Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Administration & Management, Cultural Policy, Language Arts & Disciplines, Library & Information Science, Non-Fiction, Political Science, Public Policy
ISBN: 9781400033041
Google: k8LIgJBnKY8C
Amazon: B000FC1HRI
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2002-08-12T23:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 29

* * *

Slash and Burn

Patricia Battin gave me a brittle book when we met one afternoon in Washington, at the offices of the Council on Library and Information Resources on Massachusetts Avenue. The book is a play by Robert de Flers1 and Francis de Croisset, in French, accompanied by a memoir and a frontispiece photograph of de Flers in profile (he’s reading a sheet of manuscript) and a facsimile of his handwriting. It is a charming little book, published in Paris in 1929 and library-bound in pink, black, and red marbled boards soon thereafter (since it originally came out in paperback), and now tied with a soft, salmon-colored shoestring. The bookplate says “Columbia University in the City of New York” in Gothic letters, and bears the seal of the university, in which Wisdom, or some nobly enthroned woman, says something in Hebrew while holding up a book to three naked children. There is a scriptural reference at the feet of the children, citing a passage in Peter: “Laying aside all malice2 and guile and as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby.”

In 1986, as part of a “Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project”3 organized by the Research Libraries Group (which Patricia Battin had run for a time), Columbia stamped the book WITHDRAWN and sent it to Micrographic Systems of Connecticut, where it was neatly guillotined and then filmed, with financial support from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation—whereupon Patricia Battin took it with her to Washington as a sample. The paper is brown around the edges and has the Necco-wafer smell of acidic paper, but it is otherwise intact; somebody has apparently performed a fold test on the lower corner of page 115. Fifteen years ago, Columbia’s preservation administrators decided that this book was at risk for immediate disintegration and deserved emergency filming with our tax money; today, though a photographer reduced it to a stack of loose leaves, nothing remotely decompositional has occurred. On a hot day recently, I untied its string and held up some of its pages; they did not tear or shatter or do anything except move air and make interesting soft flapping noises. Columbia University has a reel of master microfilm now and no book.

Guillotining was de rigueur in the 1988 Brittle Books plan. Not every book was cut, but most were. “I’ll try to explain this in a way that I don’t get misunderstood,” Battin said to me, when I asked her why the books couldn’t simply have gone back on the shelf after they were microfilmed. “Here we have a disaster of major proportions, and I do believe that. We have limited amounts of money. If you do it in a cottage-industry way, in which you try not to disbind the book, it’s going to cost you a lot more than if you say, okay, we have to make this economic decision, and we can save the knowledge in more books if we do it on this kind of mass—”4 Battin hesitated for an instant and then continued, “which means disbinding.



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