The reporter was shocked, but we needn’t be. If Barrow hadn’t chosen to destroy yet another page in order to perform his parlor trick, the recipe for Chicken à la Terrapin would very likely be with us today. (And it would be an interesting recipe, too: a terrapin is a large freshwater turtle.)
One root of the word “duplicity” is duplicitas, “double-foldedness.” The fold test, as it has been institutionalized in research libraries, is often an instrument of deception, almost always of self-deception. It creates a uniform class of condemnable objects—“brittle material,” or better yet, embrittled material (for somehow the em-prefix adds a further wiggle of worry) — whose population can be adjusted up or down to suit rhetorical needs simply by altering the number of repetitions demanded in the procedure. It takes no intelligence or experience to fold a corner, and yet the action radiates an air of judicious connoisseurship. Because it is so undiscriminatingly inclusive, and cheap, and quantifiable — because it can be tuned to tell administrators precisely what they want to hear — the fold test has become an easy way for libraries to free up shelves with a clear conscience. It isn’t that we’d like more space, one can almost hear them whispering to themselves, as they work the corners back and forth, it’s that the books are, sadly, doomed.
CHAPTER 19. Great Magnitude
The eighties became the decade of the Barrow-inspired statistical-deterioration survey. Stanford University1 set the pattern in 1979 by subjecting the corners of four hundred books to three double folds (three, followed by a gentle pull, just to be sure), with additional demerits for bad bindings, crumbly margins, and poor paper color — they found that twenty-six percent of the books had “deteriorated.” In 1984, the Library of Congress cut strips from the fore-edges of twelve hundred of its books and mounted them on MIT Fold Testers; a statistical consultant found that twenty-five percent had fold values of less than one, meaning that “in the judgement of experienced2 Library of Congress personnel in the preservation field” (i.e., Peter Sparks and his crew), these books “should be preserved by microfilming rather than deacidification.”
And then in 1985, in the pages of College and Research Libraries, came a monster from New Haven. It was called “The Yale Survey:3 A Large-Scale Study of Book Deterioration in the Yale University Library.” A team of interns (salaried by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation) performed double-fold tests on an incredible 36,500 books. The corners were to be “folded four times, and the crease pinched on each fold,” an appendix confides—pinched, just to be sure. “Of the books surveyed in the main Sterling [Memorial Library] stacks, 44.7 percent did not survive the four-fold paper test — a percentage that represents between 1,351,600 and 1,420,420 books.” What were we to conclude from these huge numbers? “These findings signal the need for expanded replacement and reproduction programs”—more microfilming. The current preservation librarian at Harvard, Jan Merrill-Oldham, was one of the team of dedicated folders.
The Yale survey was executed with care and thoroughness, and it’s worth studying. If we look at its results in a slightly different way, they argue for the astonishing fortitude of acidic paper, not for its endangeredness. A few years before the publication of the survey, Gay Walker, Yale’s head of preservation, delivered a paper to preservation administrators that described the environmental conditions in the Sterling stacks. There were, she said, “major problems with the ventilation system.” There was no air-conditioning, and humidity levels in the summer were extremely high. Worse than that, heating problems raised wintertime stack temperatures into the nineties and dropped the humidity to ten or fifteen percent. “Water leaks occurred4 from time to time and a pigeon’s nest with eggs could be found now and then on the upper floors,” Walker informed her colleagues. “It seemed that the Sterling stack tower was purposefully built to serve as a giant aging oven — planned deterioration indeed!”
And yet, according to the survey report (which doesn’t spell out these environmental rigors), even after decades of being dry-baked, summer-steamed, leaked on, bird-nested, and even occasionally read, the Yale collection wasn’t doing too badly: “Surprisingly, the percentage of books needing immediate treatment was much lower than we had believed,” the surveyors candidly admit. Their advance guess was that thirty or forty percent of Yale’s books would need attention, but that proved, they wrote, to be an overestimate — an overestimate, that is, unless the surveyors redefined the needing-attention category “to include all books with brittle paper” (those, in other words, that failed their mystical manipulation), whether the books actually needed attention or not. Without the fold test, Yale had no marketable preservation crisis.
And marketing was the key, it seemed, because marketing pulled in money. At the same preservation conference at which Gay Walker recounted the sorry state of Yale’s Sterling stacks, Peter Sparks gave a brief pep talk called “Marketing for Preservation.” Charities, he told his fellow folders, raise an “amazing” amount of money every year — over forty billion dollars in 1979. But the competition was keen:
To get a piece of the action,
5
an organized, systematic approach must be devised to convince donor agencies that one’s cause is worthwhile. Library preservation is a salable item; one must simply formulate an approach that will convince donor publics to invest substantially in this cause.
What was the systematic approach going to be? How could library leaders repackage the idea of mass microfilming in such a way that it would leap to a top spot on the worthy-cause roster?
Warren Haas, Verner Clapp’s successor (after a brief interregnum) as president of the Council on Library Resources, had been meditating on these questions for a long time. He was a deep believer in Barrow’s Deterioration of Book Stock, Causes and Remedies, and an equally deep believer in microforms. (Microforms haven’t returned the favor: Haas’s undergraduate thesis6 on British book censorship is available on microfiche, but the copy I got through interlibrary loan was faded to the point of unreadability, although I was able to print legible pages by changing the print setting to “negative,” so that the type stood out white on black.) In 1972, the year of Verner Clapp’s death, Haas chaired a committee on preservation for the Association of Research Libraries, and wrote its final report: Preparation of Detailed Specifications7 for a National System for the Preservation of Library Materials. (The work was supported by a grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.) Haas proposed that a consortium of big libraries embark on a “planned program of microfilming” that would include “collective ownership of any master negatives produced as part of any text preservation project.” The ownership of the masters was a matter of some concern to a library director like Haas, because, as he explained, “much master negative microfilm8 made from volumes in research library collections, at times even at the sacrifice of the original volume, is now in commercial film vaults.” The microfilm business had boomed — companies were selling enormous motley collections on “ultrafiche”9 (very high reduction microfiche) to libraries who needed to build up their title counts fast. (In a later CD-ROM era, such a product would be called “shovelware.”) Haas’s consortium would in effect become a micropublishing and reprinting concern to rival commercial micropublishers; the marketability of collections they microfilmed, Haas believed, “should weigh heavily10 in initial preservation program designations, both for the potential income and the high level of program visibility.” But before they could get their consortial shutters clicking, they would need money. A program of the scope that Haas envisioned would require, he wrote, “federal financial support11 of great magnitude.”