Compared to storing the originals in some big building, microfilming is (like digitization) wildly expensive, even in high-contrast black and white — it costs over a hundred and fifty dollars per volume8 to film a typical newspaper collection, versus less than five dollars a volume9 to build outlying storage for it and hire a person to truck to-and-fro whatever people want to see. And newspaper pages are the most difficult of all printed artifacts to photograph (or digitize) welclass="underline" they are very large, narrow-margined, and filled with tiny type and finely detailed line drawings and photography. You’re using the outside area of the lens, where distortion is higher; you’re shrinking very small things very small; and you’re removing “grayscale” nuances — of course you’re going to lose information, and beauty, in the process. Books and journals are easy to work with by comparison.
But these difficulties didn’t deter the visionaries of fifty or sixty years ago: the end product might not look that great, but it was thrilling to be able to do the work at all. And once they’d done the heady hobbyistical thing — taken cracker-sized snapshots of the contents of their newspaper shelves, using advanced Recordak film technology — it seemed only sensible to throw the old pages away, rather than to set them aside in an annex in case the microfilm turned out poorly, or had missing issues or pages or months, or in case people had questions (say about the history of American illustration or photography) that only the originals could answer. (In some microfilm, photographs come out as little more than dark rectangles on the page.) Recordak’s Charles Z. Case extolled the benefits of “condensing records10 to microscopic form to save space”; one of the company’s promotional pictures from the thirties shows a wall of volumes of The New York Times11 at the New York Public Library, heaped and ranked willy-nilly to heighten the sense of oppressiveness: in front of them stands a prim wooden cabinet full of Kodak-made microfilm. Recordak succeeded early on in winning over Keyes Metcalf, then chief of reference at the New York Public Library, who bought two microfilm readers12 in the early thirties; later, when he became head librarian at Harvard, he launched, with Rockefeller Foundation money, a large-scale project to film foreign newspapers, in order, as he wrote the foundation’s director of humanities, “to help push microphotography.”13 In those early days, microfilm was shot on the same stock as movie film (you can still see the sprocket perforations14 from the original negative on some prints) — and one has a sense that these library administrators saw themselves in the role of studio moguls, bringing multivolume reference classics to the silver, or at least the gray-green, screen.
Microfilm had an air of enticing sneakiness as well — of important covert operations performed in the national interest. This tradition goes back to the siege of Paris15 in 1870, when the Prussians cut all telegraph links to the city. In a peasant’s disguise, René Patrice Dagron, already a microphotographer of note, snuck his optical apparatus to Tours in wine barrels, and there photographed military communiqués at reduced size on emulsions that he gently rolled up, slid into quills, and affixed to carrier pigeons. The birds, which had been plunging exhausted from the sky when burdened with heavy paper, now flapped to Paris without incident.
In World War II, microfilm again came to prominence. Eugene Power,16 the founder of University Microfilms, landed a big contract in 1942 with the Office of Strategic Services, later to become the CIA, to film millions of pages of German scientific papers and other documents gathered by British agents. Around the same time, the OSS needed an efficient way to sort thousands of vacation photographs of Germany that the military had solicited from the public in order to plan bombing runs. A forward-thinker named John F. Langan hired a team of women to mount microfilm snippets of each vacation photo (along with selected stills from Axis newsreels) into a rectangular hole cut in an IBM punch card that was coded to correspond to the subject of the photo. In The Hole in the Card (a company history published in 1966 by 3M’s Filmsort subsidiary), Neil MacKay17 writes, “For example, if a request were received for a shot of a bridge in occupied France that the allies wanted blown up, the cards were mechanically sorted at high speed to segregate all ‘bridge’ cards. The film in the cards was then projected on a screen to select the exact shot wanted.”
Langan was helped by another early bird, Vernon D. Tate,18 who moved to the OSS from the National Archives, where in the thirties he had supervised the filming and destruction of a boatload of primary sources. Tate wrote in 1942 that microfilm “ranks in importance with any secret military weapon19 thus far disclosed.” One of its greatest advantages was the ease with which it could be destroyed, according to Tate:
Books may not be blown to bits or easily burned by fire; microfilms if capture is inevitable can be rapidly and completely consumed, and as easily replaced through the making of prints from master negatives.
Tate went on to become MIT’s head librarian.
After the war, the most influential microfilm booster was a polymathic, bow-tie-wearing career librarian named Verner Clapp. Clapp became the number-two man at the Library of Congress under Luther Evans (“We’re going places Verner,”20 Evans wrote him in 1945, “and I’m very glad you’re a good sailor”); after narrowly missing the chieftaincy21 himself, Clapp went on in 1956 to direct the new and very flush Council on Library Resources, which bestowed hundreds of thousands of Ford Foundation dollars on technologies of image shrinkage. In 1958, Clapp chaired a meeting on “Problems of Microform in Libraries” at the Cosmos Club in Washington; the first item on the agenda was “Reduction in bulk22—the problems of library storage.” One of Verner Clapp’s cherished bulk-reducing projects was the “Verac,” built by AVCO Corporation (they were at work on the reentry system for the Minuteman missile23 at the time) — a cubic-foot set of stacked photographic plates layered with super-high-resolution “Lippman emulsion,” which could hold a million page-images, each accessed by a servomechanism that, as Clapp put it, “brings the addressed image into the scanning position through a paroxysmic effort of approximately one-tenth of a second’s duration.” The Verac could make you a hard copy (Clapp uses this Cold War term in 1964), with the help of a Printapix tube, or the image could be made to appear on a “vidicon,” or closed-circuit-TV screen. It didn’t work, though — the words were blurry. Or perhaps the blur accurately reproduces Clapp’s own tears of frustration, for the paroxysmic Verac was an expensive failure. Like missile defense, leading-edge library automation is a money pit.
At the 1959 annual meeting of the National Microfilm Association, Clapp gave the keynote address, entitled “A Good Beginning.”24 He spoke of a hoped-for day in which microfilm machines “can be made a personal accoutrement, as homely and as natural and as essential as the tooth-brush, the ball-point pen, or as eyeglasses.” He also told delegates that microfilm “has come to the forefront again and again in time of war, and some of its best-known achievements are associated with espionage.” Most of his listeners that day were unaware that Clapp himself was, at the time, a consultant for the CIA, and that since at least 1949, while he was still at the Library of Congress, he had been an official intelligence contact with top-secret clearance. Clapp’s CIA file includes “Report of Liaison” forms from 1953 and 1954 which state that his task was to “maintain liaison on mutual library matters as well as monitor certain CIA-financed Library of Congress activity.”