24. “treated his sources crudely”: Thomas Conroy, “Methodology of Testing for Permanence of Paper — Progress Notes no. 2—Tentative Outline,” quoted in Roggia, “William James Barrow,” p. 7.
25. “aggressive promoter”: Roggia, “William James Barrow,” p. 177.
26. “widely, if incorrectly, credited”: Roggia, “William James Barrow,” p. 176.
27. “stop holding onto myths”: Roggia, “William James Barrow,” pp. 166–76.
28. “I have spent many hundreds of hours”: Verner Clapp, letter to Bernard Barrow, August 19, 1968, in Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” pp. 100–101.
29. “catastrophic decline”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 230.
30. “disastrous condition of paper”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 231.
31. “The Road to Avernus”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (January 1971), p. 114. The phrase alludes to Virgil’s Aeneid 6:126. The Avernian Lake, near Vesuvius, whose sulphurous vapors supposedly killed any bird that flew over it, was an entrance to hell.
32. “librarian/archivist’s worst enemy”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (January 1971), p. 115.
CHAPTER 16 — It’s Not Working Out
1. “knew more about old papers”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (July 1971), p. 356.
2. He quit college: Sally Cruz Roggia, “William James Barrow,” in Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998).
3. “The Barrow laminating process”: Clapp, “Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper” (January 1971), p. 112.
4. same substance that microfilm: Barrow published an early description of his method, entitled “The Barrow Method of Laminating Documents,” in the Journal of Documentary Reproduction 2:2 (June 1939), which in the thirties and forties was a center of microfilm theory. An experienced operator could laminate between 75 and 125 documents per hour, wrote Barrow.
5. Protectoid: James L. Gear, “Lamination after 30 Years: Record and Prospect,” American Archivist 28:2 (April 1965).
7. The reason that Barrow knew: See Smith, “Deacidification Technologies.”
8. New York Public Library: Five rare playbills from the NYPL’s theater collection were the first to be treated to the Barrow process, in 1956. John Baker, “Preservation Programs of the New York Public Library.”
9. the Library of Congress: Barrow demonstrated his lamination process at the Library of Congress in 1951, at a staff forum called “Techniques for the Preservation of the Collections,” presided over by Verner Clapp and Luther Evans. “The acetate film seals up the document and makes it relatively resistant to acidic gases and other injurious elements in the air,” reported the Library of Congress Information Bulletin. At the same forum, Barrow also previewed his experimental technique of ink-lifting: the “process of transferring print from a deteriorated paper to a good rag paper” by stripping off a layer of ink onto a sheet of acetate and then laminating the acetate to a sheet of rag paper. “Staff Forum,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 10:42 (October 15, 1951). In an obituary of Barrow published in the Eleventh Annual Report (1967) of the Council on Library Resources, the Library of Congress is said to have “availed itself of this technique for a number of important documents” (p. 46). In addition to a regular-size laminator, the Library of Congress also bought from Barrow a large laminator for maps. [William James Barrow], Procedures and Equipment Used in the Barrow Method of Restoring Manuscripts and Documents (Richmond: W. J. Barrow, 1961), p. 11.
10. “We have found”: David H. Stam, “The Questions of Preservation,” in Welsh, Research Libraries — Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, p. 313.
11. Zentrum für Bucherhaltung: Ann Olszewski, the Preservation Librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, sent a book from her library’s local-history collection to ZFB for restoration. Olszewski’s predecessor had sent the book to Booklab for photocopying, where it was disbound, but Olszewski didn’t throw it away. Post paper-splitting, the repaired book is “nothing short of miraculous,” she says.
CHAPTER 17 — Double Fold
1. MIT Fold Tester: Barrow used a slightly gentler device that oscillated through ninety degrees. It was built to his own specifications, making independent verification of his results impossible; later he used the MIT machine exclusively; in any case, the nature of the mechanical stress is the same.
2. “Changes in folding endurance”: D. F. Caulfield and D. E. Gunderson, “Paper Testing and Strength Characteristics,” in Luner, Paper Preservation. “It has long been known,” writes Robert Feller, “that folding endurance decreases markedly in the early stages of thermal aging of paper, whereas tensile strength does not.” Robert L. Feller, Accelerated Aging (Marina del Rey, Calif.: Getty Conservation Institute, 1994).
3. B. L. Browning: B. L. Browning, “The Nature of Paper,” in Deterioration and Preservation of Library Materials, ed. Howard W. Winger and Richard D. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Caulfield and Gunderson similarly note that the results of fold-endurance tests “vary widely even on presumably identical samples.” See also Gerhard Banik and Werner K. Sobotka, “Deacidification and Strengthening of Bound Newspapers Through Aqueous Immersion,” in Luner, Paper Preservation: “Although the folding endurance is a sensitive test procedure, it only leads to reasonable results when applied to new and strong paper samples.”
4. “While folding endurance”: Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper,” p. 133, n. 2.
5. “None of the commonly used paper tests”: Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper,” p. 133.
6. “simulates the bending of a leaf”: Barrow Research Laboratory, Test Data of Naturally Aged Papers (Richmond, Va.: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1964), p. 13.
7. one of the Barrow Laboratory’s books: Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book.
8. one of the last big experiments: Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book — V: Strength and Other Characteristics of Book Papers, 1800–1899 (Richmond: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1967).
9. Clapp’s literary assistance: “Clapp’s editorial aid to Barrow was of the most intensive kind — typically page-on-page of notes suggesting the clarification of meaning, restructuring and reordering of text, deletion of whole sections, and addition of fact and opinion. There is no evidence that Clapp provided such extensive and extended collaboration to any other person at any time.” Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” pp. 50–51.
10. including seven books: Frazer G. Poole, “William James Barrow,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (New York: Dekker, 1969).
11. “An ‘unusable’ record”: Williams, Preservation of Deteriorating Books, p. 15. Williams is following Barrow, who at one point defined as “unusable” a book having a fold endurance of between one tenth of a fold and one fold. “A leaf in a book of this strength should be turned with much care and is unsuitable for use unless restored.” Barrow Research Laboratory, Test Data of Naturally Aged Papers, p. 41. (Barrow’s fractional folds are scientifically meaningless, by the way.) Elsewhere, Barrow says that papers that fail to survive three folds on an MIT tester are “brittle papers needing restoration.” Barrow Research Laboratory, Permanence/Durability of the Book, p. 10.