Very often, when I have been able to check the microfilm of a big-city daily against an original that was discarded from some library, I have found editional differences. The existence and uses of these variations were once well-known: Alfred McClung Lee’s classic book The Daily Newspaper in America (1937) quotes an early textbook of journalism:
News is selected
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for each edition with a nicety of judgment as to values, each newspaper keeping in mind the territory that is covered by the edition. Mail editions, intended for out-of-town readers, will emphasize the national and state news…. City editions… will lay emphasis on the local news as far as its value justifies that action. Late afternoon editions concentrate on the sports scores and decisions. Street editions, designed for the café and theater crowds of the night, herald the latest sensations with their headlines.
Joseph Herzberg, city editor at the Herald Tribune, described how it worked in 1947 at his paper:
Papers are torn apart
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each edition on the night desk as late stories develop. The city desk may have a late fire or homicide, a terrible quake may have killed thousands abroad, or an important man may die at any hour. So highly skilled is the organization and so dovetailed the work of the separate desks that these late stories get in, although they may require many changes in the make-up of the paper. Stories are shifted from page to page, new pictures constantly arrive, space must be made for late theater or music reviews. The presses roll through the night and when they stop another twenty-four hours of world history has been set down.
The miracle is that libraries, collectively — not by design but just because it happened that way — once held on their shelves a surprising stash of this multi-editional diversity. Now (with a few exceptions) they don’t know, or don’t care, that it exists — and in fact most of it no longer does exist, because as each variant run leaves a library, copies of the unvarying microfilm take its place.
Even for the recent past, administrative indifference to variation can make for odd informational losses. The New York Times currently publishes, aside from its city edition, two national editions. Libraries hold these papers for a month or two or six and then throw them away after the microfilm arrives. But the Bell and Howell/UMI microfilm that all libraries subscribe to is a copy of the late city edition, not a copy of either of the national editions. This leads to sticky moments for reference librarians: somebody in California or Boston shows up wanting to look up a particular article or photo or ad that he or she clearly recalls from The New York Times—an article that is even listed in one of the available indexes of the Times (Gale Research dutifully indexes one national edition even though no library keeps it) — only to discover that the item is not part of the public record. Three years before, it was printed and read by thousands; now you can’t see it anywhere. James F. Green, a librarian at Michigan State, posted a newsgroup message in 1994 about this predicament; he said “there will be many times3 that I will have to try to convince a disbelieving patron that an article from the New York Times which is cited in our locally mounted Expanded Academic Index database is not available from any library.”
Early editions of the September 17, 1970, Chicago Sun-Times published a story4 that quoted off-the-record remarks by President Nixon (apparently aimed at the Soviet Union) about a crisis in the Middle East. Nixon’s staff called the paper to complain, and the remarks were cut from later editions. The early edition was probably the one that was delivered to local libraries: if one or two of them had collected the Sun-Times in paper from that era, it is very likely that Nixon’s words would have survived in their complete and original form. But libraries didn’t keep the paper; and Jeffrey Kimball, author of Nixon’s Vietnam War, has for several years sought in vain for a copy of the afternoon edition of that date. “For my new research project, a larger study of ‘smoking-gun’ documents, Nixon’s quoted remarks have a critical bearing,” Kimball wrote me, “but all I can get hold of now is the microfilm copy of the evening edition of the Sun-Times, which does not quote Nixon’s comments; that is, all microfilm copies of this newspaper for this date seem to be of the evening edition. I have been to the Library of Congress, phoned libraries around the country, contacted the Sun-Times, written old-newspaper dealers, searched the Nixon archives, talked to the Chicago Historical Society staff, and so on.” Time magazine once had the Sun-Times article in its clip files, where Walter Isaacson saw it and cited it in his book Kissinger, but since then (so Isaacson told Kimball), these files “don’t really exist anymore.”
Few microfilm copies of old newspapers are complete, either — not necessarily because the microfilmers skipped pages by mistake (although they have certainly been known to do that) but because the original run lacked issues or had items razored out of it by maniacal collectors. But in a marvelous bit of redefinitional insanity, a microfilmed newspaper is “considered complete” by the Library of Congress (according to its Newspapers in Microform5 reference volumes) if “only a few issues per month are missing.” Taking “a few” to mean “two” (conservatively), a microfilm is all there, for the Library of Congress’s purposes, even when more than six percent of it isn’t there. If collection managers in major research libraries replace their own imperfect, even badly broken original runs of a given daily paper with copies of a single filmed set that, though known to be incomplete, is “considered complete” by indexers, and believed to be complete by trusting buyers, the replacement process necessarily leaves permanent, unfixable impairments in the documentary record. Before we had four different Ace combs in our pocket, each with a different missing tooth; now we have four miniature photographs of the same Ace comb with the same missing tooth. If that tooth happens to contain an article about the building of the new gymnasium in the high school where your parents met, or about the trolley-car line that once went down your street, forget it, you’re out of luck.