This was surprisingly fascinating! The closest I've come to contacting this issue myself was that UC Berkeley required me to submit my dissertation on archival quality paper, but I think all years since mine (2008) have been allowed to submit electronically. I'm pretty sure someone is still producing an archival quality hard copy from those electronic submissions.
This is the one thing that makes me a bit hesitant to suggest that academic journals should switch to low-cost all-electronic open-access formats.
I knew there was something wrong with Baker's thesis when I read the book on its first coming out. Because when I was in library school in 1980, twenty years earlier, we were told that discarding the originals after microfilming them was a bad old idea that wasn't being done any more. Microfilming was for improving access (you can make copies of the microfilm and send them anywhere), not for preservation. De-acidification was the coming thing for preservation, at least then.
Baker also thoroughly misunderstands the double-fold test. He says that if you don't want the paper to break, just don't fold it that way. The idea of the double-fold test is as an early warning system, like the canary in the coal mine. It tells you which paper is most brittle and most needs attention.
I think more than one person has pointed out that, from the strict point of view of preservation, paper beats almost anything, including film and electronic storage. A well-tended well-made built will easily survive with 100% of its information intact for 200 or more years. That is certainly not true of *any* film and *any* form of digital storage. (In terms of digital storage, beyond ordinary bit-rot for any magnetic medium we have the problem of the technology needed to read even things like pressed CD-ROMs vanishing. Anyone with 5" floppy disks formatted in some ancient DOS format knows this.)
- Presents something I didn't know I was interested in and makes me interested in it
- Provides a solid & readable summary of the book's best arguments
- Contextualizes it for the modern reader and addresses some common criticisms
- Assesses what the reviewer's own conclusion on the matter was
I noticed in a post once that the Internet Archive goes out of its way not to guillotine material and has a fancy and presumably more expensive scanner that works page by page and requires a manual operator, wouldn't be surprised to see if they've read this book or just came to the same opinions on the matter.
I stopped reading this review twice, because I became so enraged. To me, this is culture wars material. I have seen university librarians reduce the size of the collections to create more "thinking space", or because a new online system was expensive or we needed more computer labs for students who already own computers. One local library reduced its collection simply because they reduced the height of the shelves in order to serve the Frank Lloyd Wright aesthetic of the beautiful new building.
This review reminded me of two stellar short works by librarian Peter Briscoe: Reading the Map of Knowledge which concerns the art of librarianship and is a paean to those glorious few librarians who love real physical books and do themselves read voraciously. He also wrote an elegiac novella called "The Best Read Man in France" about a book collector who has been putting together a rare collection of North and South American Early Colonial Scientific Treatises and Researches by Jesuits. It's a melancholic meditation on the fate of historical knowledge in modern society.
How did you make this so thrilling to read? Its an argument about proper data storage and how fast acidic paper decays. And a methodological point that how they tested paper longevity was biased. I should not have been excited while reading this, but I was. I kept expecting somehow to shout Objection! or confess betrayal on a rooftop in the middle of a storm.
I have not read the book reviewed here ("Double Fold"), but this review makes it sound pretty one sided, and the review does not challenge it.
There does seem to be a consensus today that "destructive preservation" was a bad idea, but there is very little consideration here of economic and logistical pressures which presumably pushed (some) librarians in that direction.
Regarding dumpster books today, my understanding is that these days the large majority of de-accessioned books in the USA are sold or donated to at-scale efforts like Better World Books, who sort and variously re-distribute internationally; sell used on Amazon; donate to other libraries; destroy/recycle a final fraction of books. If you look in the dumpsters it is mostly best sellers from decades past, of which there are hundreds of thousands of duplicate unwanted copies. It seems pretty efficient and heterogeneous (eg, "the market", librarians, independent organizations, and collectors all get to take a pass before something gets binned).
Nick Basbane's book "Patience and Fortitude" (2001; strong recommend overall if you skip any chapters boring to you) has some segments in the final section ("Book Places") about weeding into off-site warehouses, preservation (microfilming and digitization), and the SFPL main branch. Basbane is ultimately on the "keep books", but I thought presented both sides of several debates reasonably.
"Edition of One" (1990, available to borrow at https://archive.org/details/editionofoneauto0000powe) is the autobiography Eugene Power, who founded University Microfilm (now ProQuest) in Ann Arbor, and was involved in the early days of microfilm as a business. Interesting history, though there is a lot of personal history to skim over. The early days seem to have centered around microfilm as a distribution and low-cost publishing tech, as opposed to preservation and paper-replacement.
