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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 17, April 22, 2001, Article 7 NEW BOOK: LIBRARIES AND THE ASSAULT ON PAPER Stephen Pradier, Tom Fort, and others all pointed out the release of a new book that is a call to arms for bibliophiles, researchers, and historians. "Double Fold : Libraries and the Assault on Paper" by Nicholson Baker is "an outraged, bitterly funny indictment of how our country's most august libraries have systematically trashed older books and newspapers. With a few notable exceptions, the librarians we meet in the book aren't the prudent, book-nuzzling custodians we'd expect to find at the National Archives and major university libraries; instead, they're efficiency-minded technophiles who wantonly destroyed original texts and replaced them with badly filmed, unreliable facsimiles. As a result, the original copies of many newspaper runs and books are gapped or gone, while their microfilm replacements, imperfect to begin with, are melting and yellowing. Newer, more sophisticated duplication efforts, such as digital scanning, are stymied before they even start: The microfilms are too poor to copy from, and the originals have already been destroyed. This is because, in the library biz, what's called "preservation" is actually destructive. (If you want to talk about the literal repair of books, the term is "conservation.") To microfilm a text is to ruin it: The volume is gutted like a fish so that its sheaves may be easily fed into the camera, and the disemboweled result is usually sold or dumped." [from commentary in the online magazine Slate: http://slate.msn.com/code/BookClub/BookClub.asp, forwarded by Stephen Pradier. From the Publisher: "Since the 1950s, our country’s greatest libraries have, as a matter of common practice, dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. The marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it are the subject of this passionately argued book, in which Nicholson Baker pleads the case for saving our recorded heritage in its original form while telling the story of how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public trust by auctioning off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself — who eventually discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper is to buy it. Double Fold is an intense, brilliantly worded narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and controversy." Book Excerpt: "The British Library's newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane — possibly mistaking the library complex for an aircraft-manufacturing plant — dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however, was a very large foreign- newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick-thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum's crown-and- lion symbol of curatorial responsibility. Bombs spared the American papers, but recent managerial policy has not — most were sold off in a blind auction in the fall of 1999. One of the library's treasures was a seventy-year run, in about eight hundred volumes, of Joseph Pulitzer's exuberantly polychromatic newspaper, the New York World. Pulitzer discovered that illustrations sold the news; in the 1890s, he began printing four-color Sunday supplements and splash-panel cartoons. The more maps, murder-scene diagrams, ultra-wide front-page political cartoons, fashion sketches, needlepoint patterns, children's puzzles, and comics that Pulitzer published, the higher the World's sales climbed; by the mid-nineties, its circulation was the largest of any paper in the country. William Randolph Hearst moved to New York in 1895 and copied Pulitzer's innovations and poached his staff, and the war between the two men created modern privacy-probing, muckraking, glamour-smitten journalism. A million people a day once read Pulitzer's World; now an original set is a good deal rarer than a Shakespeare First Folio or the Gutenberg Bible. Besides the World, the British Library also possessed one of the last sweeping runs of the sumptuous Chicago Tribune — about 1,300 volumes, reaching from 1888 to 1958, complete with bonus four-color art supplements on heavy stock from the 1890s ("This Paper is Not Complete Without the Color Illustration" says the box on the masthead); extravagant layouts of illustrated fiction; elaborately hand-lettered ornamental headlines; and decades of page-one political cartoons by John T. McCutcheon. The British Library owned, as well, an enormous set of the San Francisco Chronicle (one of perhaps two that are left..)." [Editor's note: This gutting of our libraries has been in full swing for many years. My interest in contemporary accounts of coinage in America led me, over time, to purchase a large number of old newspapers containing such content. I published many of these in a book draft and on my web site (http://www.coinlibrary.com). I naturally asked myself the question, "Where are these dealers getting all this stuff?", and the answer was that libraries had been deaccessioning newspapers for some time, boosting a cottage industry of paper and ephemera dealers who buy and remarket the papers to collectors. One dealer who contacted me was remarketing a partial set of London-based Gentleman's Mazagine, vol 1 (1731) to vol 71 (1801). I purchased from him a set of virtually all numismatically- related articles published in the magazine during those years, which included several items related to American numismatics. I shudder at the thought of someone dismembering a set of this important journal, but a number of personal libraries were enriched as a result (as was the seller, no doubt).]

Wayne Homren, Editor

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