Biggar describes an illustrated 1909 book, Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun: A Record of Pioneer Exploration and Mountaineering in the Punjab Himalaya, by an explorer named Fanny Workman. The Library of Congress guillotined and filmed it in 1975; when a researcher who had recently used the book requested the disbound remains, she was told that the library wasn’t allowed to transfer books to individuals. The Preservation Microfilming Office wouldn’t let her take even the map. Fanny Workman’s book, with its ninety-some illustrations, went to a Baltimore pulpery. Last time I checked on Bibliofind, on April 20, 2000, there were two copies of Fanny Workman’s Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun for sale. One, “slightly rubbed and worn” and recased with new endpapers, was going for $2,200; the other, “slightly spotted” but crisp, for $2,400.
Assuming, conservatively, that the books the Library of Congress got rid of have a replacement value of forty dollars apiece (some would be worth less, some a great deal more), and assuming (generously) that the library kept ten percent of the originals after filming them, the Preservation Microfilming Office threw out more than ten million dollars’ worth of public property between 1968 and 1984.
Spring-balanced book cradles, which hold bound books open evenly under a camera without cracking their spines, have been around since the thirties. Gutter shadow isn’t as dark and deep in books as it is in newspaper volumes, because books aren’t as thick, and their margins are usually wider. Very few of those three hundred thousand volumes would have had to be terminated in order to be “preserved,” except that the PMO’s mandate was to condense efficiently, per Verner Clapp’s cost-estimating subcontractors. A 1987 Library of Congress Discussion Document titled “Preservation Selection Decisions,” written by Ricky Erway, then of the Planning Office, includes a list of pros and cons to “keeping the material in its original format.” One of the cons is “no space savings.” If you keep the original but microfilm it in order to reduce the risk of damage to it, Erway points out, you actually provide “negative space savings.” (Meaning that you must store the boxes of microfilm, too.) Erway also writes: “To save space, it is beneficial to transfer to a new format those materials which can then be discarded or can at least be stored offsite.” The “primary solution” for brittle books, according to Erway’s paper, was “Discard original.”
In turning over this document — and it took me more than four months to extract it from the library, after I saw it mentioned in a UNESCO report on methods of library preservation — the head of the library’s Office Systems Services and Records Office wanted me to know (1) that the Library of Congress is not bound by the Freedom of Information Act,16 (2) that the report “was never shared broadly within the Library,” and (3) that its recommendations “never became Library policy.” Oh, and another thing: “The report you are requesting is not of record at the Library of Congress.” Ricky Erway herself now works at the Research Libraries Group; when I called her, she was kind enough to fax a copy of “Preservation Selection Decisions” to her former employer so that they could send it to me, since they seemed to be unable to locate it on their own. The document is, Erway says, “an artifact of its time”; when she looked it over recently, though, she thought, “Well, this seems pretty rational to me.”
A year after Erway submitted her report, the new librarian of Congress, James Billington, dropped in on the library’s Cataloging-in-Publication division, where he said a friendly hello to a publishers’ liaison named Victoria Boucher. Boucher and Billington chatted for a moment, and then she brought up what was on her mind: the library was destroying books and calling it preservation. Knowing Billington’s interests, she mentioned the loss of pre-Revolutionary Russian works in good condition. Billington seemed, as Boucher recalled afterward, “annoyed and embarrassed.” She asked him if he’d yet been into the stacks (where books had slips in them marking them for microfilming), and he said he hadn’t. When Billington left, the head of the department snapped at Boucher, “I’m glad he has you to tell him how to run a library!”
Boucher also went to the library’s European Division and protested the sacrificial microfilming; she was told that she was “preaching to the choir.” Eventually she had a talk with the head of the Preservation Microfilming Office at the time, Bohdan Yasinsky. Yasinsky reassured her, saying that people from Rare Books see the books before they are destroyed and have a chance to save them. “Quite a few people feel the way you do,” Yasinsky told Boucher. “I am known as ‘the butcher of books.’ ” The Library of Congress wasn’t really a lending library, he said, so it didn’t matter whether books remained in portable form. Boucher asked him if there had been any complaints from members of Congress (who can take books out); he said that there hadn’t been. He fixed her with a basilisk gaze, according to Boucher, and said, “They know it won’t do them any good anyway.” When I telephoned Yasinsky (who is now a Ukranian specialist at the library), he promptly confirmed the butcher-of-books epithet. There were those, he said, who were “very skeptical” when he told them that he had to cut a book in order to film it. Yasinsky attributed their unhappiness to “nostalgia.”
There have been reforms at the Library of Congress since the late 1980s. Decision trees and definitions of “serviceable” in reference to book stock have evolved considerably, I’m told — now the library supposedly keeps almost everything. Or rather, everything that has been allowed to become part of its collections; everything processed for retention, cataloged, and shelved. For, in fact, librarians reject and discard a huge mass of books that the library is given, free, by publishers every year (as the national library, the one library to have this privilege, they should be shelving everything17 they are sent); the only items that the library is required by law to store in perpetuity, oddly enough, are unpublished but formally copyrighted manuscripts. Anything published they can discard at any time. (“I am happy to announce18 that the Copyright Discard project is going very well, and all of your efforts are most appreciated,” one recent internal memo began; the question was whether a certain class of material should go in the “regular Discard tub” or the copyright-discard tub.) And the library doesn’t necessarily keep its second copies, either; one notable duplicate they deaccessioned some years ago was one of five known copies of an interim edition of Finnegans Wake19 from the twenties; the library bartered it for ten thousand dollars’ worth of fine press books.
A great research library must keep its duplicates, even its triplicates, for a number of reasons, the most basic ones being that books become worn with use, lost, stolen, or misshelved.20 (A recent survey21 of nineteenth-century American books at the Library of Congress found that “the number of Not on Shelf, misshelved, and missing books is alarming.”) Curious, I searched, on May 18, 2000, for phrases like “Surplus Library of Congress” and “Library of Congress Duplicate” on Bibliofind and turned up these: a rare printing of Henry Adams’s A Radical Indictment! (1872) for sale for $2,000; a very fragile Hebrew grammar by John Smith published in 1803, with early ownership signatures on front and rear pastedowns (and a Library of Congress duplicate release stamp on the verso of the title page), for sale for $295; Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (1979), with an introduction by Milos Forman, rubber-stamped as a Library of Congress duplicate and for sale for $500; two volumes called Chosen Kobunka Sokan by Sueji Umehara, with approximately one hundred plates and an LC surplus stamp, for sale for $650; an anonymous 1881 book titled Ploughed Under; the Story of an Indian Chief, written with the assistance of “Bright Eyes,” a.k.a. Susette La Flesche Tibbles, a full-blooded Omaha Indian, stamped “Library of Congress Surplus Duplicate” and spine-labeled “Reserve Storage Collection,” for sale for $450; a children’s book from 1861 by Jane Andrews called The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air, with eight illustrations (described as “a Library of Congress duplicate surplus”), for sale for $150; an 1831 edition of The Federalist, on the New Constitution, by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, with a duplicate stamp on the first flyleaf, for sale for $400; E. H. Barton’s Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever, inscribed by the author to the Smithsonian Library in October 1858, with a Library of Congress release stamp on the first flyleaf, for sale for $450; and a book called The Army of the Potomac by Major General George McClellan, published in 1863, inscribed by McClellan to “His Excellency, General Count von Moltke, Chief of Staff etc etc with the sincere respect of George McClellan, Jun/69,” with a Library of Congress duplicate stamp on the copyright page, for sale for $12,500.