My wife, formerly a librarian for King County (the nation's largest library system), had never heard of this book, which has me wondering exactly how ubiquitous the book is among the profession.
I appreciated the effort to take a position here while giving the other side's arguments their due. I'm sympathetic to the position, too-- take that, High Modernists! But I think it's oversold a little here. The loss of old materials is frustrating but not a horrific harm to human flourishing in the way that, say, urban planning and agriculture policy can be. Also, the advent of good color digitization makes the microfilmers look basically right in principle, though 50-some years premature. Modern computers get around all of the microfilm drawbacks that the review mentions. Even so, this was a very effective, readable summary of Double Fold and a fun window into a bit of history and society that I had no idea existed.
Wow, I was just talking about *Double Fold* on the phone with a friend last night (!!).
I loved the extra context and analysis that this review offered. Really a terrific and thought-provoking discussion.
This reminds me of various things:
(1) I remember feeling that Baker underrated digital scanning, which could be done to much higher standards than microfilm scanning, producing a much more usable, accurate, and appealing version of a book's content. I think this has proven true; even though most of his attack is against microfilm, I recall that he was also pessimistic on digitization, which seems like a criticism that hasn't aged as well. There are legitimate criticisms of digitization, but it's mostly been a humongous improvement compared to microfilm.
(2) The part of the book that explains that older paper is *much more durable* than, um, middle-aged paper—as the review explains—came as a big revelation to me, since I'd seen cheap pulp paperbacks falling apart in my hands at merely 40 or 50 years of age, but meanwhile my father's bookstore had books that were hundreds of years old that seemed pretty much fine. Since our intuition about most things is that older will translate to more fragile and worse condition, this is really important and counterintuitive even for people who like books a lot but have never studied paper or preservation.
After reading Baker's explanation, I've pondered and mentioned to friends that the oldest book I own (the New Testament in Greek edited by Mills, published 1787 in London) is totally fine and you can easily read it by hand just as you would read any modern book. This despite the fact that it's *the same age as the U.S. constitution*. (It was rebound in cloth, in what looks to me like the 1940s or so.) This is a powerful reminder of Baker's point that eighteenth and nineteenth century paper is *awesome*.
(3) I remember the librarians' anger at Baker over this book. I met one librarian when this came out who said "this man who writes softcore porn has a lot of presumption in telling librarians how to be custodians of culture", or words closely to that effect. (This is a reference to *The Fermata*, Baker's 1994 erotic timestopping novel.) According to my friend who works for a major library system, some librarians have never forgiven Baker and still feel offended by his criticisms to this day.
(4) Regarding the dumpster issue:
> Many other books were, however, simply trashed. As a combination of bizarre rules, bureaucratic stubbornness, fear of publicity, and simple inertia, it’s apparently very rare for American libraries to simply donate discarded books to the public. Sometimes the books are sold, but usually they are thrown into the dumpster, regardless of their value.
My father was able to save a lot of books by discreetly asking librarians when they were going to put deaccessioned books into the dumpster. I think he said that, if he asked nicely, they would even put the books *next to* the dumpster rather than inside it. Presumably everything about this varies a lot from library to library—in terms of the quality, condition, and scarcity of what's deaccessioned, how the individual librarians feel about it, and how willing they are to cooperate with people who want to grab the books and give them a new home—but the "fear of publicity" part rings true to me. I think the librarians my father knew did not feel that any book lover would like to see, or even think of, books put out in the trash, even as a result of a reasoned deliberation by librarians about how best to serve library users.
I don't know how deaccessioning has changed over time, but it may still be possible in some places to ask for a heads-up and try to grab some of the books on their way out. I still have the impression it would be best to be discreet about that! But I bet computer cataloguing and online retailing have somewhat reduced the extent to which rare books end up in the trash, because it's so much easier today to check whether something is unusual and/or economically valuable.
FWIW, this claim appears to be false: "After 20 years, the book remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among librarians."
I'm a public librarian by trade, I've never heard of this book, nor heard anyone discuss it, or even it subject matter. Doesn't mean it isn't known by many, but clearly not universal.
