"Double Fold," Libraries and Book-Burnings

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Anyone read Nicholson Baker’s “Double Fold” yet? I have it on reserve at the library (not surprisingly, the library does NOT have many copies of it on order!). Anyway, it’s a horrifying expose about how libraries all over the world (including the Library of Congress!) are destroying old books, magazines and newspapers, both for “lack of storage space” and because “they’re crumbling to dust.” Baker disproves both of those in this book, and also notes that books and newspapers are being destroyed (“guillotined”) in order to be transferred to microfilm—which is not only illegible much of the time, but which itself deteriorates faster than paper! Can’t wait to read this; my head will probably explode by page 40.

Baker became a hero of mine about ten years ago when he decried libraries’ junking their card catalogs in favor of computers (which often don’t work). Anyway, here’s today’s Salon review of it—

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/27/baker/index.html

2

Sort of off-topic, but what else is new around here:

Sorry, Eve, but I have to disagree. I love computerized card catalogs. They make it so much faster to find what I’m looking for.

In fact, my city library has not only computerized its catalog, but has made it available online as well. I can search at home for any book - say, Platinum Girl: The Life and Legends of Jean Harlow by the ever-fascinating Eve Golden - and find out which neighborhood branches have a copy in their collections, whether the copy is currently checked out, and when it is due back.

I see that my neighborhood branch has one copy that is currently checked out and due back on May 9. I could wait until then if I wanted, or I could drive across town to one of the three branches that currently have a copy checked in. I can also see that neither your Theda Bara book, your Anna Held book, nor your new collection of essays is in the library system at all. I guess I need to have a talk with my local librarian.

This is why I love computerized card catalogs.

(By the way, someone must really like your Jean Harlow book. One branch has a copy that is currently checked out. It was due back February 28.)

3

Kepi—I am delighted not to have to disagree with someone who says such lovely things about (and gives such overt plugs to) my books. Be sure and march RIGHT up to your librarian and find out why my three most recent books aren’t in the system!

I—and Mr. Baker—are not opposed to computerized card catalogs. We are simply opposed to the destruction of the old card catalogs. They ALWAYS work, and are also invaluable historical documents. The computers frequently have problems—when my local library lost power during a storm last year, they had to shut down for a week because their computers were down (that never happens with card catalogs—at the worst, a drawer might jam). And the main circulating branch of the New York Goddam Public Library? There are a dozen computers—50% of which have “out of order” signs taped to them, and the other 50% have a line a block long to use 'em. Oh, and no instructions anywhere.

Feh.

4

Some of us are out there fighting the fight. The prison where I work at has a library with only so much space. Having received new books over time, it was decided that some older books would have to go to make room. The surplus books were boxed up and the plan was to toss them out with the garbage.

But then Our Hero, Little Nemo, arrived in the nick of time. I have volunteered to pick up all the surplus books and store them in my garage until I can find another library that wants them. If nothing else comes up before then, I plan to donate the lot to the county book sale which is held every September.

5

A little off topic, but the subject of book burnings brought this back to mind.

Public book burnings–why should rednecks & Customs officials monopolize this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post , Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings of Christian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances–a festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear autumn afternoon.

It’s a passage from a Hakim Bey book. I love it.

MarxBoy

6

Speaking of Eve’s books, my coworker was thumbing through a book on sex in the 20th century the other day (remember, I work in a bookstore, she had just randomly picked it up), and she pointed out a picture of Anna Held, dressed in corset and pantaloons and not much else, to me! “Look, the perfect body!” I was completely startled, but thanks to Eve’s brilliant writing, was able to enlighten her.

So read Eve’s books! Your friends will think you’re cool!

7

Well, I finally found a copy of “Double Fold”—I’m about halfway through, and it’s just as horrifying and blood-pressure-raising as I’d suspected.

Since the 1950s, libraries—not just small local ones, but The British Library, the Library of Congress and the NYPL—have been selling or destroying millions of books, newspapers and magazines. Some do it to save shelf space (for what? more things to destroy?), others claim (falsely) that the paper is deteriorating to an extent that it’s not worth saving the books.

So, everything is transferred to miscofilm—which, as I can well testify, is CRAP. It translates photos and artwork to black smudges, it’s often illegible, and miscrofilm itself deteriorates faster than paper does! Also, the originals have to be “guillotined” in order to film them.

