What Would Dewey Say?

Pity the librarians.

They shoulder the heroic task of collecting and saving the sum of human knowledge, a job every bit as important to our national security as a strong military. Libraries are cultural treasure chests, the seed stock for open, vigorous public policy debate in our democracy, and information banks that provide ideas that lead to economic advances and entrepreneurship.

Yet, instead of being depicted as valiant sentinels on the front lines of our national defense, librarians suffer from endless depictions as meek, fussy clerks.

And now, at the hands of Nicholson Baker, librarians come in for much harsher treatment-and for just the opposite reason. The problem, he argues, is not that librarians are always straightening the books on the shelf. It is that they are recklessly throwing out, selling, giving away and destroying books.

The distressing story Baker tells in “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper” illuminates the dark side of our Information Age. Books, magazines, newspapers and electronic databases are piling up in libraries. Librarians have responded by looking for ways to make easier-to-store copies so they can throw out the bulky originals. They have concentrated these intentions on microfilming publications whose paper is brittle or likely to become brittle. This planned destruction is the opposite of librarians’ traditional zeal for collecting the original, and it makes Baker angry. “This isn’t an impartial piece of reporting,” Baker says at the beginning of his polemical book.

Double fold-bending the corner of a book page back and forth-refers to a test that librarians use to determine brittleness. Baker will have none of it. Brittle pages can still be read, he points out; a better test is one that determines if a reader can turn the pages without their crumbling.

Embrittlement originated in mass literacy. Needing a cheap source of paper to serve their mass audiences, mid-19th century publishers began the practice of using wood pulp. Highly acidic, pulp paper turns brown and brittle in a few decades, or even more quickly if it is left in the open air. Although embrittlement is a worry, Baker acknowledges, librarians have overreacted. No reliable scientific studies have determined how long brittle paper will last. In an effort to get funds for microfilm, librarians have egregiously overstated the embrittlement problem so that it is now common for them to talk about books turning to dust, something that simply does not happen. “Librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper’s fragility,” Baker charges, “and they continue to lie about it.”

Just how usable are embrittled newspapers? The Historic Newspaper Archives Inc. buys library-discarded newspaper collections, guts the bound volumes and sells individual copies of newspapers to people who want gifts to commemorate someone’s birthday. Baker says the archives “owns what is now probably the largest ‘collection’ of post-1880 U.S. papers anywhere in the country, or in the world, for that matter.”

Federal financing for microfilm “preservation” has led libraries in the United States to jettison nearly a million books, many of them rare, according to Baker’s calculations: “It’s as if the National Park Service felled vast wild tracts of pointed firs and replaced them with plastic Christmas trees.” In grasping the quick fix of microfilming and discarding, librarians have introduced new problems. Microfilm copies do not approximate the clarity of the originals, especially vexing when illustrations are involved. Nor is microfilm itself indestructible. Acid in acetate-based microfilm can “shrink, buckle, bubble, or stick together in a solid illegible lump.”

Some argue that digital reproduction will turn out better. But, Baker says, high-quality digital facsimiles on compact discs can never be created “unless we decide right now to do a much better job of holding on to the originals.” And that is not all. Today’s microfilm or compact disc may become tomorrow’s vinyl phonographic record. In that case, we will be unable to buy or service the equipment to read reformatted materials.

The author of “The Everlasting Story of Nory,” ’The Size of Thoughts,” ’Vox” and other books, Baker is a diligent, thorough reporter with an eye for the quirky, all very much in the mode of the New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Among the colorful personalities who appear in the book is 19th century geologist Isaiah Deck, who had the brainstorm of unearthing Egyptian mummies and using their linen wrappings to make better paper. He also argued that mummy remains could be used to make soap. Other mad library scientists-some of them with ties to the CIA-experimented with pneumatic page-turners, holographic storage, lamination (which also causes embrittlement) and diethyl-zinc. The latter, it was hoped, could be used to de-acidify old paper. Apart from its other shortcomings, the equipment had the unfortunate side effect of exploding.

The Library of Congress, the leader in “the idea of destroying to preserve,” as Baker writes, comes in for justified criticism. Under its current head, James H. Billington, the library has ratcheted up its reformatting programs as well as its public relations efforts to justify them. In one of its many pat slogans, which seems to have little basis in fact, the Library of Congress claims that 70,000 books become brittle each year.

Baker argues that the solution to book and periodical destruction is to stop it. Libraries, especially the Library of Congress, must instead acquire more storage space. If Baker had his way, the library would keep not one copy of every book but three. This is easier said than done. It is unlikely to go down well with taxpayers or legislators, who may not be persuaded by his argument that it is costlier to microfilm than to invest in more buildings.

“Double Fold” is an important book. And even if Baker could have made his argument more succinctly, one must admire the depth of his earnestness. With pledges of his own money and foundation funding, he created the American Newspaper Repository to purchase a large collection of newspapers of which the British Library was unburdening itself.

Baker is keeping his newly acquired treasure in a New Hampshire warehouse near his home. “Maybe someday a research library will want to take responsibility for these things, or maybe not-whatever happens, at least they aren’t going to be cut up and sold as birthday presents.”

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Baker speaks up for the collecting tradition that began more than two millenniums ago and is at the center of Lionel Casson’s “Libraries in the Ancient World.” Libraries, as Casson shows, have from their beginnings been about power. The earliest libraries were built by and for kings, who used them to store official financial records and clay tablets containing “rituals, incantations, prayers, and the like, for warding off evil or calling for divine aid.”

The greatest expression of imperial collecting was the Egyptian library in Alexandria. Alexandria’s librarians assiduously confiscated scrolls from ships visiting their port and transcribed them. Following a procedure that Nicholson Baker would recommend, the library kept the originals and returned the copies, which of course were inferior as a result of the mistakes that inevitably crept in. So valuable were librarians to the Pharaoh’s empire that Ptolemy V supposedly threw one in prison to prevent his going to work in a library in far-off Pergamum.

Although popular legend says that the Alexandrian library was destroyed by fire in 48 BC, it is much more likely to have declined gradually through lack of resources, upkeep and politics, says Casson, a classics professor at New York University. In its waning years, the library was no longer a center for scholars. Ptolemy VIII and IX awarded library directorships to political supporters. When the Romans took over, they gave the post to star athletes.

In the next wave of empire building, Roman generals treated books as fair booty and hauled them home. Asinius Pollio, an accomplished author as well as a successful military commander, built Rome’s first public library; Augustus built the second.

Plundering books, of course, was only one important step in building a library. Keeping track of them was another. We take the Dewey Decimal System for granted. But in ancient times, it was a breakthrough merely to conceive of the idea of making lists of books or figuring out how to organize them coherently. Even in those early years, when the Roman elite had libraries and slaves who acted as librarians, owners worried about missing books.

In a letter from AD 45, a Roman general wrote to Cicero that he was on the heels of a slave who lifted a book from the orator’s collection. “I will certainly find him for you,” the general reported. But he seems to have failed.

Casson’s book, like Baker’s, reminds us that libraries are not the placid places that librarians would like us to think they are. Like most great institutions, they are strife-ridden and can easily make costly mistakes in an effort to remain viable. Although we may, indeed, pity the librarians, too much is at stake to let them alone control their fate. As Baker writes of the Library of Congress: “It is a strangely secretive place, under-scrutinized by comparison with other federal bureaucracies, its maladministration undetected by virtue of its reputation as an ark of culture. The library has gone astray partly because we trusted the librarians so completely.”