I have a Library Science degree, and there are some constraining factors here. Just adding more shelf space is a lot harder than this makes it sound, and most library systems have *no money* for this. The librarians know the last time someone looked at an item in their collection; quite often it’s been decades. They can’t keep all of this copious, bulky material at the expense of new titles and risk stagnation. They have nowhere to put the damn stuff and no one will give you money to build infinite climate-controlled warehouses for books and papers that haven’t been checked out in decades.
How did libraries manage to do it before 1950? In the early 1900s, there were about 10,000 unique titles issued by recognized publishing houses in the US each year. That number in 2010 was over 300,000. Add in all the niche, indie and on-demand titles and you’re talking millions of titles. Every year. And that’s just books.
Is paper still the best storage medium going? Of course. Is it a tragedy to lose the entire run of a paper due to technical or coordination failures? Absolutely. But I don’t believe it’s physically possible for even the most well-heeled and interconnected system of libraries to keep everything we’ve been generating for decades, especially when those materials have been sought out by exactly no one in a human lifetime. The alternative to preservation by destruction in most cases wasn’t preservation, it was just flat out destruction.
Thrilled to see this almost forgotten book reviewed. The microfilming insanity was on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and Baker is a true hero. I was stunned while I read the original, and then stunned again at the vicious response by the library community. It ended my love of librarians.
Has anyone looked into deep learning based super resolution systems? Baker's juxtaposition of the full color and the black-and-white blobs could be used as training data.
I wonder to what extent the events chronicled here inspired Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End." A major plot arc of Rainbows End is a slightly-futuristic version of this: books being outright shredded, because the cheapest way to digitize books was to scan the shredda and geometrically reconstruct the pages.
I remember going to the library with my family as an elementary school-age child. Once I'd found the Red Dwarf VHS I wanted to check out and bring home, I had little to do. I usually ended up at the microfiche machines scanning through archived versions of our local news paper looking for the funny pages.
Maybe the technology was better by then (1990s), but I don't recall finding the images to be of low quality or difficult to read.
I've never seen much empty shelf space at a library. Approximately every volume acquired means a volume let go. Microfilming it first is better than not.
The dominant use of microfilm was newspapers. They were printed on the cheapest paper of the day and they don't do the anaerobic thing as well as books. For that matter, they don't sit neatly on a shelf like books. And they're an absolute nightmare to re-assemble if some reader is less than careful. I remain unconvinced that a century of newspapers in their original form was ever a practical thing for a library to make available.
Microfilm may not have been a great format, but it's what was available and it's easy to scan to something more modern.
I see community libraries getting rid of books on a weekly basis. Twenty years ago when I worked shelving books in a local library, that library went by the date the book had last been checked out. I don't remember how long, but I think it was five years. If something wasn't checked out in that length of time it was "donated" to their nonprofit auxiliary where they were sold in a yard-sale type environment. I don't know what happened to the ones nobody bought.
I took a writing class from a less-well-known author in the 1990s. In that library in the early 2000s there were several of his books. In 2013 there were two and by 2019, one.
Where I live now, there are three trucks of "free" books out in front of the library doors every day. I don't know how fast they disappear, but I look at them once every few months and there is near-complete replacement. At least these are not being thrown out.
Last year I found a book of local history, created by a large group of volunteers and published in the 1980s by a community organization which no longer exists. It is an amazing book. It has a library of congress catalog number but is long, long out of print. The local community would benefit from this book but there it was being given away. I am confident in guessing that it was never digitized, and being that it was made 40 years ago, the people who were old when it was written and committing their personal knowledge to paper are probably long gone.
I can't find the citation but a few years ago I read online about the digital archives of a UK newspaper that had been focused on labor issues. They put the back issues online and threw out the paper ones. Then, IIRC, something happened with their web hosting and they chose to delete a bunch of those issues entirely, thus removing that perspective on UK labor history from the record entirely. What I read insinuated that the current leader of the organization wanted it that way. I'll keep looking for the link.
Good book review. Only I think I either needed less, or more, about Cox's rebuttal.
I am a hand bookbinder. I have done complete restorations on books from the 15th century to today. A couple of points I know from personal experience. One is that the wood pulp paper that was common for a century-plus starting in the early 1800s is complete garbage. Yes, if readers were super careful with the book, it was seldom handled, and it was always properly stored, it would still be OK. But a well-loved adventure book from the turn of the century will have half its leaves falling out, and trying to mend or repair that super acidic stuff is terrible. A second point is that librarians are often the worst enemies of books (no offense to any librarian readers here). I have worked on loads of books where a library perforated their name onto the title page, stamped their name in big purple blotches throughout the book, or had a 300 year old book cheaply rebound in buckram by a commercial binder. These are not acts of loving care. Yes, major research/specialty libraries have staff conservators and hand binders. However, as this review makes clear, exactly what librarians deem worthy of that treatment changes over time. I recently put a period leather binding on a very valuable three volume set of Plato from 1578 that had been bound in mid 20th century black cloth. At least there were no library stamps or perforations.
