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Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number Two
To
Breath Is to Judge: An Attempt to Think Calmly about Nicholson Baker's Book, Double
Fold
"Essentially,
then, Baker suggests that every publisher send the Library of
Congress a copy of everything it produces, that LC catalog all of
it, and never throw it away. Why? Is it true that everything is
worth saving? Probably not. A great many books are not worthwhile.
They are junk the moment they come off the press. They are junk
today, junk tomorrow, junk forever."
Those
librarians! They're always ending up on someone's liste de merde. If the
local American Family Association operatives aren't reaming them out for
letting Dick & Jane ogle the nasty Web sites down at the P.L., then Pat
Schroeder of the Association of American Publishers is characterizing them
as pirates running amuck among pitiful, helpless giant publishers (see Uncle
Frank's March essay). If the AFA and the AAP take a break, that doesn't
mean rest for the wicked: It means that Nicholson Baker has his sharp pen
unsheathed, and is going after some librarian hide.
Think of it: My sister-in-law once said of my work, "That must be a
restful profession." Oh, yes. We librarians read French novels and sip
Michigan wine, and recite aphorisms of the Enlightenment. We'd sip French
wine to go with the novels and the aphorisms, but we can't afford it. Said
sister-in-law will soon find out just how restful is the wonderful world of
the library worker: She herself is putting the final touches on her library
degree at Indiana University. I fear that this may somehow be my fault, but
am afraid to ask.
Nicholson Baker, as by now everyone who reads knows, thinks that the
destruction of America's publishing heritage is the fault of librarians. His
extensively researched new book, Double Fold (Random House; 370p.
$25.95; ISBN 0-375-50444-3), takes librarians to task for what he considers
their misguided efforts to save the village by destroying it. In this case,
the village consists of thousands of books and newspapers published after
1870, the date generally used as the point from which publishers largely
abandoned high-rag content paper for paper with a much higher wood pulp
content.
Back in the day, high-rag paper helped assure a long, happy life for books,
provided they did not become the targets of religious or political zealots
intent on purifying the available literature by setting fire to it, or by
bugs looking for sustenance. The shelf life of good paper can be
astonishing. If you ever get a
chance to handle books produced in the first two or three centuries of
modern printing, you will find their paper remains wonderfully supple, firm,
and resilient--like my abs, if only I could bring myself to do those
exercises I see on the infomercials during insomnia bouts.
Commerce being what it is (crass, soulless, grasping, clutching, and
heedless of long-term damage wrought by the short-term quest for profit),
most publishers eagerly switched to the widely available and cheap high-acid
content wood pulp paper in the second half of the 19th century.
As Baker points out, this development was far from all bad: It enabled
publishers to crank out more product at more affordable prices.
Acid Trips
Thanks to its chemical content, this paper often came down with a bad
case of acid indigestion that a trainload of TUMS
couldn't quell. Although books from previous centuries endure almost
oblivious of the passage of time, a great many post-1870 books turned
yellow, and sometimes brittle, in a few decades. The higher the acid
content, the quicker these unpleasant changes occurred.
Partly in response to what they saw as the unsettling prospect of vast
numbers of books crumbling away to uselessness, librarians in the nation's
major research libraries began looking for ways to preserve the intellectual
content of these materials. They began microfilming the books. Sometimes the
microfilming entailed taking the books apart to enable a good image capture.
Once apart, the books were off to the pulp yard. As anyone who has worked
with acid-eaten books can testify, once these babies are in pieces, there is
no putting them back together. The preservationists sometimes felt that the
only way to save the books was to destroy them--as physical artifacts, if
not as works of intellectual content.
Pass the Marshmallows
Major microfilming projects have helped give some assurance to the
continued existence of this intellectual content, even though the original
packages in which it greeted the public may be doomed--or, alas, sacrificed
in the filming. Nicholson Baker is seriously aggrieved about this sacrifice.
For Baker, it amounts to something morally akin to burning Joan of Arc at
the stake, and toasting marshmallows in the blaze.
