But library administrators had other things to think about than illustration and scholarship. “Increasing pressure19 on the storage facilities at the Colindale site” was the justification for their desperate act. One of the finest libraries in the world was unable or unwilling to buy, build, retrofit, or lease a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse anywhere in England that could hold their unique international collection.
With Western Europe taken care of, having freed up thousands of linear meters of shelf space without any political trouble, the British Library then moved on to papers from Eastern Europe, South America, and the U.S.A. They sent out notices of availability to the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society, of Worcester, Massachusetts. The Library of Congress rejected everything, but the American Antiquarian Society, which owns a famous collection of early papers (bound in black with gold trim), took several titles, mainly covering the era of the Civil War and immediately afterward. “The redcoats are coming!” librarians there said, shelving the red-spined British volumes next to their black ones. Richard Bland College in Petersburg, Virginia, claimed several nineteenth-century runs. John Blair, head of the history department, says he would have taken more of the British Library’s collection if his college had had more space; Blair remembers working as a stock boy in a large Massachusetts library in the fifties and hauling home dozens of unwanted newspaper volumes. “They just junked them,” he said; he has used them for years in his classes. Blair likened the clearing out of newspaper collections to the overeager tearing up of track as the railroads went into decline. “Now maybe they regret losing some of those rights-of-way,” he said.
No other libraries expressed interest in the huge remaining mass of U.S. material. The plan, blessed by the British Library’s board, was to offer to dealers whatever libraries left unclaimed; anything dealers didn’t want was to be thrown away: “Material for which we cannot20 find a home will be offered to dealers for sale, or as a last resort sent for pulping.” Brian Lang, the director of the British Library, reiterated this plan in a letter to me: “The intention is that runs of newspapers for which no bids have been received will be pulped.”
CHAPTER 2. Original Keepsakes
I didn’t want the newspapers to be dispersed by dealers or “pulped” (awful word), so I hastily formed a non-profit corporation called the American Newspaper Repository, and, when it was clear that the auction was going to go forward whether I liked it or not, I submitted bids. A dealer from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Timothy Hughes Rare and Early Newspapers, also bid on the papers, as it turned out. Hughes owns a medium-sized, pale blue warehouse, tidily kept, filled with rows of industrial shelving; on the shelves rest about eighteen thousand newspaper volumes. He is an undemonstrative man with a small mustache, honest in his business dealings, who was formerly on the board of the Little League Museum in South Williamsport. His usual practice is to “disbind” the newspapers — that is, cut them out of their chronological context with a utility knife (you can hear the binding strings pop softly as the blade travels down the inner gutter of the volume) — and sell the eye-catching headline issues (Al Capone, the Lusitania, Bonnie and Clyde, Amelia Earhart) or issues containing primordial Coke ads or Thomas Nast illustrations, shrink-wrapped against white cardboard, at paper shows (where buyers gather to look over vintage postcards, baseball cards, posters, and other ephemera) or through his printed catalog or website. His father, jolly and self-effacing, is a retired sharpener of band-saw blades, as was his grandfather; now his father and his brother, along with an amiable ex-schoolteacher named Marc, are employees of the company, filling orders, moving pallets of incoming volumes around with a forklift, writing catalog copy, and gradually working down the inventory, almost all of which came from libraries.
If American libraries had been doing the job we paid them to do, and innocently trusted that they were doing, over the past five decades — if they had been taking reasonable care of our communal newspaper collections rather than stacking them in all the wrong places, and finally selling them to book-breakers or dumping them in the trash outright (an employee of one Southern library recently rescued from a Dumpster, and successfully resold to a dealer, a run of Harper’s Weekly worth ten thousand dollars) — then the British Library’s decision to auction off millions of pages of urban life, although it would mark a low point of cultural husbandry, would not have been such a potentially disastrous loss to future historians. Fifty years ago, after all, there were bound sets, even double sets, of all the major metropolitan dailies safely stored in libraries around the United States.
But that is no longer true. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library once owned Pulitzer’s New York World complete, for instance, and Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Tribune Company once owned sets of the Chicago Tribune. They don’t now. (“I’m sorry to say and appalled to say that they were tossed,” an employee of the reference department of the Chicago Tribune said to me. “It was before my time.”) At Columbia University (whose school of journalism Pulitzer founded), at the New York Public Library, and at the Library of Congress, you can flip through memoirs, biographies, scholarly studies, and original holograph letters of Joseph Pulitzer, works that describe his innovations in graphic design and recount his public squabble with Hearst over The Yellow Kid, a popular color cartoon that first appeared in the World in the 1890s — a squabble that begat the term “yellow journalism.” But the World itself, the half-million-page masterpiece in the service of which Pulitzer stormed and swore and finally went blind, was slapdashedly microfilmed in monochrome and thrown out by the New York Public Library, probably in the early fifties. Columbia said good-bye to its World at some point thereafter; the New-York Historical Society did so around 1990. The University of Chicago library, under the direction of micro-madman1 Herman Fussler (former lead librarian and information specialist for the Manhattan Project), produced a bad copy of the Chicago Tribune in the fifties as well. The Library of Congress was quick to clear its shelves of the World and most of the Chicago Tribune and replace them with copies of the NYPL’s and the University of Chicago’s microfilm; and copies of that very same mid-century microfilm — edge-blurred, dark, gappy, with text cut off of some pages, faded to the point of illegibility on others — will now have to serve for patrons of the British Library, too.
All the major newspaper repositories — the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, for instance, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, both of which once had collections of national importance — have long since bet the farm on film and given away, sold, or thrown out most of their original volumes published after 1880 or so. Nearly all major university libraries, state libraries, and large public libraries have done the same. Even the great American Antiquarian Society, having decided some years ago to narrow its focus to publications before 1876, is arranging with Timothy Hughes to swap long runs of some small-town papers — the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Sentinel from 1888 on, for example — for older titles that they want.