I must confess that this book review made me quite upset. Not so much because of the content as much as the "conspiratorial tone": "Did you know that librarians are really trying to cheat you out of your precious paper copies? They are so bad!"
A few things -- I completed my MLS (Master in Library Science) in 2013. Since then, I have been doing my MA and then PhD in a different field and been reliant on library collections as a researcher. Librarians, with all there quirks -- and boy are there many -- are a lot more heroic than this lovely review likes to suggest. A few thoughts:
1.) To read this review is to believe that librarians were wholesale throwing out books left and right and that one can no longer find significant numbers of physical books anymore. Not true. The main "victim" of microfiching was always newspapers, not books. Libraries have been very careful to preserve physical copies of book collections. The only "books" where I haven't been able to find physical copies but have been able to find microfiche versions are of dissertations. (Which aren't books.)
2.) The book reviewer speaks of one of the defenders of doing microfilm: "His main argument is that libraries can’t keep everything...He doesn’t explain how libraries managed to find enough money to do exactly this up to the 1950s"
So, first, this involves an extreme underestimation of the exponential growth of library collections after the 1950s. This wasn't linear growth in the postwar period. This was massive, explosive, exponential growth. And space: let's talk about space, since this reviewer seems to think it is so plentiful.
Yes, space is always available to be purchased. But not always at the price and location where one wants it. For example: the New York Public Library long ago ran out of space. And space in Manhattan and the surrounding Burroughs has not been cheap. (They've even dug deep under Bryant Park behind the main branch to make space.) They ended up having storage in New Jersey -- because it was actually affordable. But this involves shipping materials back and forth and it can take a bit of time. And boy, do patrons get really mad when they can't get what they want and NOW! [Lest you think this only is a problem for the NYPL, think a bit about property prices in Washington, DC -- or Cambridge, MA -- the location of two other storied library collections in the US)
So second: Microfilm is as much about convenience -- I can get it now, I don't have to wait for it. Which is important for a world where patron (*cough* customer *cough*) is King/Queen. And New York Public Library just could not afford to keep half as many physical newspapers as it could microfiche in its main branch. [Btw, this convenience factor also extends to physical libraries in small Illinois towns where real estate is cheap such as the University of Illinois -- they also have remote storage]
And third: let's say that NY Public library did keep that Prague Newspaper Kafka published in in print form. They wouldn't dare ship it across the country to a university in South Carolina to allow a student there to look at it for her research. But they would allow microfiche to travel that distance. Because it was a copy. [Based loosely on a true story] Microfiche -- before the computer, before the Xerox machine -- this was also about democratization of access.
3.) Paper -- paper has its pros and its cons. We've just read a review of a book that fetishizes paper as the greatest of all media. And let's be fair: it is a great medium. No question. But as this review allows, but doesn't fully appreciate, not all paper is created equally. Important: not all newspapers used the same quality of paper. Let me just say that I have been in the bowels of a library and seen a crumbling newspaper that they wouldn't touch, because they hoped to figure out a way to preserve it for future generations and not hurt it before they secured the funding.
Yes, the New York Times provided a nice rag/cloth paper edition. That's nice. But do we lack access to copies to the NY Times today? Digital, microfiche or paper? This isn't about the NYTimes. This is about the radical Yiddish newspaper from Cleveland that ran for twenty years in the early twentieth century. And the queer independent newspaper that didn't pay its staff and had to get cheap paper to print-- "Rag what?" they would ask.
[I would also suggest someone look at Steven Hale's comment about wood pulp paper.]
4.) Destructive preservation: let's be clear, there were destructive forms of microfiching that took place. There are also destructive forms of digitalization -- although anyone who takes a course on this in library school today is informed that this is the nuclear option. And this was, in hindsight, not great. This is something that the library community -- the limited parts I have had access to -- regrets.