His outrage, I acknowledge with regret, appears to possess considerable
justification. Throughout Double Fold, Baker refuses to accept at
face value any of the arguments put forward by preservationists whose
tactics include the destruction of the objects of which they are purportedly
the stewards. He argues, persuasively, that doctrinaire thinking about
preservation has led to the needless slaughter of newspapers and books that,
given modest maintenance and reasonable storage conditions, could survive
intact--and usable--for many decades to come. Keep your old volumes
in a dry place, with the humidity not too high. Keep them out of the light,
keep them properly shelved, and they will last.
My grandfather, a casual scrapbook keeper, routinely cut out articles from
local newspapers in the early part of the 20th century. These
articles, mounted in dimestore scrapbooks, never received any care except
for their storage in a dark closet. The clippings hold up to this day,
readily readable. If cheap paper so casually maintained can hold up for
close to a century, one must trust that it could persevere far longer in
proper institutional settings, where temperature and humidity can be
controlled, and where Grandpa won't inadvertently toss his wet overshoes on
top of the pile. Baker's investigations testify to this point.
Good Old Books
There is something, even for a rational man or woman, transcendently
human about holding in one's hands a good old book that many other men and
women have handled and read, in previous decades, in previous centuries. A
sensitive soul feels a kinship with these departed readers, and senses a
link to their reactions to the book as a physical entity, to the language of
the text, to the ideas and images therein.
I like old books. I like them better than new books. Given a choice between
going to a second-hand bookstore or a "first run" bookstore, I
will usually choose the second-hand store. I like old books because they
have soul, and new books do not. Some new books will eventually have soul,
but none have it upon first publication. Please do not ask me to explain
this. I know book soul when I feel it. This knowledge is one of my
concessions, as one who likes to think of himself as a fairly rational man,
to the irrational.
My first gig in the bookworld was as an apprentice in a hand bookbindery
that specialized in repair and conservation of old and rare books. I worked
in a shop where I learned how to sew books together on cords, how to make
hollow-back spines, how to bring dried out leather bindings back to life
with careful application of the proper unguents, how to repair damaged paper
with Japanese tissue and paste, and any number of other slow, painstaking
tasks of the hand binder's craft. I dwell on this business to help assure
readers that my career has not been devoted to wanton abuse of the innocent
vehicles of intellectual property.
I have paid some dues to the historical body of the book, and, in fact, left
my blood on some of its representatives while learning the needlework. I am
pleased to see that Ellen McCrady, my old tutor in the crafts of the book,
and presently publisher of the Abbey Newsletter (http://sul2.stanford.edu/byorg/abbey/)
on the preservation arts, is one of the experts to whom Baker turns for
guidance on technical issues.
Microfilm Gorge
Baker writes, "microfilm is a brain-poaching, gorge-lifting trial
to browse." He is correct. Digital versions of print materials are
better, generally, and have advantages in their capacity for online
searching, but they, too, have shortcomings--not the least of which is that
digital conversion often involves the same sin as microfilming: destruction
of the converted object.
Furthermore, the preservation of intellectual content that the microfilmers
claim is far less than perfect. Some of Baker's most disturbing passages
concern the loss of value in the filmed versions of turn-of-the-century
newspapers that featured elaborate artwork, including excellent color
printing. Microfilming savages this work, rendering into murk the labor of
long-dead artisans. Baker also observes that the varying content of
different daily editions of a given newspaper is lost through the
slash-and-film school of "preservation."
The title of Double Fold describes what has become a standard test in
the library business to determine the vitality of a book's paper: grasp a
corner of a page, and fold it back and forth. The sooner it breaks, the
worse the paper, and the more likely a candidate is the book for
microfilming, or digitization.
Baker does not condemn microfilming and digitization out of hand: He asks,
simply, that these activities, which are crucial to wider dissemination of
the materials ordinarily owned only by research libraries, not result in the
physical destruction of those materials. As Ellen McCrady often said when I
struggled with a new binding or preservation technique, "First, do no
harm."
That may not be a bad dictum to follow. If more librarians in the
preservation game had followed it over the past half century, librarians in
general would not today be getting touchy, defensive, and embarrassed over
Baker's screed. They could read their French novels and sip their Michigan
wine with cleaner consciences.
