What that activity was precisely is hidden behind a censor’s busy Magic Marker; some of it probably concerned the contract microfilming of classified documents. In Clapp’s handwritten daily minutes, now held at the Library of Congress’s manuscripts division, there is a note from November 1951, when he was chief assistant librarian—“Round up on CIA projects,” followed by a list of names,25 including Frederick Wagman (a lifelong microfilm enthusiast, later director of the University of Michigan’s library and president of the American Library Association) and John W. Cronin, the Library of Congress’s head of processing and member of the American Library Association’s committee on cooperative microfilming projects. Around the same time, Clapp notes that he’s gotten word from Alexander Toth, the CIA’s librarian, that the “CIA contract is in mill.”
All Clapp’s notes are on paper, easily read today. Clapp’s CIA file, on the other hand, is an unfortunate victim of the Cold War mania26 for micro-preservation: it looks to have been inexpertly filmed at some point, and it has undergone a severe fading, as microfilm does when technicians don’t take care to rinse off the hypo fixative. The copy that the CIA sent me is poignantly stamped with the words BEST COPY AVAILABLE27 on almost every nearly indecipherable page. Some of the pages are, though uncensored, completely unreadable. The same cautionary language — BEST COPY AVAILABLE — accompanies the printouts from microfilmed newspapers that one can order from the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.
There was a palpable glamour to microfilming in those early days, difficult though it may be to feel it now — a hot chemical whiff of cinematography and of high-stakes intelligence work. And there was, as well, the entrepreneurial appeal of creating a product you could sell to other libraries, and the further compensations that flowed from selling your master negatives and reproduction rights to commercial microfilm companies such as University Microfilms, as most libraries that possessed early homegrown film eventually did.
But the main reason microfilm (and its rectangular, lower-resolution cousin, microfiche) has always fascinated library administrators is, of course, that it gives them a way to clear the shelves — to “expand without expanding,” in the words of a full-page Xerox-UMI advertisement in the July 1976 issue of Microform Review. The picture in the ad is of a squeezed, feather-shedding American eagle; the headline is AMERICA’S SPACE PROGRAM IS IN TROUBLE:28
We don’t have enough of it. Space. Not in the cities. Not on the land, and, as we don’t need to tell you, not in the libraries. University Microfilms can give you more space. More space translates as more ways to expand without expanding, more options open.
Serials Management in Microform is our own slum clearance program.
Newspaper collections were the first slums to be cleared (books came later), and because the Library of Congress had the largest newspaper collection in the country, it was one of the first to go to work. (The Library of Congress had “files of American and foreign newspapers29 more complete and in greater amount than in any other library,” wrote one celebrant a decade before the clearance began.) In 1950, an energetic soul named Clyde S. Edwards was put in charge of the library’s Serials Division; an internal report for that year pointed out “the badly congested condition30 of the bound newspaper collections, and the urgent need for space in which to expand them.” But the newspapers were never to have enough space again. Verner Clapp, microfilm futurist, was by this time running day-to-day operations at the library (Luther Evans was out of the country for long periods, on missions for UNESCO), and Clapp was not a believer in “merely more of the same31—ever and ever larger bookstacks and ever and ever more complicated catalogs.” He subscribed to what is sometimes called the steady space32 model. The ideal research library would (as he described it in his 1964 book The Future of the Research Library) reach a certain fixed physical size and stay there forever: techno-shrinkage systems (improved Veracs or, eventually, textual databases) would allow librarians to “retire” their originals (i.e., shear their spines and take their pictures) in favor of ever more densely packed micro-surrogates. The curious twists of meaning that accompany microfilming were not entirely lost on Clapp. “It is an art,”33 he told the conventioneers in 1959, “dedicated to preservation, yet it is often practiced as a preparation for deliberate destruction.”
Rather than putting up more shelves for the newsprint collection, or building or leasing a warehouse — traditional reactions to a space shortage — the Library of Congress’s response in 1950 was to abandon the binding and storing of many new newspapers: incoming papers were dumped after a few months, as soon as commercial microfilm arrived to put in their place. That practice saved dramatically on binding costs, thus subsidizing the cost of the microfilm, and it “retard[ed] somewhat the normal growth of this congested condition,” wrote a still dissatisfied Clyde Edwards, “but will not improve the present state of things.” There was only one sure way to relieve the overcrowding, Edwards advised in a later report: “I am convinced that the only solution to this problem lies in an intelligently planned reduction of the original files.”
Edwards needed upper-level permission for such a far-reaching disposal program, however. In a “conference decision,” the library’s managers determined to solve the newspaper problem by, as Branson Marley put it, “permitting the disposal34 to other libraries of bound newspapers replaced by microfilm.” A unobtrusive footnote follows Marley’s innocent-sounding sentence: “Volumes for which there are no takers are destroyed.” None of this epochal activity,35 in which the Library of Congress began its slow betrayal of an unknowing nation, was published in contemporary annual reports.
Volumes for which there are no takers are destroyed. Increasingly, there weren’t takers, because such is the prestige of our biggest library that whatever its in-house theoreticians come to believe, however nonsensically misinformed, however anathematic to reasoned stewardship, other research libraries will soon believe as well. In 1956, Verner Clapp’s last year at the library, the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress was a little more forthright than it had been about what was going on: “The problem of deteriorating newspapers36 was accentuated by the equally vexing problem of making deck space for newly bound volumes. Following a survey of these problems, orders were placed for a number of microfilm copies of domestic titles available in this form.”
But because it takes time to microfilm backfiles amounting to millions of pages, the “planned reduction” went fairly slowly at first. Bill Blackbeard told me that when he first began saving newspapers in the late sixties and early seventies, the Library of Congress still had a huge collection, handsomely bound, stored in a naval warehouse37 on Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. “They had virtually every major American newspaper from a large city,” Blackbeard said, “usually from the beginning of the newspaper, or the time that the papers were sent to the Library of Congress — through the nineteen-fifties. Most of these bound files ended about nineteen-fifty.” These papers hadn’t received the kind of heavy wear that, say, a Kansas City Star might have gotten at a public library in Missouri, or The Detroit News might have in Detroit.