5.) But what is this review *really* about? I actually don't think this review is about microfiching as such. It is really about an anxiety about digitization. Although only briefly touched on in this review, I take this to be the real anxiety driving the hand-wringing about all those bad librarians throwing away books. (A brief look at the comments confirms this suspicion) And I understand the underlying anxiety: but I can't read my paper book anymore. I don't want to read an ebook. What happens if Amazon decides to delete my ebook from my Kindle! [Has happened] A simple internet search reveals how widespread this anxiety is. I understand these anxieties.
Yet paper fetishization can not allow us to be blind to the many virtues of digitization. (In my research, for instance, it allows me to search whole swaths of 19th- and 20th-century German-language Jewish newspapers and find things that I never could have even seen 15 years ago. And all without having to go to fifty different libraries that each only contain piecemeal collections of each of these newspapers.
And the need for lots of copies -- including of digitally-born products? Librarians are thinking about that, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS)
In sum, I apologize for this long post, but I think it's important to be a little less hysterical about librarians playing executioner with our precious collections. Preservation of and access to cultural products has never been more rampant, and we largely have librarians to thank for that. Have they made mistakes -- yes. But some of these mistakes start to look a lot less like blatant mistakes than like decisions with pros and cons if understand all the factors in play.
Wait, we use acid-free paper now? I've got plenty of books I bought in my teenage years (the first decade of the 21st century) and they are noticeably more yellow than the more recent ones.
This was fascinating, and the book review I have enjoyed the most so far. But it made me smile to think of film (I believe Kodak TechPan was developed for microfilming) being described as unreliable and fragile. I can't tell you how many digital photos I have lost through corruption, crashes and simple obsolescence of a file format! Yet I can scan or wet-print a negative or slide I took 50 years ago and have a perfect image.
Deaccessioning is hardly a problem unique to libraries. Museums have been embroiled in similar controversies, and people in the musem and library communities tend to take a very paternalistic tone on the matter.
They also tend to see their role as a pedagogical one aimed at the general public, with much less interest in preservation or appealing to specialists.
This review has produced a strange effect on me. I would ordinarily be sympathetic to the topic, I hate the destruction and disposal of items merely because they're old and out of the fashion, and the review broadly makes me agree that what is recounted as happening was indeed a tragedy.
And yet I disliked it. I think it's the tone - the reviewer seems to absolutely agree with Baker on all views. But I don't think that the librarians involved were uniquely and comprehensively all book-hating barbarians who only wanted an excuse to chop up and throw away old books, magazines and newspapers.
The reviewer says "How did Slow Fires get away with showing the dismemberment of rare items to the public? By pretending that nobody wants to be doing any of this." Well, how does the reviewer know they were pretending? I haven't seen this film, I have no idea if it was all performances and crocodile tears, but at least consider it possible that some of the people involved genuinely were regretful about the necessity (as they had been taught it was) to destroy the books in the process of recording them. Attributing ill-will and malice to *everyone* involved in the grand project is too much, I feel.
This is, after all, the lure of modernity. We are living in the Space Age! We have all this shiny tech! We want to prove we are modern and relevant! So here is the futuristic method of preserving and accessing material, why *wouldn't* we want to use it? Instead of multiple bulky copies of dusty papers taking up space, we can have modern clean microfilms that are easy (in theory) to store, share, and move. Besides, it's not like other places don't have copies of these, anyway, so what is the loss?
I challenge everyone here who ever threw out a newspaper: did you ever consider that in fifty years time a researcher might be dying to have an original copy of The Weekly World News or The National Enquirer? So we should be a little more sympathetic to people of the past.
Whether Baker or Cox are in the right, I can't say, but I can definitely see why Cox would want to fire off a rebuttal called "Vandals in the Stacks?" in response to the charge that all the librarians and archivists were no better than the Golden Horde descending on the Rus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%27
As to the ban on giving copies of discarded books to the public or even the shredded remains of the guillotined books, I wonder if it has something to do with the stripped books rule? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book I have definitely seen stripped books for resale in second hand book shops, even ones with "if this book has no cover, it cannot be offered for sale" type warnings included on the front pages. Also, there seems to be a tax rule about remaindered books and inventory that may affect the disposal of books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commissioner I do think libraries probably are covered by some kind of contract with publishers where they can't just give away old stock to the public.
