get rid of it! Give it to another library
if
it needs it and can care for it; sell it to a collector or dealer if there are enough pieces left to sell; or — horror of horrors — put it in the trash can.
If we don’t start throwing things out, Darling insisted, “the central stacks of all major libraries will soon be condemned as unsanitary landfill — the world’s intellectual garbage dumps.” Darling was the head of Columbia’s preservation department when she wrote these words. Later she was a special consultant3 for Peter Sparks’s National Preservation Program Office; the National Endowment for the Humanities paid her to develop training programs and a self-study manual4 for preservation planning.
Battin herself was of the opinion that it “may well be cheaper5 to support access than large real estate holdings and service personnel to house and manage rapidly growing collections of artifacts.” And yet to me she said, in the sincerest possible voice, “I don’t think it’s your librarians that have ever tried to miniaturize in order to save space. I think it hurt most of us as much as it did any scholar to have to make these decisions, but we had the responsibility.” Later, however, when I asked her directly why a given book couldn’t just resume its former place in a library’s collection after it was “preserved,” she said that “you have to look at the cost of maintaining this on the shelf.” Then she seemed to sense a self-contradiction; she said: “And in that regard, space does become a factor in making the decision. But it is not the factor that led one to microfilm in the first place. I think that’s very important, to make that distinction.”
I asked her about Thomas Tanselle’s proposal to store any post-preservational rejects in a publicly financed repository. “Tom has presented this to me in public meetings before,” Battin said. “And I don’t think the economics have been worked out.” (She and her colleagues managed to work out the economics of a hundred million dollars’ worth of microfilming; surely figuring out how to devote ten million dollars to the foundation of a national repository is not beyond their talents.) Tanselle, she said, “represents a fairly small group of scholars for whom this is a very passionate issue. I think the vast number of scholars would rather have the access that we were trying to provide.”
And what access is that? How has the Brittle Books Program furthered access to anything? In the case of newspapers on film, you can mail around the spools, which is a convenience, since the newspaper volumes themselves (if they haven’t been scrapped) must as a rule stay on site. But books are portable and parcel-postable. Columbia University, alone among world libraries, owns a microfilm copy of Francis de Croisset’s memoir of Robert de Flers, which it once owned in the original. I now own the original, because Pamela Darling, or someone at Columbia’s preservation department, gave it to Patricia Battin, who gave it to me. In 1985, everyone at Columbia had access to the original book; now I do. (Columbia can have the book back anytime.)
“Access,” as employed by practicing retrievalists, does not mean physical access. The ability to summon words from distant, normally unreachable sources, which can be a fine thing for scholarship, is being linked to the compulsory removal of local physical access, which is a terrible thing for scholarship. Battin wrote once that “the value, in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” No wonder scholars like Thomas Tanselle opposed her: she was determined to make it more difficult for them to do their work.
“We have differed from the very beginning,” Battin says of Tanselle. “It’s just an honest disagreement.”
Speaking of honesty, late in our conversation I asked Battin what the thinking was behind the idea that books were “turning to dust.”
She looked puzzled. “I guess I don’t understand,” she said. “They were. Are you thinking it’s hyperbole?”
I said I didn’t know quite what the phrase meant.
“Basically what we meant was they were crumbling,” Battin explained. “I think we used ‘crumbling.’ ‘Crumbling books’ was what I remember much more that we used rather than ‘turning to dust.’ ”
In 1995, in testimony offered to Congress on behalf of the Association of Research Libraries, the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the National Humanities Alliance, Battin said, without qualification, that before 1988 (that is, before “the massive salvation effort” of the full-scale brittle-books initiative) “millions of books6 were crumbling and turning to dust on shelves in libraries and archives…. Surveys confirmed that nearly 80 million books were threatened with such destruction.”
I brought up Peter Waters and his question of whether any library anywhere had a substantial inventory of losses caused by brittle books crumbling to dust. In response, Battin patted the marbled boards of Croisset’s memoir. “This was withdrawn,” she explained. “That’s what we did. That’s our inventory — what’s been withdrawn.”
The book she had given me — its pages quite intact well over a decade after the microfilming company disbound it — qualified as an example of a book that was crumbling to dust? Had she possibly exaggerated somewhat?
“I don’t think the statistics were exaggerated,” Battin answered carefully. She said that Sidney Yates, the congressman, used to call her up saying “I need to know this and I need to know that.” Battin finally told him, “We’ve got the best information we can get. We can either wait ten years, and do careful counts, and lose more, or we can go on with these figures.” In other words, it’s an emergency because our statistics tell us so, and we have to go with the statistics that confirm that it is an emergency because since it is an emergency we have no time to waste gathering other statistics that might indicate that it isn’t an emergency, so please give us seventeen million dollars right now.
Battin finally said to me: “You probably are quite right that ‘turning to dust’ may well be hyperbole, as a way to catch the imagination of people.”
CHAPTER 37. We Just Kind of Keep Track
I, obviously, have a different view of the Brittle Books Program and the U.S. Newspaper Program than Patricia Battin does. The Newspaper Program, in particular, has, in my opinion, drained beauty and color and meaning from the landscape of the knowable past in ways that are reminiscent of what happened to the English countryside as a result of the government-financed destruction of the hedgerows in the fifties and sixties — and runs of daily newspapers, unlike rows of hawthorns, can’t be replanted. But after more than a year of interviewing librarians, I am aware that many of them don’t agree with me (although some do). I talked to Robert Dowd, who coordinates a subset of the Newspaper Program out of an office at the New York State Library in Albany. Dowd said: “There are cases of course when we are going to find the microfilm, it is not any good, and the papers from which the microfilm is produced are gone, because they were disposed of, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that.”
We have, I said to Dowd, lost intellectual content as a direct result of our massive effort to preserve it.
“I’m not going to disagree with you,” Dowd replied. “It’s absolutely true, we have, and it’s unfortunate. What’s the other option, we don’t try? That’s obviously not the way to go.”
But that is the way to go. When trying does far more harm than not trying, don’t try. Go slow. Keep what you have.