A few times a year, the library would publish in its Information Bulletin38 a list of the papers it was replacing with film: if no federal agencies wanted them, they could go to other libraries or non-profit organizations; if no non-profits wanted them, they might go into dealers’ trucks; if dealers had gotten their fill, they went to the dump. “Their files were just immaculate, white paper, good-looking stuff,” Blackbeard said. “They couldn’t wait to get rid of them.”
Two documents together disclose the enormity of the Library of Congress’s print-purgation program over the past several decades. One is a forty-six-page mimeographed list entitled Holdings of American Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Newspapers Printed on Wood Pulp Paper, prepared by the Library of Congress’s Serials Division in May 1950, just before Clyde S. Edwards strode onto the scene. (“Wood pulp paper” here just seems39 to mean everything published after 1870, aside from several titles printed especially for libraries in the thirties on ultra-durable rag paper.) The publication served as a hit list of sorts; it includes not only the item counts of post-1870 volumes for more than six hundred different newspapers (everything from the Alaska Daily Empire from 1913 to 1949, in 105 volumes, to the Laramie, Wyoming, Republic and Boomerang from 1916 to 1949, in 103 volumes) but also the “estimated number of exposures” that it would take to microfilm all of them: sixty-seven million.
The other document is a detailed inventory,40 prepared in the summer of 1998, entitled “19th and 20th Century U.S. Newspapers in Original Format: Inventory of Volumes Held in Remote Storage.”
According to the 1950 count, there were over sixty-seven thousand volumes of post-1870 wood-pulp newspapers in the Library of Congress. From that gigantic land-mass of print, a few thousand volumes now remain. Looking at the numbers a slightly different way, there were, in 1950, around fifty wood-pulp newspaper runs that numbered more than 400 volumes. (661 volumes of The Cincinnati Enquirer from 1874, for instance, 498 volumes of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, 630 volumes of the Portland Daily Journal, 594 volumes of the Brooklyn Eagle, 495 volumes of The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1874, 413 volumes of Hearst’s New York American, and so on.) There are no runs of more than four hundred volumes now — and no runs of more than three hundred, or two hundred, or one hundred. Whispers of this secret history are to be found in the small card catalog that librarians keep behind the reference desk in the newspaper reading room: above the typed entry for the New York Herald Tribune, for instance, is a handwritten note: ALL ON FILM41—(817 VOLS. DISCARDED).
Diane Kresh was until recently in charge of the Library of Congress’s Napoleonically named Preservation Directorate; I brought up the newspapers with her on one of my visits to the library. “Generally we retain the inkprint42 until we have a microfilm available,” she said. I asked her if she thought that was a good policy.
“I do,” she said. “I’ve seen bound newspapers that have become so embrittled that they can’t be used. They are still intact — things aren’t falling on the floor. But you can’t open them, and you can’t turn the page.”
So the library got rid of the newspapers because of their condition, not because of space requirements? Or was it some combination?
“Oh, no, it wouldn’t be the space,” said Kresh. “It’s the inherent vice of deteriorating paper, and particularly newsprint.”
But it was the space, unquestionably. The Library of Congress once owned the Chicago Tribune, The Detroit News, the New York Forward, and The New York Times in rag-paper library editions43—printed, in other words, on stock that is significantly stronger than practically all book paper of the twentieth century. The library banished these titles anyway. Charles La Hood, the library’s chief of photoduplication in the seventies, wrote: “Microfilming came at a propitious time,44 as the Library of Congress was experiencing an acute space problem in its newspaper collection.”
When I pointed out to Kresh that ex-Library of Congress newspapers find avid buyers every day, and thus could not be nearly as decrepit as she was implying, Kresh admitted that “there is, obviously, ultimately a storage issue.”
Why, one wants querulously to ask, is our national library so often in the throes of a space crisis? (In 1997, the library’s Working Group on Reference and Research described “a crisis of space,45 in particular in general collections stacks.”) A year of a daily paper would fill fifty-two volumes and occupy less than half the Barbie aisle in a Toys “R” Us. Compared with the sort of human artifacts that the Smithsonian Institution must store (locomotives, dynamos, space capsules), or those that the National Trust for Historic Preservation is entrusted to protect (office buildings, battlefields, neighborhoods), newspapers and books are marvelously compact. Lack of money isn’t the problem. The library has spent huge sums on microfilming, and its preservation budget is more than eleven million dollars a year — enough to buy, build, and outfit a warehouse the size of a Home Depot, which would hold a century of newsprint. Are the library’s senior managers really so grotesquely inept that they can’t plan for the inevitable growth of the single most important hoard of human knowledge in the country? Why is it so difficult for this great research institution to do what any steadily growing concern — a successful pet-food discounter, say, or a distributor of auto parts, or a museum of sculpture — manages to do year after year, without fuss? Why can’t our great libraries have the will to find room to accommodate what we so desperately want them to keep?
I asked James Billington,46 the current librarian of Congress, what he thought about making room for original papers. Billington, a Russian historian who was, in the fifties, a CIA analyst under Allen Dulles, has raised large quantities of private money to pay for the library’s American Memory digitization project. “The embrittlement process is not just a question of degrading — these things disintegrate,” Billington said. “There’s always a trade-off. The happiness and satisfaction of seeing the whole thing in the original is a short-lived privilege for today’s audience. It’s likely to be, in the real world, at the expense of the variety and richness of what future generations will be able to see in the microfilm version.”
CHAPTER 4. It Can Be Brutal
Inherent vice indeed. Everything goes wrong in time — the germane question is whether the Library of Congress, and the many institutions that followed its example, got rid of things that were, at the time of their jettisoning, both usable and valuable. I bought, on eBay, a 1908 volume of the Panama City Star and Herald (published in English during the building of the Panama Canal); it has the Library of Congress’s oval stamp on the spine. From a dealer, I bought a volume of the New York Post for April 1943, also spine-stamped by the Library of Congress. From another dealer, I bought three issues of the Richmond, Virginia, Daily Dispatch1 from 1879, printed on very strong paper made of straw and rag, each bearing a tiny yellow Library of Congress address label. The issue for Tuesday, June 10, 1879, has this in its editorial columns: “We are pressed for room just now. Do not imagine that your article has been thrown into the waste-basket, (though it may have been.) Some communications keep well. We have several such on hand. We hope to be able to publish them soon.” All these objects are in excellent fettle; they can be opened and page-turned with impunity.