I think I probably have some sympathies to the unfortunate guillotiners here, despite the grave error the entire project represented in destruction of original sources, because it's one of the perennial accusations against Christians by some subset of atheists: they destroyed all the books! as in this silly book (er, I may elsewhere have written something of a negative review about it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age
So it is proposed that the wicked and obsessed Christians deliberately destroyed as much of pagan Classical learning as they could because they were just that big of meanies. See palimpsests, which get much play in this debate - scraped off the genius works of old in order to write over them with boring old sermons! But the real explanation tends to be more complicated https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/the-disappearance-of-ancient-books/
So therefore my sympathies are invoked on behalf of the misguided who thought they were preserving by destroying and I am less inclined to ascribe to every single one of them a sinister policy of book-hating and deliberate, knowing, destruction.
Well-done review, but made me hate the original (unread by me) book 😀
I found the review as interesting and well-written as everyone else here. Just wanted to make a small point about Brasilia. By the most inclusive definition of skyscraper (at least 100m), Brasilia has only one of them (the Central Bank) or two (depending on whether Congress is considered 100m or 96m). If we adopt the definition of 150m, there are no skyscrapers at all.
Residential buildings are all six stories or less. Legend has it that the architects wanted a height such that all parents could call their kids at the street for lunch from the window.
Curiously, very few structures are ever torn down in Brasilia.
Not to be too nitpicky, but I'd point out that the "Obama memoir is more historically interesting than a wal mart catalog" is exactly backwards. I've read catalogs from 1883, and they're fascinating glimpses into the real lives experience of the people.
Not just what they bought, but how they spoke, viewed themselves, how they idealized themselves. What they desires and what ailed them.
I can't say I've ever bothered to learn jack about uh...
*Googles*
Chester A. Arthur. Couldn't tell you a damn thing about him.
Obama seems important now, but in 2250? He'll be as notable as Chester A. Arthur. He'll probably get a footnote as the first black president, but otherwise?
People barely learn about Teddy Roosevelt anymore, and he was an astounding president.
Great review! In my opinion the reviewer's message is profound. We should protect our legacy in all the ways possible. Thank you for trying to show us "the bigger picture".
I'm late but I really enjoyed this one and want to compliment the author. Great choice of book and outstanding review! The Book Review contest seems to be a huge hit, at least I am enjoying this a lot.
Late to the game, but excellent excellent review. Struck the perfect balance between coverage of the book, its critics, and personal opinion. Damn well written too.
This was surprisingly fascinating! The closest I've come to contacting this issue myself was that UC Berkeley required me to submit my dissertation on archival quality paper, but I think all years since mine (2008) have been allowed to submit electronically. I'm pretty sure someone is still producing an archival quality hard copy from those electronic submissions.
This is the one thing that makes me a bit hesitant to suggest that academic journals should switch to low-cost all-electronic open-access formats.
I knew there was something wrong with Baker's thesis when I read the book on its first coming out. Because when I was in library school in 1980, twenty years earlier, we were told that discarding the originals after microfilming them was a bad old idea that wasn't being done any more. Microfilming was for improving access (you can make copies of the microfilm and send them anywhere), not for preservation. De-acidification was the coming thing for preservation, at least then.
Baker also thoroughly misunderstands the double-fold test. He says that if you don't want the paper to break, just don't fold it that way. The idea of the double-fold test is as an early warning system, like the canary in the coal mine. It tells you which paper is most brittle and most needs attention.
I think more than one person has pointed out that, from the strict point of view of preservation, paper beats almost anything, including film and electronic storage. A well-tended well-made built will easily survive with 100% of its information intact for 200 or more years. That is certainly not true of *any* film and *any* form of digital storage. (In terms of digital storage, beyond ordinary bit-rot for any magnetic medium we have the problem of the technology needed to read even things like pressed CD-ROMs vanishing. Anyone with 5" floppy disks formatted in some ancient DOS format knows this.)
> When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked.
You're going to use approval voting [or similar], right, not actually just "vote for your single favorite" with all the problems that entails...?
Solid review, checks all the boxes:
- Presents something I didn't know I was interested in and makes me interested in it
- Provides a solid & readable summary of the book's best arguments
- Contextualizes it for the modern reader and addresses some common criticisms
- Assesses what the reviewer's own conclusion on the matter was
I noticed in a post once that the Internet Archive goes out of its way not to guillotine material and has a fancy and presumably more expensive scanner that works page by page and requires a manual operator, wouldn't be surprised to see if they've read this book or just came to the same opinions on the matter.
This made me pause tonight's tasks. Very interesting read!
