There’s no question that wood pulps are in general weaker than rag pulps; and old newsprint, especially, tears easily, and it can become exceedingly fragile if it is stored, say, on the cement floor of a library basement, near heating pipes, for a few decades. But the degree of fragility varies from title to title and run to run, and many fragile things (old quilts, old clocks, astrolabes, dried botanical specimens, Egyptian glass, daguerreotypes, early computers) are deemed worth preserving despite, or even because of, their fragility. The most delicate volume I’ve come across (a month of the Detroit Evening News from 1892), though the pages were mostly detached, and though it shed flurries of marginal flakes when I moved it around, could nonetheless be page-turned and read with a modicum of care — there was an interesting article,8 with two accompanying etchings, about a city shelter for “homeless wanderers.” (Sinners slept on wooden bunks without bedding, while the newly converted got cots with mattresses, and a reading room.)
Old newsprint is very acidic — and so? Our agitation over the acid in paper is not rational. Just because a given page has a low pH (a pH of 7 is neutral, below that is acidic) doesn’t mean that it can’t be read. There are five-hundred-year-old book papers that remain strong and flexible despite pH levels under five, a fact which has led one conservation scientist to conclude that “the acidity of the paper alone9 is not necessarily indicative of the state of permanence of paper.” It is difficult, in fact, to get a meaningful measure of how alkaline or acidic a paper actually is, since chemicals on the surface behave differently than those held within; the standard scientific tests (which often rely on a blender) don’t discriminate. It’s true that, all things being equal, pH-neutral paper seems to keep its properties longer than paper that is made with acid-containing or acid-forming additives; scientists have been making this observation,10 on and off, for more than eighty years. But saying that one substance is stronger than another is not the same as saying that the weaker substance is on the verge of self-destruction. A stainless-steel chair may be more durable than a wooden one, but the wooden one isn’t necessarily going to collapse the next time you take a seat.
Can’t scientists foretell with a fair degree of certainty how long a newspaper collection of a given age will last? No, they can’t; there has never been a long-term study that attempted to plot an actual loss-of-strength curve for samples of naturally aging newsprint, or indeed for samples of any paper. Years ago, William K. Wilson,11 a paper scientist, began such a study at the National Bureau of Standards. For three decades he recorded the degradative changes undergone by a set of commercial book papers; then somebody decided to clean out the green filing cabinet in which the papers were stored — end of experiment. “That raised my blood pressure a little,” Wilson told me.
In the absence of real long-term data, predictions have relied on methodologically shaky “artificial aging” (or “accelerated aging”) experiments, in which you bake a paper sample in a laboratory oven for a week or two and then belabor it with standardized tests. With your test results in hand, you can, by applying a bit of chemist’s legerdemain called the Arrhenius equation, come up with what appears be a reasonable estimate of the number of years the sample will last at shirtsleeve temperatures. But the results of these sorts of divinatory calculations, invoked with head-shaking gravity by library administrators, have been uniformly wrong, and they are now viewed with skepticism12 by many paper scientists. The authors of the ASTM Standards, for example, write that the use of the Arrhenius equation to predict the life expectancy of paper is “an interesting academic exercise,13 but the uncertainty of extrapolation is too great for this approach to be taken very seriously”; William Wilson points out that you can’t predict how long an egg will last in the carton by putting it in boiling water for five minutes. Paper has a complex and as yet ill-charted chemistry, with many different molecular and mechanical processes under way concurrently; one Swedish researcher wrote that it is a “naive hope”14 to think that we can estimate “the life length of books by means of accelerated aging tests and [the] Arrhenius approach.”
In a way, however, all surviving newspaper collections, in and out of libraries, are taking part in an immense self-guided experiment in natural aging — an experiment that confutes the doctrine of newsprint’s imminent disintegration. Peter Waters, former head of the conservation lab at the Library of Congress, told me that he sees no reason why old ground-wood pulp paper can’t hold its textual freight for “a hell of a long time” if it is properly stored. He notes that most of the cellulose-sundering chemical reactions that can happen to a book or newspaper volume seem to take place in the first decade or so of its life; fifty years of handling paper (Waters is a master bookbinder) have taught him that the rate at which paper loses strength decreases significantly over time — the curve of observed decay levels out. There is a very good chance, then, that a volume of the New York World that is doing okay at age ninety will be in pretty much the same shape when it is a hundred and eighty, assuming someone is willing to take decent care of it.
The British Library’s papers had escaped the Blitz and the agenbite of their own acidity, but their keepers craved the space they occupied. English law requires that the library preserve British newspapers in the original but makes no such stipulation for foreign papers, and in 1996 the library quietly announced its intent to rid itself of about sixty thousand volumes — almost all the non-Commonwealth papers printed after 1850 for which they had bought microfilm copies. (The microfilm, much of it shot in the United States decades ago, is of varying quality — some good, some not good, all on high-contrast black-and-white stock, which wasn’t designed to reproduce the intermediate shades of photographs.) The announcement appeared as an inside article in the newspaper library’s newsletter;15 it was written up not long after as a short wire-service story16— “British Library Giving Away Historic Newspapers.”
In 1997 the library selected for discard17 more than seventy-five runs of Western European papers and periodicals, from France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They were able to place a number of these titles with national and university libraries; others they planned to sell or throw away. (I first found out about these developments in 1999; library officials still have not provided an accounting of where everything went.) Baylor University in Texas asked for, and got, eight runs of important French and Italian papers from the 1850s on, some of which will become part of their renowned Armstrong Browning collection, since Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning likely would have read those papers in their expatriate years.
Very few people knew any of this was going on. Although I interviewed a number of American newspaper librarians and dealers, I heard nothing of it; and even well-connected heads of libraries within England — such as David McKitterick, librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, who serves on an advisory board of the British Library — were not informed of the “overseas disposals project,”18 and learned of it only late in 1999, when word began to get out. McKitterick objects to the “very quiet way” in which the deaccessioning was handled (at the very least, other British libraries should have had a better-advertised chance at the papers, he says), and he is troubled by what is on the lists; he mentions, for instance, the newspapers of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, and occupied France. “I’ve now talked to a number of scholars about this,” McKitterick told me, “and they’re absolutely furious. When you replace a broadsheet newspaper with microfilm, you effectively kill stone dead much of what it meant at its time. Film can’t deal adequately with illustrations — and yet they were discarding the great French illustrated papers of the early twentieth century.”