I also have a volume of the New York World-Telegram from February 1934. This one has no ownership markings on it, but its marbled boards and triangular cloth corners and spinal typeface resemble those shown in a photo in a 1966 picture book called The Library of Congress. In the photo, a man wearing what looks to be a butcher’s apron2 is cutting apart a newspaper volume at a worktable; behind him is an electric guillotine. The caption reads: “Because single sheets are reproduced more quickly and accurately than bound pages, this bindery employee is taking apart newspaper volumes that are to be photographed as part of the Library’s program to preserve most of its newspaper files on microfilm.”
Timothy Hughes, who sold me the volume of the World-Telegram (for $125) couldn’t say for sure where he got it. “It possibly came from the Library of Congress — I buy from a variety of sources and even my sources get them from various people — [the items] often get passed down to 3 or 4 dealers before they end up in my hands, so who knows where they originally came from.” According to Winifred Gregory’s pre-war compendium, American Newspapers 1821–1936, there were six libraries that, as of 1936, owned up-to-date bound runs of the World-Telegram, which was the leading liberal New York City paper of the time. (The Herald Tribune was by reputation conservative; the Times was moderate.) These libraries were: the New York Public Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, the Union City (N.J.) Public Library, the Ohio Historical Society, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. All have since ditched their World-Telegrams. The Library of Congress’s catalog card for the World-Telegram says NO LONGER IN LC and ALL ON FILM.
Could this volume be described as crumbling? Its pages have yellowed, especially at the outer margins, where light and air have penetrated, but they are whole and sound — no bits and pieces fall out when you carry it around, and it survived the rigors of UPS GroundTrac shipping without mishap. You can open this magnificent public diary without harming it; you can turn its pages without trouble; you can peruse it with a moment’s pleasure or a day’s fascination. Joseph Mitchell,3 who was already freelancing at The New Yorker, writes about the arrival of Emma Goldman in the United States after her years of exile. “The anarchist4 wore a snakeskin print dress and a Paisley shawl,” he writes — and the photo confirms it. A. J. Liebling, another World-Telegram writer, gets a color quote from a cabbie while covering a violent taxi strike: “I come first. The customer comes second, and I don’t care if you miss your train, mister.” Heywood Broun prints a letter he got from Robert Benchley. Gretta Palmer, on the woman’s page, says that the speakeasy ended the male-only bar, but that segregation is returning: “Don’t the men like us any more now that their judgement is unclouded by the gasoline in the old-fashioned gin?” In a sports section, a huge cartoon has Robert Moses, the new parks commissioner, hitting a hole in one, because he has promised to spruce up the city’s golf courses. And on February 22 there is a nice anonymous lead — maybe by Liebling again? — on page one: “Miss Florence La Bau, an alumna of Goucher College and Columbia University, a young woman of wealth and social position in Ridgewood, N.J., was doing a fourth mate’s job on the freighter Wichita when the ship plodded into port today with a cargo of human hair from China, tea from Formosa, silk from Japan, sugar from the Philippines and two strange bears from the mystery land of Tibet.” Reading a paper like this is not the only way to understand the lost past life of a city, but no other way will enclose you so completely within one time-stratum’s universe of miscellaneous possibility. Nothing makes an amateur historian of you with more dispatch.
Real historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aren’t reading the old newspapers very much anymore, though — not page by page and month by month, for pleasure — and the texture and content of historical writing has, one suspects, undergone subtle changes (thinnings of specificity, losses of groundedness) as a consequence. Historians don’t read the old papers because their libraries don’t keep the old papers to read, and microfilm is a brain-poaching, gorge-lifting trial to browse. When you try to survey a series of filmed issues methodically, you miss things that would be obvious to an eye-reader; it’s oddly difficult sometimes to do the equivalent of turning the page, especially when you’re handling heavily scratched or faded microfilm and must crank up the magnification to make out the words. (This is particularly true at the Library of Congress, where the reader-printers in the newspaper room are in such poor repair that some of them pull forward rhythmically on their own at times, their take-up reels afflicted by a sort of electro-Parkinsonism.) You feel as if you’re mowing an endless monochromatic lawn, sliding the film gate this way and that, fiddling with the image-rotation dial and the twitchily restive motor switch. If you have a date and a page number, you look that one citation up and leave; you’re rarely tempted to spend several hours splashing in the daily contextual marsh. “Certainly the patron’s desire to browse through back issues of newspapers is almost completely gone — people rarely browse5 through microfilm”: so wrote E. E. Duncan in Microform Review in 1973. At the Archives of Ontario, one of the microfilm readers had an air-sickness bag taped to it; since the seventies, image-ergonomists have known of a kind of motion sickness that afflicts some microfilm users which seems to be caused by the difficulty of visually tracking the creep and lurch of passing text-scapes. Ben Procter, a recent biographer of William Randolph Hearst, appears stoic, brave, unflinching, because he was actually willing to read what Hearst published: “Oh, yes, microfilm, yes,” he told Brian Lamb, on Booknotes. “It can be brutal, but you find out a great deal about the man and about his papers.”
There are nice things about microfilm, too — the congenial clicks of your neighbor’s forward button; the way the chosen image fuzzes and bows modestly offscreen as you press print, as if it must retire to another room to change; the warbly whine of the reel’s motor when the glass plate lifts to let the film rewind at straightaway speed; the loud confident slaps of the freed leader that proclaim to everyone in the room that someone has finished his or her research. Because microfilm readers frame text arbitrarily, conferring equal eye-weight on all segments of a page, you occasionally discover tiny items you wouldn’t have seen if you read the paper conventionally, favoring the areas that its editors and layout artists expected you to look at first. And of course questing scholars cheerfully endure the ocular and neckular ordeal of microfilm if they have good reason to — if they can’t go to a library where the originals are, or if they want to make copies, or if the paper itself is indeed so fragile that it can’t be touched or turned without damage. But librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper’s fragility, and they continue to lie about it. For over fifty years they have disparaged paper’s residual strength, while remaining “blind as lovers”6 (as Allen Veaner, former editor of Microform Review, once wrote) to the failings and infirmities of film.