Since the perfection of the Xerox machine, microfilming has been unnecessary to any book-preservational act. If I were a preservation administrator, and I were absolutely sure, because I had an infallible accelerated-aging test for paper, that all surviving copies of Edmund Gosse’s Questions at Issue at my library and everywhere else were going to disintegrate into illegibility tomorrow at 3:30 P.M., and if I were determined to preserve the contents of that book for the human record, and if I had no secret craving to make use of the shelf space that Gosse’s book occupied, would I have the book microfilmed? Certainly not. I would instead make two full-sized eye-readable photocopies, one bound and one unbound. The bound copy would go on the shelf tomorrow, and the unbound one would become the master, and go into storage in order to make copies for other libraries as they wanted them. Preservation photocopying, as it is called, is faster and cheaper than microfilming, and much easier to check for errors and to correct when errors are found than film is (the film technician must splice retakes into the frame sequence, and there is a stipulated limit of three splices per roll), and the image is cleaner on a paper copy, and you don’t need to read it on a screen in a windowless hellhole—and you will get a better digital scan and searchable OCR text from it as well, when or if that time comes.
Savage, ungovernable space yearnings, in concert with an ill-conceived long-term plan to stock the sparkling digital pond with film-hatchery trout — these, and not groundwood pulp or alum-rosin sizing, were the real root causes of the brittle-books crisis.
CHAPTER 23. Burning Up
At several points during their congressional testimony, Vartan Gregorian, Lynne Cheney, and others referred admiringly to a brand-new movie called Slow Fires. This documentary, conceived and commissioned by Warren Haas, paid for by money given to the Council on Library Resources from the Exxon and Mellon Foundations, with further infusions from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is the most successful piece of library propaganda ever created. Haas chose Terry Sanders, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, to produce and direct; Haas had heard good things about Sanders on a visit to UCLA, and during their interview Sanders struck Haas as a person who was willing to listen. At the outset, Sanders was a blank slate—“Basically, it’s not a subject that I know the slightest bit about,” Sanders told me — but he was, Haas recalls, a “quick study.” Sanders got Haas, Welsh, Sparks, and a few others to come up with a wish list of what they wanted the film to do and say, and he read the packets of material he was sent. He felt that he could use some help with the writing: “I’m not particularly a wordsmith — this needed some poetry to it.” So he asked Ben Maddow, whose Asphalt Jungle had been nominated for an Oscar in 1951, to come up with the screenplay.
Still, Sanders was worried. “When I would tell people about the film that I was doing, about the paper and books turning to dust and the acid eating away — as I told them, their eyes would literally glaze over. It was not an exciting topic to anyone. So that was a good early warning signal that [we’d] better do everything possible to make it an interesting film. We were running scared the whole way.” They spent months trying to think of a title; finally, Ben Maddow came up with a real grabber: Slow Fires.
Haas himself (blue shirt,1 wise-looking eyebrows) begins the movie quietly, saying something innocuous about how we can’t get carried away by electronic fads; but soon we are in a lushly photographed, somberly sound-tracked world, visiting the Austrian National Library in Vienna, where expressionless international preservationists have convened to discuss (at a meeting funded by the Council on Library Resources) the world’s paper crisis; and then we’re at Harvard’s Widener Library, in a gorgeous slow dolly shot of bookshelves accompanied by narrator Robert MacNeil’s voice of literate probity: “Here Nobel Prize winners roam the open stacks — historians reevaluating the past, scientists looking to see what other scientists have already done.” Then MacNeil’s voice drops slightly: “Yet month by month, year by year, these precious volumes are burning away with insidious slow fires.”
Lap-dissolve to a pair of stone lions: at the New York Public Library, we learn, “millions of books are victims of a chemical disease.” The NYPL’s chief of conservation, John Baker, says that the books may not look so bad (he’s right, they don’t): “But when you open them, many, many of them are so brittle and deteriorated that they simply fall apart in your hands.” (We never see such an outcome in the film, however.) Then we’re off to the Library of Congress, containing, MacNeil narrates, “the cumulative daily life of the nation, invaluable and irreplaceable.”
Yet even here, inside this shell of splendid masonry, millions of volumes are falling apart, inside their covers, and within the very fortress meant to preserve them.
At this, there is a stare-shot of a worn and tattered book and a sudden (but soft) violin-tremolo of fear on the sound track. Vartan Gregorian comes on, a jolly charmer, but serious now, announcing that there are “seven million disintegrating books” in the Library of Congress.
The film’s kidney-punch is delivered in William Welsh’s office. Welsh, who from some angles looks a bit like Kirk Douglas, or maybe I’m thinking of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler in the TV version of Batman, holds a small old book while he describes the library’s 1984 deterioration survey. “So we had a survey made of our collections,” he says, “and we discovered, much to my horror, that twenty-five percent of our book collections of thirteen million books—twenty-five percent—were embrittled. That means they would crumble.” Welsh does not describe the MIT Fold Test that was the basis of this embrittlement percentage, but he does vividly demonstrate what he means by the temporally indeterminate phrase “would crumble.” He opens the book he is holding. It has a loose binding, but its pages are not falling apart; indeed, they appear abundantly readable. Nothing breaks off or crumbles away as Welsh flips through it.
“This is a book taken from our collections that shows the condition that I’ve described, embrittlement,” he says, and he pulls a page out and crumples it in his fist. Working his fingers, he allows the illegible confetti that he has just created to flutter onto his lap. He looks meaningfully at the camera, as if what he has done is devastating in its irrefutability. “You see what happens when you do that to it,” he says.
Slow Fires has a sequel, Into the Future (1997), about the novel burdens of keeping digital media alive. Into the Future is very good, but Slow Fires has moments of trying tendentiousness.2 It would be a better film if what it was saying happened to be truth and not head-slapping exaggeration — then its use of crisis language borrowed from struggles over DDT, AIDS, and acid rain, and its footage of murmuring papyrologists attempting to reassemble fragments of ruined Egyptian texts (“within a generation or two our own books in our own libraries will look like this unless we take heed”), and its pity-inducing pans over shots of charred library interiors and of the Florence flood, would have some justification. But one mustn’t chide the director of a made-to-order film for doing his best to tell the story that the people who hired him asked him to tell. “I’m not the expert at all,” Terry Sanders told me. No prominent paper scientists — not William Wilson, or Chandru Shahani, or Klaus Hendriks — were interviewed in the film or asked to review the script for accuracy. Nonetheless, the film won Grand Prize3 in the science category of the 1989 Salerno Film Festival.