Junk Today…
All that said, there remains something about Baker's preoccupation with
preserving every blessed thing that doesn't rest easy on the mind. In one of
his closing recommendations, he urges that the Library of Congress
"lease or build a large building near Washington, and in it they should
put, in call-number order, everything that they are sent by publishers and
can't or don't want to hold on site."
Essentially, then, Baker suggests that every publisher send the Library of
Congress a copy of everything it produces, that LC catalog all of it, and
never throw it away. Why? Is it true that everything is worth saving?
Probably not. A great many books are not worthwhile. They are junk the
moment they come off the press. They are junk today, junk tomorrow, junk
forever.
Consider the Nancy Drew mysteries, or the Bobbsey Twin adventures, or the
Hardy Boys, or (my personal favorite as a child) the Tom Corbett, Space
Cadet series. Even now, a substantial bookcase at my house is chiefly
occupied with supporting a large quantity of these books.
What good are they? Rearrange their words, give them all another name, it
doesn't matter: You've read one in the series, you've read them all. These
books follow a formula so rigid that the author could have written them in
his sleep. Or her sleep. And probably did. Sure, let's save two or three as
examples of their times and sensibilities, but why 20 or 30? There is
nothing in any of them not in all the others. As works of literature, they
are worthless. As windows on their prime times, they are relentlessly
repetitious.
Yes, there are collectors out there willing to pay serious money for such
books in fine condition. Their willingness rests not on the intrinsic value
of the books as art or literature, but on an ersatz value our culture likes
to assign to worthless objects because they are hard to find. One sees this
phenomenon in operation at any "antique" store.
Do we really want to save forever a copy of every piece of junk published,
simply because someone, somewhere, might think it useful?
We Don't Wanna Go Down in the Basement
My grandfather followed that practice. He saved everything. His basement
was and still is a wonder of objects gathered and hoarded over a lifetime.
Most of it was just plain damned junk. Literally. The old man brought it
home with him from the local junkyard. Twenty years after his death, his
family still hasn't been able to get shut of the bulk of it. The task of
culling the worthwhile from the dreck is so overwhelming that no one wants
to tackle it.
It may not be a good idea to invest the nation's resources in creating and
maintaining a storage facility that does for published materials what my
grandfather's basement did for the contents of the village junkyard. For
that matter, if we save all the books, newspapers, and magazines, what
defense could we offer for not saving everything else? Every piece of sheet
music, every compact disk, every computer program, every godforsaken bit of
published cultural debris that has its moment of fame?
We would, lord help us, have to make sure that we saved Herman's Hermits'
unutterably moronic "Henry VIII," and Whitney Houston's bellowing
bombast, "I Will Always Love You." Not to mention every
ill-tempered, posturing rap tune that takes Oedipal offenders to task.
Please, no. Make them go away. Let us have some mercy on our descendants, if
not on ourselves. Let us at least leave a record (written, sung, whatever)
that suggests we were not as crude and tasteless as we know we are.
A Word from '68
Perhaps the most memorable utterance I ever heard came from a Marxist
philosophy professor in whose class I wrestled with the heavyweights of
existentialism in the spring of 1968. During a discussion of Camus, someone
in the class was griping about people like Camus being
"judgmental." The prof, ordinarily a very humane and gentle sort,
turned his pale blue eyes on the student in an uncharacteristic glare, and
slowly uttered, in a voice devoid of warmth, the following statement:
"To breathe is to judge."
This observation filled me with a new light. Its absolute truth, possibly
the only absolute truth of our existence, cut to the heart. Yes: To breathe
is to judge. Refusal to judge is an abdication of one's fundamental human
responsibility. Saving everything, simply because it exists, is such an
abdication.
That is why responsible librarians don't save everything, and it is why
pleas that the Library of Congress, or someone or something, hang onto
everything published, everything recorded, just in case, have the ring of
fear and neurosis. It is the fear of making choices, the fear of decisions,
the fear of letting go, the neurotic need to cling to the past and its
detritus.
We have to choose. Saving everything, regardless of its merit, is not a
choice, but an obsession.
Uncle Frank is going to get rid of those Nancy Drew books.
Uncle Frank's Diary Home
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Grant
Burns ("Uncle Frank")
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