Remember all those huge issues of bound newspapers and magazines that used to be on library shelves? They’re almost all gone now: sold to those “Buy Your Birthdate!” places that chop 'em up, or sent to pulping factories. Nicholson Baker discovered that there are probably NO complete sets left of such newspapers as the NY Herald-Tribune, the NY World or the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I think I need a cup of tea. Everyone who cares about saving old books, magazines and newspapers should read this book (it’s very interestingly written by the way, as Baker has an ax to grind and is not shy about it!).

8

Um, “microfilm.” When my blood pressure goes up, my fingers lose typing ability . . .

9

The problem wiht card catalogs is that it isn’t simply a matter of keeping them or throwing them out–the things were extremely expensive to maintain. Our mid-size University library required three full time people to type up new cards, replace cards that people wandered off with, and put cards back into order. A place like NY public library must have had a whole department.

10

Well, the card-catalog question has not yet been addressed in the book (I’m only half through). It seems to deal with the destruction and “deacquisitioning” of books, magazines and newspapers.

Baker made himself into a non-profit organization so he could buy up an save as many bound newspapers as he could—major libraries will not sell them to private individuals, which means the ones that aren’t bought up are pulped.

I work from microfilm a lot researching my books—but up till now I had innocently assumed the original newspapers and magazines were still being held safely in storage somewhere . . . Now I look at the blurry microfilm type, the black, smudgy photos and illustrations, and I could just SQUEAK when I realize the originals have been destroyed!

11

Why not sell or auction off old books when deaquisitioning? (sp, I know!)
When they do it at the museum, there are very strict guidelines-selling, auctioning, give to other museums, etc etc…throwing away is a last resort for hopelessly damaged items that are of no use.

Considering all the old books and magazines and newspapers I would LOVE to get my little paws on…

Actually, I have to say, I like the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s computer system very much.

12

“Why not sell or auction off old books when deaquisitioning?”

—That’s what Nicholson Baker would like to know, too. He mentions some of the books that were chopped up for microfilming and then discarded, and others that were put up for offer to other libraries and pulped if not picked up. Some sold on the Internet for thousands of dollars, which certainly would have paid for more shelf space . . .

As for the old newspapers and magazines; I could plotz. Whenever I’m in London, I stop by the Westminster Abbey gift shop, and buy old newspapers and magazines for sale there (some dating back to the 1700s). Now I wonder, were they originally part of bound sets that were hacked apart for boobs like me to buy piecemeal?

13

I don’t know the answer given in the book, but I know here at our University Library much of the problem is that nobody wants them. Dissertations that no one has opened in 50 years, range after range of enginnering journals from the 30s, etc. For every 1860 edition of King Alfred’s translation of Boethius that gets thrown out there are ten versions of Explorations into the Effect of the Raising the Effective Income Tax .25% in a Pre-Industrial Enviroment."

IMHO, part of the problem is that the “publish or perish” mentaility has lead to the creation of a glut of academic journals filled with junk articles written by people who would rather be teaching, or writting one good book, but are instead struggling to get X number of articles publshed by date Z so that they don’t have to move thier own considerable book collections.

14

I have a friend who’s a university research librarian and she was so incensed by Baker’s ideas that she e-mailed me out of the blue with a Dope-worty rant on the subject.

Here’s a distllation of her counter-arguments.

  1. Libraries are repositories of information and ideas, not objects. The words and ideas contained in books are what is worth keeping. If you’re interested in books as examples of typography, design, papermaking, etc., you’d be better off at a museum.

  2. Baker has no idea what preservation means. The materials need to be kept in a climate and termperature-controlled environment which is expensive to maintain.

  3. Hi Opal! (Okay, that’s my point, not hers.)

  4. Libraries are also fighting a holding action against new-age type thinking typified by the architect of the proposed Seattle library (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/01) who castigates librarians for their “unquestioned loyalty to the book” which can only “undermine the Library’s plausibility at the moment of its potential apotheosis” and that instead they be “reprogrammed” to work “in a new and fluid manner.”

  5. Every institution must make decisions and set priorities on what they choose to acquire, what they keep and what they discard. According to my friend, Baker makes no distinction between an original copy of the Declaration of Independence and the latest issue of the free shopper you find on your lawn.

