electric was lukewarm: GE was “unwilling to take the risk of an incident with the chemical diethyl zinc.” Carolyn Harris, “Preservation of Paper Based Materials: Mass Deacidification Methods and Projects,” in Conserving and Preserving Library Materials, ed. Kathryn Luther Henderson and William T. Henderson (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 67.
06. “small air leaks”: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Book Preservation Technologies, OTA-0-375 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), p. 30. One GE worker burned his arm when some diluted DEZ “dripped on his skin from piping that he was cleaning.” The injury did not require hospitalization (p. 73).
07. “we have demonstrated”: George B. Kelly, Jr., “Mass Deacidification,” in Preservation of Library Materials, ed. Joyce R. Russell (New York: Special Libraries Association, 1980). In the discussion that followed this paper, Kelly was asked whether other conservation labs might adapt an existing vacuum-drying chamber to treat books using DEZ. “It is possible,” Kelly wrote, “but you are going to have to have some extremely good engineers and extensive modifications of the chamber. You cannot afford one mistake. One mistake and you have a disaster on your hands. Proceed with caution.”
08. “400 to 600 years”: W. Dale Nelson, “Space Technology Used to Prolong Life of Books,” Associated Press, May 23, 1982, Nexis.
09. “at least five million volumes”: “Conquest of Brittleness, the Ruin of Old Books,” The New York Times, August 8, 1984, sec. B, p. 8, late city final edition, on microfilm. In a 1990 Times article on deacidification, Malcolm Browne, the great war journalist, apparently divided 77,000 by 365 days in order to come up with a fresh-seeming number: “At a rate of more than 200 volumes a day, books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, are turning to dust. But after a decade of research, accidents and administrative delays, the library reports that it is about to take a major step toward stopping the rot.” Malcolm W. Browne, “Nation’s Library Calls on Chemists to Stop Books from Turning to Dust,” The New York Times, May 22, 1990, p. C1.
10. “handling of diethyl zinc”: Library of Congress Information Bulletin, April 23, 1984; quoted in Karl Nyren, “The DEZ Process and the Library of Congress,” Library Journal, September 15, 1986.
11. “no known safety risks”: Daniel Boorstin, “Letter to the Honorable George M. O’Brien, Member of Congress [Transmitting] Statement on the Library of Congress’s Diethyl Zinc Gas Phase Book Deacidification Process,” July 10, 1984, quoted in a footnote to Smith, “Deacidifying Library Collections.”
12. weapons procurers: The library’s secretiveness and its unwillingness to document its experiments in peer-reviewed journals are discussed in Jack C. Thompson, “Mass Deacidification: Thoughts on the Cunha Report,” Restaurator 9:4 (1988).
13. 113 degrees: Glenn Garelik, “Saving Books with Science,” Discover, March 1983.
14. “self-sustaining and uncontrollable”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 25.
15. The results were “mixed”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 31, 42–43.
16. Thus many of the stacked books: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 42–43.
17. “Cause of odor a mystery”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, October 1994, lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).
18. “a Library of Congress representative”: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center, Accident Investigation Board Report of Mishaps at the Deacidification Pilot Plant, Building 306 on December 5, 1985, and February 14, 1986, James H. Robinson, Jr., Board Chairman (September 4, 1986), p. 96.
19. Later, Welsh admitted: Representative Vic Fazio “criticized the librarians for secretly diverting funds from other library programs to support the DEZ experiment,” reported The Washington Post. “ ‘Specifically,’ [Fazio] wrote Boorstin last Dec. 2, ‘over $2.3 million of the $3,740,474 obligated since fiscal year 1981 has come from funding sources other than those approved by . . .Congress.’ ” Phil McCombs, “Library’s Preservation Go-Ahead;
Dangers of Book-Saving Process are Discounted,” The Washington Post, February 11, 1987, p. C-1, final edition, Nexis. At the hearing, Fazio said, “You didn’t realize you had gotten hooked on this approach.” Welsh answered, “I realized I was hooked, but not that I was using that much money without your permission.” Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, pt. 2, February 10, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 417.