“Unless someone sits down with the papers to be considered for disposal, and compares issue by issue, perhaps even page by page,” there is no way to be sure that issues aren’t being lost, Dowd said.
Since that isn’t happening, I said, the conclusion we must draw, artifactuality aside, is that we have to hold on to the originals.
“Somewhere in the back of my mind I absolutely agree with you,” Dowd replied. He told me about some of the New York State Library’s volumes of a Buffalo paper that he has saved because, even though there is ostensibly complete microfilm, he happens to know that there are things in the volumes that the microfilm copy lacks.
And yet, though Dowd acknowledges the losses to history, his project cuts up almost all the newspaper volumes they film, for the usual reason: to get the “very, very best image we can” consistent with high-speed production. Were they forbidden to cut the volume, his filmers would have to take precious time moving it around under the camera: “You’d lay it down, then you’d move it over, then you’d flip it over, then you’d move it over — that kind of thing, so the handling becomes a factor.” If the library that owns a particular run of newspapers wants them back, their loose leaves are returned; if not, they usually go in the trash. Even the ones that aren’t thrown away are the worse for filming: once disbound, newspaper pages don’t stay aligned and have less edgewise strength-in-numbers than pages within intact volumes — they are harder to keep safe.
Dennis Hardin supervised work on the U.S. Newspaper Program at the Indiana Historical Society, and he continues to film local papers. “If the library wants them back,” Hardin says, “we wrap them up in kraft paper and send them back or take them back, but in a lot of cases, if they were looking to unload them to make more space, we make an agreement with them that we will just discard them.” Of the volumes he photographs, “very, very few go back on the shelf.”
But there are still runs of interesting Indiana papers — family-owned, small-town papers — that Hardin hasn’t been able to get his hands on. “Many publishers do not want to turn over their bound volumes to us,” he said. “For one thing, one of our policies here is that we have to take the bindings off…. Well, a lot of publishing offices, especially men and women who are elderly who have had the paper in their family all their lives, don’t want to see their legacy just taken and torn apart that way.” Hardin keeps his eye on these remaining caches of paper. “Having been at it for eighteen years, we are fairly aware of where certain unfilmed collections still reside. I’m still more than twenty years away from retirement, so some of these elderly publishers and county recorders and so forth, we just kind of keep track, and as we are able to gently prod them into doing the right thing with their newspapers before they retire, or maybe leaving their papers to someone who will take care of that for them after they’re gone.”
I pointed out to Hardin, as I had to others, that dealers make a living buying and selling ex-library wood-pulp newspapers volumes — many seemed to hold up surprisingly well. Hardin replied: “At any given moment, there’s lots of it that’s still in pretty good shape, but that’s not to say that some day, eventually, every one of them will crumble. It is inevitable — it is inevitable. And though you may still find bound volumes of papers from the twenties or even earlier — you may find a bound volume from 1912 that still has the Titanic story in it in pretty good shape — but as inevitable as the sinking of that ship was, those papers will crumble.”
In the summer of 1999, an ex-library bound volume of the New York Sun containing issues from April 1 through June 30, 1912, sold for three thousand dollars on eBay: it was in “immaculate” condition and contained weeks of news about the Titanic disaster. The sinking of the Titanic was not, of course, inevitable — other big ships sailed safely across the Atlantic before and afterward. The reason that ship sank was that human beings in positions of trust made horrible errors of judgment.
CHAPTER 38. In Good Faith
Which brings us back, finally, to the foreign-newspaper collection at the British Library. In August 1999, I got the list of the U.S. papers that the British Library was getting rid of. How could they be saved? In a rush, I formed the American Newspaper Repository, with my mother, my father, and my wife on the board of trustees — they were the only ones I felt I could ask to serve on such short notice. The repository’s purpose was, as a lawyer phrased it for the IRS, “to acquire, preserve, and make available to the public, original newspapers of historic and scholarly interest that would otherwise be destroyed or dispersed into private ownership.” (I took some satisfaction in seeing the word “preserve” used in its traditional sense.) Having faxed off letters of inquiry to the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Getty Foundation, I flew to London a week before the British Library’s September 30, 1999, deadline for bids. About forty volumes were set out for inspection by potential purchasers, and I was given a tour of the shelves. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. I suddenly felt, turning the pages of a beautiful Chicago Tribune volume from 1909, as if I’d stumbled on a lost, jewel-encrusted city in the jungle, and that curio dealers were waiting for a sign to begin chiseling away at it.
Edmund King, the director of the Newspaper Library, gave me tea in his office. I described to him, at the point of tears, the historical importance of Joseph Pulitzer’s World, and I asked if there was some way to convince the Library to call off its sale and keep the papers, or to act responsibly by transferring them to a non-profit entity such as the one I’d just started. I explained how the vintage-newspaper market worked in the States, and I told him that there were almost no duplicates of these papers left, and that the duplicates weren’t duplicates in any case because of editional variations. The decision to dispose of the foreign papers was made by the board several years earlier, King said. “As things stand, because we have gone to dealers, perhaps the best thing to do is to act as if you are a dealer, and place a bid for the runs.”
A few days later, on a Saturday, with the help of Nicolas Barker, editor of The Book Collector and a former head of preservation at the British Library, I got in touch with Brian Lang, the library’s director, on his cellular phone. (He was waiting in line at a supermarket when I first reached him.) I asked him to call off the sale. “I don’t have an answer for you now,” Lang said, but he seemed somewhat taken aback and willing to give the problem thought.
Heartened, I got back to the States and faxed Lang a long follow-up letter that I thought would clinch it. “The very best thing for these papers would be for the Newspaper Library to reshelve them carefully, tightly control their use, and keep them safe,” I wrote. I acknowledged the library’s space difficulties — but perhaps there was a way to turn that problem around, I suggested, and use the present disposal emergency to inspire a major donor to endow a new rare-newspaper storage facility in Colindale. If the library’s decision to dispose of the listed papers was firm, then I hoped they would consider donating the papers to the American Newspaper Repository. I listed the members of the repository’s advisory board, thinking that some impressive names might help sway him. (Two of the advisers, who have since become trustees, are William Hart, Chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Thomas Tanselle, an obvious choice.) I closed the letter by asking Lang again to suspend the September 30 sale, and to “take steps to ensure that this great surviving collection is kept intact for future scholarship.”