CHAPTER 33. Leaf Masters
The NEH didn’t know and didn’t care; the national preservation statistics were mute on the subject; but still I kept an eye out for estimates and demi-disclosures, because I believe we need to know how much was lost. In 1984, David Stam, then director of the New York Public Library, wrote that “a heavy proportion1 of our embrittled material has been discarded after microfilming” (by “our” he meant in the United States), and he said that “the practice of disposal has often included materials that could have been adequately preserved in the original.” There is, however, no way to quantify the words “heavy proportion”—does it mean over half? I called Yale’s Paul Conway back and asked him whether a fifty-percent discard figure was a reasonable guess through 1993 or so. He said that “fifty percent rings true” for the years between 1983 to 1993. “But since then libraries are trying a lot harder.”
Gary Frost, who was for years in the business of making sumptuous preservation photocopies (sometimes with color-copied title pages) at a place in Texas called Booklab, wrote in 1998:
If the current compulsion toward digital scanning of library materials is really the dawning of a New Age era of microfilming what is the preservation implication? The implication may be the same; that the new technology will be considered a preservation method that results in the discard of library materials. The microfilming process, by one estimate, has resulted in the discard of over 60 % of the originals recorded.
Over sixty percent? Was that a reasonable estimate? Gary Frost is an interestingly ambivalent — one almost wants to say “tortured”—soul. He strongly believes that librarians should continue to function as custodians of the “source original.” Conservators should “support developments in storage facilities and delivery systems that enable the survival of originals.” He told me that Michael Lesk’s and Brother Lemberg’s idea of discarding millions of books in favor of networked digital page-scans is “a right-wing paramilitary objective — or no, a left-wing paramilitary objective.” He regrets the “very strong undercurrent in the USA toward disposability, toward favoring clean copy over soiled original.”
But in producing Booklab’s fabled preservation photocopies, Frost’s team of operators severed spines just as microfilmers would, to get pages to lie flat. Frost gave his mutilés de guerre a nice name, though: he called them leaf masters. Libraries were supposed to put their pristine, acid-free Booklab photocopies on the shelf and store the soiled leaf masters in cool sanctums, using them like the frozen sperm from great racehorses whenever the circulating photocopy had done too many laps. Originals were not for “eye reading,” but for “machine reading”—for the infinite propagation of copies. (“I’ve never seen a book I couldn’t copy,” Frost said, when I asked about the extent of crumblement or dusthood.) Not so many libraries were interested in storing boxed or shrink-wrapped bundles of loose pages, though; the leaf masters often went in the compost pile.
“We’ve cut two or three hundred thousand books here in flat platen work,” he told me. “It is what it is. I know that the types of materials that we were working from were such combat-battered brittle materials anyway that there wasn’t any circulation left in them. I also realize the dilemma of in any way projecting a preservation agenda based on destruction, even though that’s been possible in a couple of weird ways.”
I wondered what percentage of the disbound Booklab books were kept by libraries afterward. If I was to go to a university and ask to see their disbound, shrink-wrapped Booklab originals, I said, what would my chances be of seeing something?
“I would say that your chances are probably very minimal,” Frost answered. “Certainly in the ten- to twenty-percent category of stuff that we did. I could be wrong.” The libraries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art don’t throw away their leaf masters, according to Frost. “They don’t believe in brittle books. That’s almost seven or eight or nine libraries right there, in that one museum. But that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule that most of these would be thrown away.”
I asked him who had been the verbal source original for the estimate that microfilming had resulted in the discard of “over sixty percent” of the books recorded. John Dean, of Cornell, had come up with that a long time ago, Frost said.
“I don’t think so,” said John Dean, when I reached him. “I have no basis for that kind of number at all.” Dean did confirm a discussion in 1993 (at an annual meeting of the NEH’s Office of Preservation) of how much to keep after microfilming. “Faculty and bibliographers and curators were saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to throw this stuff away, I don’t want it filming.’ ” The idea that libraries should now digitize their goods so that other libraries can throw out their copies is one he attributes to “the brutalist school.”
The oddity here is that Cornell has been a hotbed, or testbed, of crypto-brutalists — but that’s a matter for a later chapter. Perhaps the sixty-percent estimate Gary Frost had in mind came not from Cornell’s John Dean, who disowned it, but from Yale’s Gay Walker. Walker wrote in 1989: “Based on a non-scientific survey2 of the field, the majority of filmed volumes are subsequently withdrawn from collections.” The survey to which Walker refers was eventually distributed as part of an informational compilation called Brittle Books Programs, produced by the Association of Research Libraries. “Of all responding libraries,”3 write the surveyors, Jan Merrill-Oldham and Gay Walker, “nearly half discard 90 percent or more of the original copies of volumes after they have been reproduced.” Almost a quarter of the thirty-five libraries surveyed kept none of the volumes after reformatting, they found; two libraries declined to answer. Walker does not volunteer Yale’s own percentage; but included in this compilation is another 1986 document in which she writes that items at Yale designated for withdrawal should “have all ownership marks removed4 or marked out and a ‘discard’ stamp applied to the inside front flyleaf and the inside back cover as well as the title page… items are sent to the Gifts and Exchanges Unit when a truckload has accumulated.” In a 1987 article for Restaurator, Walker offers another hint: “In the great majority of cases,5 the very deteriorated, brittle, disbound original is withdrawn from the collection and often placed in a library booksale for a minimal amount.” Walker was “Arts of the Book Librarian” at Yale when she wrote that.
Walker and Merrill-Oldham’s survey is, in any event, the best estimate I’ve found of discarding practices at the height of the brittle-books agitation. To be cautious, though, let’s say that only half of the books, not (as Walker says) “the majority,” were thrown out. Between 1988 and 1993, the NEH paid for the microfilming of about 500,000 books, and the Library of Congress’s Preservation Microfilming Office filmed another 150,0006 volumes or so. At a fifty-percent retention rate (which is, for the Library of Congress of that era, extremely conservative), 325,000 books were removed from U.S. libraries as a direct result of federal money. Add the newspapers to that.
But the losses exceed that number. In the same paper, Walker wrote that the “filmed copy must be a perfect one — other copies of the book will be discarded upon the strength of the listing.” Does this still seem strange — that libraries would cast aside their own copies of books simply because they have been judged by others worthy of filmed preservation? It was never a strange idea within the preservation movement. Recall that Robert Hayes had built it into his cost-benefit analysis: the creation of a film would have a multiplier effect around the country, triggering local bibliectomies. (Sometimes a library would buy the microfilm from the filming library to replace its original; but sometimes the library would simply feel better about deselecting its original in the knowledge that preservation-quality microfilm was potentially there to be bought, even if it wasn’t actually bought.) Hayes figured that five physical copies would disappear from libraries for every book filmed, but let’s say, more conservatively, that from 1988 through 1993 fifty percent of the filmed books spawned three physical disappearances — one at the filming library and two of duplicates somewhere else. And let’s say that none of the remaining fifty percent (i.e., those books that were physically reshelved post-microfilming) prompted any parallel discards elsewhere — highly unlikely, but also conservative. That triples the loss-estimate and brings it to 975,000 books. Almost all these books were old and out of print, so the replacement cost, assuming that these original editions could be found on the used-book market, and ignoring costs of recataloging and reprocessing, is high — say (again conservatively) forty dollars a book. As a very rough, lowball guess, thirty-nine million dollars’ worth of originals left our nation’s libraries, thanks to federal largesse. It’s as if the National Park Service felled vast wild tracts of pointed firs and replaced them with plastic Christmas trees.