After Barrow died in 1967, Clapp’s Council continued to fund the Barrow Lab, which forged on under the direction of Dr. Robert N. DuPuis,10 who in the fifties was director of research at Philip Morris. DuPuis wrote memos11 at Philip Morris that plaintiffs have since used as evidence of the tobacco industry’s extensive foreknowledge of the medical dangers of smoking; in 1955, he assured viewers of See It Now, Edward R. Murrow’s TV show, “If we do find any12 [components in tobacco smoke] that we consider harmful, and so far we have not, we’ll remove these from smoke and still retain the pleasure of your favorite cigarette.” In 1970, DuPuis became interested in the promise of morpholine, used in floor polish, to lift acid paper’s pH. Eventually, the Barrow Lab and George Kelly at the Library of Congress began some morpholine “vapor phase deacidification” tests, precursors to the diethyl-zinc trials. The Barrow Lab used treatment chambers made by Vacudyne,13 a company whose processing units, coincidentally, were helpful to cigarette manufacturers in their “vapor phase ammoniation” of tobacco leaves. (Ammonia raises the pH of smoke, allowing for a more powerful buzz per gram-unit of nicotine; morpholine raises the pH of paper — transiently, as it turned out.) Morpholine probably wasn’t a carcinogen — so Litton Bionetics14 determined through assays paid for by the Council on Library Resources in 1977—but it had a dead-fish smell, caused headaches and nausea,15 yellowed some paper, and sometimes changed the color of leather and pyroxylin-coated book jackets. Henry Grunder, a librarian at the Library of Virginia (formerly the Virginia State Library), wrote me that the Barrow Lab experimented with morpholine on his library’s books: “We frequently run into the tell-tale rubber stamp, with the lot number written in; and the darkening discoloration that it is said the process induced in some papers is also present. (It left that behind, although no residual alkalization.)”
But in 1964, Clapp’s feelings about mass deacidification and other prolongations of incarnate bookness were only mildly enthusiastic anyway. Even if deacidification could be made to work, he wrote, he expected it to be “comparatively expensive”;16 and he mentions “storage at reduced temperatures” only in passing. Those were fine techniques to fiddle around with, but microfilm was for pragmatists: “The sensible solution17 to look to is, again, a solution based upon replacement of originals by high-reduction microfacsimile.”
Notice the rhetorical fine-tuning. In 1961, Clapp was attempting to demonstrate that microfilm was good for libraries purely on economic grounds, because it was cheaper than the safekeeping of originals. Now, several years later, perhaps chastened by some of the less-than-fruitful hardware-development outlays the Council had made, he was saying that even if microfilming always remains more expensive than safekeeping, it is the best answer to a different problem — the problem of catastrophic deterioration — an answer that, he points out, has the side benefit of reducing “storage, binding, and other maintenance costs”18 as well. Microphotography is, he notes, “already the standard method19 for preserving newspapers”—why not books as well? Microfilm and attendant book-riddance is always the solution, but the primary problem it solves is beginning to shift. The idea of destroying to preserve is gaining ground.
Late in life, Clapp wrote a long, multi-part essay20 for Scholarly Publishing about W. J. Barrow and the quest for permanent paper. It is required reading in some library schools, and for good reason: it is engagingly written and full of interesting sidelights about the development of papermaking. Clapp portrays his friend Barrow (whom he had known and advised since 194821) as a hero—“an essentially solitary worker22 lacking formal training” who single-handedly identifies the true causes of paper’s demise (not wood pulp, not polluted air, not gaslights, but alum-rosin sizing), and who invents an alternative acid-free recipe (or possibly adapts it without attribution from a formula developed by the S. D. Warren23 Company) that changes publishing forever.
Clapp’s essay has helped move along reforms in the paper industry, and for that we should be grateful. But Barrow was not the pioneering self-taught visionary that Clapp made him out to be; one book conservator, Thomas Conroy, writes that Barrow
treated his sources crudely,
24
refusing to correct theory in the light of observation, and (a greater personal defect, but a smaller scientific one) giving inadequate credit to his predecessors. Much of Barrow’s appeal to librarians was that he proposed simple solutions to extremely complex and unfashionable problems. When serious attention was again given to preservation, starting in the late 1960s, Barrow’s writings were taken as given, and used directly as foundations for further work; his articulations were not challenged or confirmed.
Sally Roggia, in a recent dissertation, writes that Barrow was an “aggressive promoter”25 who in the fifties and sixties began to be “widely, if incorrectly, credited26 with original scientific research and findings that were essentially confirmations of work that had been known for decades, and not new discoveries.” Roggia says that librarians and archivists must “stop holding onto myths27 especially when, as in Barrow’s case, the myth contradicts reason and common sense.”
Clapp’s authority, his steady money, and his careful shaping of the truth created the Barrow myth. “I have spent many hundreds of hours28—yes many hundreds” editing Barrow’s writing, Clapp informed Barrow’s son after his death; “I do not mean to denigrate your Father’s achievement in any way when I say that in the programs of research which he conducted with assistance from this Council we were a full, if a junior partner.” So when Clapp talks about Barrow’s amazing discovery of the “catastrophic decline”29 in fold endurance and the “disastrous condition of paper30 in the second half of the nineteenth century”; when he titles a historical section “The Road to Avernus”31 (i.e., hell) and describes papermaker’s alum as “the librarian/archivist’s worst enemy,”32 we should pause for a moment, and recall that Clapp was a man besotted with microtext, who had spent lots of Ford Foundation money in attempts to perfect micro-machines and image-storers that would allow research libraries to unload their shelved and cataloged book inventory, and that in his role as chief assistant librarian of the Library of Congress he presided over the undoing of its peerless newspaper stock, a willed act that has undermined American historiography far more seriously than anything that alum-tormented newsprint could possibly have done to itself. Clapp, with Barrow’s laboratorial help, demonized old paper; he did so partly in order to compel improvements in new paper, and partly to make a convincingly urgent case for filmed replacements.
CHAPTER 16. It’s Not Working Out
Clapp says that W. J. Barrow “knew more about old papers1 than anyone else alive.” If so, it was a taxidermist’s knowledge. Barrow spent his life coating old papers with melted plastic — not an activity that one normally associates with paper connoisseurship. He quit college2 in the twenties to work in his cousin’s company, the Barrow Corporation, which made work clothes. He managed clothes factories until 1931, when the company collapsed; a year later he set up shop as a conservator at the Virginia State Library. There, experimenting on the library’s collections, he gradually refined the now infamous Barrow method of document lamination.