  6. Many libraries do attempt to sell or donate materials they no longer need. They do not have many takers.

15

I’m a librarian and have read only exerpts and reviews of “Double Fold” so far (I’ll get to it, really), but based on those, I’m extremely dubious of Mr. Baker’s position. Libraries really don’t have space to keep everything. Honest to God. And although some valuable stuff may hit the trash, alot of the deaquisitioned stuff is just junk. In some cases it’s dangerous. I don’t want you coming to my library and using the outdated nursing and drug manuals I’m dumping. And you don’t want my nursing students using them either. They don’t contain the most current medicines or treatments. This info is inaccurate and possibly dangerous.

And does anyone care if I get rid of that shelf of DOS manuals? I can’t sell them. No one wants them. If I do sell them, it’s going to be for pennys on the dollar, and it’s not going to buy me a million dollar addition, and I’m full up.

So would you like to buy me more space? Your taxes would go up. Do you mind? It’s for the library. It’s a good cause. Or you could donate a wing and we could keep the outdated newspapers in it. If there’s space, we’ll keep them. We like books. We hate weeding, which is the library term for getting rid of the old ones. No one gets into library science because they hate books.

As a matter of fact, we like the books so much that, when they get really old, we don’t want you to touch them. Those old newspapers, if they are printed on wood pulp, are turning to dust. I’ve seen them. The old cotton stock paper is holding up nicely, but the wood pulp is acid damaged, and needs to be treated to stop the damamge. But treatment for the whole collection is expensive, and conservation libraries are going to do books before newspapers. The fragile stuff isn’t easily accessable to the public because, present company excluded, you can’t trust a lot of the public. If left to themselves, they’ll be cutting their birth announcements out of those old newspapers.

And yes, microfilm can be crappy, but who’s doing that anymore? Has Mr. Baker got a chapter on digital preservation? If not, he’s feeding you old info to support his position. Preservation libraries are scanning materials in as fast as they can. This isn’t as good as the originals (we like primary sources) but it keeps picture quality and can be fully indexable, and thus easier to search.

So, I agree that it’s a crime that the old stuff is being deacquisitioned, but every library I’ve worked at has tried to find it a home before tossing it in the dumpster. If you’ve got room, your welcome to take it all home.

Just don’t fill your garage with Nation Geographic, Reader’s Digest or Life Magazine. Somebody’s got those bases covered. Trust me.

16

For those who might be interested, several responses to Mr. Baker’s book, from librarians and preservation professionals, have been collected here. They echo the arguments that have already been made in this thread, and make some additional ones.

None of those responses seem to mention the card catalog issue, so I will. As someone whose job used to include maintenance of the card catalog, I can second Manda JO’s point. It’s extremely labor intensive, and costs a lot in staff time. This in an era when library budgets are generally shrinking, and we are being asked to do more with fewer resources.

An alternative is to “freeze” the card catalog. To pick a date, say January 1, 1999, and declare that from that point, the card catalog is closed. It will continue to be available, but no new cards will be added to it. Last time I checked, Indiana University had done this with their card catalog. This would eliminate the work involved in printing and filing new cards, although we would still have to make sure the cards already filed were kept in order, and refile them when they weren’t. Older cards would still exist, and be available for their historical value.

The disadvantage to this, obviously, is that as time passes, a greater percentage of the library’s holdings are not to be found in the card catalog. Patrons who expect it to be up-to-date will complain when they go to the card catalog, and can’t find a book published last month. Sometimes they won’t even bother to complain, but will leave the library cursing under their breath about how woefully understocked it is. Even when the library posts signs, in multiple locations, saying that the card catalog is not up-to-date, and be sure to check the online catalog as well, you will still get patrons who don’t read those signs. This I have seen with my own eyes.

Ultimately, I agree with my colleagues. No one is happy to see materials discarded. But alternatives are not as easy as Mr. Baker seems to think.

