A Letter From America #29
The Next Chapter
of the American Newspaper
Repository
From
the Rare Book Review
This summer I had
the pleasure of going to the sea shore for a few days, and my hosts announced
that we were going to grill bluefish for dinner. I volunteered to go the local
seafood store to pick it up. These days in the States you usually get your fish
in a plastic bag, so I was happily surprised, traditionalist that I am, when no
petroleum products were wasted and it was delivered wrapped in newspaper. Thus
always to newsprint, I thought, taking my soggy package home. If you don’t
reuse it, it just becomes somebody else’s conservation problem.
Remember Nicholson
Baker? The American journalist and novelist (Vox, the first
non-pornographic phone-sex novel) first made a splash in the antiquarian book
world with his New Yorker piece on the sad fate of the San Francisco
Public Library. He then went on to write Double Fold, an ill-tempered,
polemical, but often accurate indictment of how a number of major libraries had
trashed their own collections through ill-conceived programs of date conversion,
generally by microfilming and then disposing of the originals. Baker’s point
about what happened, in the big picture, is certainly correct. His tendency to
single out particular individuals in libraries as villains-in-chief was not
nearly so fair in a world where such decisions were generally taken by
committee, and virtually all parties, right or wrong, were working in good
faith. This aspect of Double Fold, far more than its real message, roused
the ire of the library world, which fired back ill-tempered polemics in reply.
Baker’s greatest
anger was reserved for the disposal of late 19th- and 20th-century
newspapers by some major libraries after they had been microfilmed (often badly
or incompletely), leaving no available originals for the researcher. As he very
rightly observes, the papers of this era are unique cultural artifacts from the
beginning of the era of mass communication. They cannot be adequately translated
into an alternative medium without losing part of their intrinsic message, and
our cultural heritage is poorer for the destruction of the originals.
Well, my heart was
all with Baker in these arguments. I, too, have fought this fight (I’m on the
black list of a major American library for blowing the whistle on their
hatcheting of their own collection, but that’s another story). Yeah, UP
AGAINST THE WALL, LIBRARY EVIL-DOERS! Let’s kick ass and take names, and have
a few unconstitutional state trials, too. No printed artifact left behind.
My head told me
otherwise. It is easy to deplore from the sidelines, but the librarians who are
drowning in seas of decaying newsprint and have no space left are in desperate
straits, too. I sit on the board of a library that has an exemplary record in
such matters, but had to find a home for vast, bulky, newspaper runs out of
scope to their mission. It was like trying to find a foster home for an
adolescent arsonist. So I was interested in what would happen to Baker when he
tried to take the weight of the world on his own shoulders and founded the
American Newspaper Repository, intending to stow institutionally unwanted
newspaper runs in a Maine warehouse. I also have some experience in filling
warehouses with printed matter, and I figured it wouldn’t be long before he
needed another warehouse. And then another. It was admirable in a quixotic sort
of way, but that class of thing couldn’t last.
Happily, a major
institution with the resources to manage Baker’s idea has stepped up to the
plate. This spring Baker announced that the fifty tons of newspapers he had
accumulated in Maine had been shipped to Duke University in Durham, North
Carolina in five tractor-trailer loads. Duke has agreed to keep the collection
intact (no disbinding or "experimental deacidification" (doesn’t
that sound ghoulish?) allowed. Duke is taking in the collection as part of a
larger commitment to gather this kind of endangered material, and provide at
least one home of last resort for such stuff, including advertising material and
comic books. If everybody stays happy with the deal, title to the Repository
will officially pass to Duke at the end of the year.
So hats off to
Baker for putting his money where his mouth was (although I suspect he heaved a
sigh of relief when the last tractor-trailer pulled out). And congratulations to
Duke for their vision to take on the mountain of paper that awaits them. Maybe I
should send them the paper the fish was wrapped in….
–
William S. Reese