31. about one third of her library’s reels: Nancy Kraft, Final Report, Iowa Newspaper Project: Microfilming, State Historical Society of Iowa, 1992.
32. compelled some improvements in standards: The Kodak MRD line of microfilm cameras, whose basic design dates from the fifties and even earlier (they are no longer sold or serviced by Kodak) remain the pack mules of American newspaper work, despite the fact that there are now, and have been for at least a decade, computer-controlled camera systems that offer higher resolutions and better ways of monitoring and adjusting contrast and focus than Kodak’s cameras offer. In the late eighties, C. Lee Jones, president of MAPS (now Preservation Resources, a microfilm bureau founded by the Council on Library Resources), began evaluating a German-designed Herrmann & Kraemer camera, which offered, he told me, “resolutions that had only been dreamed about prior to that.” Within a month he was convinced that he had to “convert the whole shop to H&K cameras.” Eventually they bought twelve more. Resolution, in the microfilm world, is measured in line-pairs per millimeter. A typical frame of Kodak-shot preservation microfilm can legibly record one hundred and twenty pairs of lines per millimeter on a test-pattern “target”; Herrmann and Kraemer cameras offered resolutions forty to sixty percent better than that (higher, by the way, than the six hundred dots-per-inch resolution that is the benchmark in many current digitization projects) — a matter of considerable importance when you are shrinking large newspaper pages from the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties filled with many columns of closely printed footnote-sized type onto a fixed width of thirty-five-millimeter film. The H&K cameras also had ways of automatically correcting for variations in contrast — another endemic problem in age-toned newsprint pages. “It’s the subtle change in contrast that throws microfilmers most often,” Jones explained. “Where they may have a perfectly fine setting at the beginning of a book, it may not be worth the powder to blow it up at the end.” But the bulk of newspaper-microfilming work did not go to MAPS, but to places with less good equipment. “MAPS got very little of the U.S. Newspaper Project,” says Jones, “because those were long established procedures often done by commercial shops, and examined by people who were not really trained to evaluate the quality of film.” The NEH, which was paying the bills, demanded only that microfilming shops adhere to industry standards that, according to Jones, were written with the limitations of the Kodak camera in mind. “These were minimum standards,” Jones says. “And if you’re talking about producing preservation microfilm for the very long term future, I don’t think you can afford to adhere to minimum standards.” In 1993, Jones wrote: “To simply reformat endangered materials into a form resistant to scanning or one that complicates scanning is a serious disservice to scholars and researchers of the future.” That, however, is what has happened. C. Lee Jones, “Preservation Film: Platform for Digital Access Systems,” Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter 58 (July 1993). Jones now directs the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City.
33. “NORTHAM COLONISTS HOLD MEETING”: Foster’s Weekly Democrat & Dover Enquirer, January 16, 1914.
CHAPTER 5 — The Ace Comb Effect
1. “News is selected”: G. C. Bastian, Editing the Day’s News, 1923, quoted in Lee, Daily Newspaper in America, p. 279.
2. “Papers are torn apart”: Joseph G. Herzberg, Late City Edition (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), p. 13.
3. “there will be many times”: James F. Green, “Problems with NYT Eds. & Indexes,” posting to Library Collection Development List, March 9, 1994.
4. Chicago Sun-Times published a story: The article, by Peter Lisagor, appeared in the Sun-Times on September 17, 1970. See Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 226–27. Some of what Nixon said was quoted by Henry Brandon in The Retreat of American Power (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), p. 134; Kimball would like to see it all in its original form.
5. Newspapers in Microform: Various volumes (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984 and earlier).
6. Bosse: David Bosse, Civil War Newspaper Maps: A Cartobibliography of the Northern Daily Press (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).
7. “significant gaps”: For example, fourteen days were missing from the Chicago Daily Tribune for 1862 and 1863, and January 2 through April 28, 1865, were missing from the Chicago Post. Bosse, Civil War Newspaper Maps, pp. 211–12.
8. Edwina Dumm: See Lucy Shelton Caswell, “Edwina Dumm: Pioneer Woman Editorial Cartoonist, 1915–1917,” Journalism History 15 (spring 1988). In another Ace comb variation, several libraries get rid of a particular title before anyone has microfilmed it, knowing, however, that another set exists; later, the single remaining copy available for microfilming turns out to have gaps. Matthew J. Bruccoli, working on a biography of John O’Hara, wanted to study a run of the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Journal, in which O’Hara had published his earliest journalism. (O’Hara wrote a column for the Journal called “After Four O’Clock”—of which, according to Bruccoli, O’Hara was “intensely proud.”) The Journal’s own backfile had gone to the Schuylkill County Historical Society when the paper went out of business, but Bruccoli discovered that this run lacked volumes for 1924 through 1926, the period of O’Hara’s activity there. The other libraries in the area had, Bruccoli told me, donated their runs of the Journal to paper drives during the Second World War, “apparently with a certain amount of glee.” In his foreword to The O’Hara Concern (New York: Popular Library, 1977), Bruccoli writes: “The disappearance of this material resulted in the most serious hole in my research.”
CHAPTER 6 — Virgin Mummies
1. Dr. Isaiah Deck: “On a Supply of Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt, by Dr. Isaiah Deck, chemist, etc., New-York,” in Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New-York, for the Year 1854 (Albany: C. van Benthuysen, Printer to the Legislature, 1855), pp. 83–93.
2. 113 Nassau Street: Deck, “On a Supply of Paper Material,” p. 93. The New York Times: Elmer Davis, History of the New York Times, 1851–1921 (New York: The New York Times, 1921), illus. f.p. 74. Vanity Fair: “The staff of ‘Vanity Fair’ met on Fridays in the old editorial rooms, 113 Nassau Street, and drank, and smoked, and discussed the next issue.” Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Detroit: Gale Research, 1970), pp. 137–38, quoted in n. 63 of a biography by Dave Gross of nineteenth-century American hashish-eater and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870), nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Ludlow/THE/Biography/foot63.htm.