17

Well, hey! I would kill to get my hands on copies of old, out of print bios of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, anything on Tsar Nicholas II, etc etc…

18

READ THE BOOK before you demonize Nicholson Baker—there are just as many heroes as villains in his book, and he does indeed point out the financial issues and space issues (and proposes solutions that don’t include destroying millions of books, magazines and newspapers). A few notes:

  1. Libraries are repositories of information and ideas, not objects. The words and ideas contained in books are what is worth keeping. If you’re interested in books as examples of typography, design, papermaking, etc., you’d be better off at a museum.

—Ummm, actually, libraries ARE indeed repositories of “objects” (i.e., books, newspapers and magazines). Who the hell else keeps them? If your friend thinks otherwise, she should get a job at a Barnes and Noble; she has no business working anywhere near a library.

  1. Baker has no idea what preservation means.

—He explains in great detail the difference between “conservation” and “preservation,” and how the two often interfere with each other.

  1. Hi Opal!

—OK, I certainly have no counterargument here.

  1. I’m not sure what your point was, so I’ll hold off.

  2. Every institution must make decisions and set priorities on what they choose to acquire, what they keep and what they discard. According to my friend, Baker makes no distinction between an original copy of the Declaration of Independence and the latest issue of the free shopper you find on your lawn.

—She did not read the book. He is talking about the unecessary destruction of major newspaper and book collections so they can be “efficiently” microfilmed—which entails chopping up and destoying the originals. There ARE ways of microfilming without guillotining, but that costs a few dollars more, so it’s easier just to trash millions of original documents.

  1. Many libraries do attempt to sell or donate materials they no longer need. They do not have many takers.

—They do not have many takers because they are offered to the HIGHEST BIDDER. They will NOT sell to private individuals or or “undersell.”

So would you like to buy me more space? Your taxes would go up. Do you mind?

—One of the points made is that millions of dollars (NEH-donated) are being wasted on programs actually destructive to books, whereas chilled storage space would actually cost LESS.

" . . . we like the books so much that, when they get really old, we don’t want you to touch them. Those old newspapers, if they are printed on wood pulp, are turning to dust. I’ve seen them. The old cotton stock paper is holding up nicely, but the wood pulp is acid damaged, and needs to be treated to stop the damamge."

—Again, read the book. There are whole chapters on this supposed “turning to dust” business. The only way a book or newspaper could possibly “turn to dust” (and I doubt you have ever seen THAT happen, I work with old newspapers, too), is if they are badly stored and abused in handling.

Preservation libraries are scanning materials in as fast as they can.

—Yeah, that’s part of the problem. It’s faster and cheaper to guillotine the originals and feed 'em into the machines. With a little more time and care, they could be copied onto microfilm or digitized, AND the original could be saved as well.

Again, read the book—it’s by no means an anti-library (or anti-librarian) screed. It only takes to task a few ill-informed, greedy or outright stupid people who have irretrievably destroyed millions of books, newspapers and magazines over the past 50 years. And by the way, that “latest issue of the free shopper you find on your lawn?” That WILL be an important document in 200 years. Your research librarian friend should know that.

19

Not to get overly defensive on behalf of my friend, but her argument is that the PURPOSE of the library is not to serve as an archive for a jillion old books, but to serve as the archive for the information they contain. If a more efficent method of storing the information were to exist (e.g., digitalizing everything in the catalog) she’d be in favor of that. It’s not the purpose of the library to hang on to a jillion books just because we all love the feel of an old book in our hands.

As to why she’s working as a university research librarian instead of at Barnes and Noble, gee I don’t know – she could probably make more at Barnes and Noble, instead of doing something she wanted to do since she was a little girl, and spent her college career training for.

As for my point number 4, it was to illustrate that while Baker is castigating libraries for not keeping old materials (and riling up several posters in the meantime) there are others who are just as voiciferous in their criticism that libraries and librarians are TOO attached to books, and should put everything on line.

I was interested by your comment that the book is not a “screed.” Although I haven’t read it, that’s exactly the word my friend used to describe it. I guess it depends on whose ox is being gored.

20

Word to that, Eve. I’m currently helping to catalogue that PAT collection over at the Heinz Center-putting it online. Basically, when the new bus station was being built, they discovered about six deep shafts-old wells, cisterns and privies. Filled with trash going back to the early 19th century. I’m working on typing in the glass artifacts they’ve found-what people throw away yesterday can be priceless to historians today. Old ink wells, fragments of old soda bottles, old tumblers, shards of pickle bottles…