I stopped reading this review twice, because I became so enraged. To me, this is culture wars material. I have seen university librarians reduce the size of the collections to create more "thinking space", or because a new online system was expensive or we needed more computer labs for students who already own computers. One local library reduced its collection simply because they reduced the height of the shelves in order to serve the Frank Lloyd Wright aesthetic of the beautiful new building.
This review reminded me of two stellar short works by librarian Peter Briscoe: Reading the Map of Knowledge which concerns the art of librarianship and is a paean to those glorious few librarians who love real physical books and do themselves read voraciously. He also wrote an elegiac novella called "The Best Read Man in France" about a book collector who has been putting together a rare collection of North and South American Early Colonial Scientific Treatises and Researches by Jesuits. It's a melancholic meditation on the fate of historical knowledge in modern society.
How did you make this so thrilling to read? Its an argument about proper data storage and how fast acidic paper decays. And a methodological point that how they tested paper longevity was biased. I should not have been excited while reading this, but I was. I kept expecting somehow to shout Objection! or confess betrayal on a rooftop in the middle of a storm.
Thanks, this is interesting.
Oh my! That was beautiful, and tragic. Thank you. As an undergrad in late 70's I spent much free time prowling the stacks of my university library.
I have not read the book reviewed here ("Double Fold"), but this review makes it sound pretty one sided, and the review does not challenge it.
There does seem to be a consensus today that "destructive preservation" was a bad idea, but there is very little consideration here of economic and logistical pressures which presumably pushed (some) librarians in that direction.
Regarding dumpster books today, my understanding is that these days the large majority of de-accessioned books in the USA are sold or donated to at-scale efforts like Better World Books, who sort and variously re-distribute internationally; sell used on Amazon; donate to other libraries; destroy/recycle a final fraction of books. If you look in the dumpsters it is mostly best sellers from decades past, of which there are hundreds of thousands of duplicate unwanted copies. It seems pretty efficient and heterogeneous (eg, "the market", librarians, independent organizations, and collectors all get to take a pass before something gets binned).
Nick Basbane's book "Patience and Fortitude" (2001; strong recommend overall if you skip any chapters boring to you) has some segments in the final section ("Book Places") about weeding into off-site warehouses, preservation (microfilming and digitization), and the SFPL main branch. Basbane is ultimately on the "keep books", but I thought presented both sides of several debates reasonably.
"Edition of One" (1990, available to borrow at https://archive.org/details/editionofoneauto0000powe) is the autobiography Eugene Power, who founded University Microfilm (now ProQuest) in Ann Arbor, and was involved in the early days of microfilm as a business. Interesting history, though there is a lot of personal history to skim over. The early days seem to have centered around microfilm as a distribution and low-cost publishing tech, as opposed to preservation and paper-replacement.
My wife, formerly a librarian for King County (the nation's largest library system), had never heard of this book, which has me wondering exactly how ubiquitous the book is among the profession.
Brief review-of-the-review:
I appreciated the effort to take a position here while giving the other side's arguments their due. I'm sympathetic to the position, too-- take that, High Modernists! But I think it's oversold a little here. The loss of old materials is frustrating but not a horrific harm to human flourishing in the way that, say, urban planning and agriculture policy can be. Also, the advent of good color digitization makes the microfilmers look basically right in principle, though 50-some years premature. Modern computers get around all of the microfilm drawbacks that the review mentions. Even so, this was a very effective, readable summary of Double Fold and a fun window into a bit of history and society that I had no idea existed.
Wow, I was just talking about *Double Fold* on the phone with a friend last night (!!).
I loved the extra context and analysis that this review offered. Really a terrific and thought-provoking discussion.
This reminds me of various things:
(1) I remember feeling that Baker underrated digital scanning, which could be done to much higher standards than microfilm scanning, producing a much more usable, accurate, and appealing version of a book's content. I think this has proven true; even though most of his attack is against microfilm, I recall that he was also pessimistic on digitization, which seems like a criticism that hasn't aged as well. There are legitimate criticisms of digitization, but it's mostly been a humongous improvement compared to microfilm.
(2) The part of the book that explains that older paper is *much more durable* than, um, middle-aged paper—as the review explains—came as a big revelation to me, since I'd seen cheap pulp paperbacks falling apart in my hands at merely 40 or 50 years of age, but meanwhile my father's bookstore had books that were hundreds of years old that seemed pretty much fine. Since our intuition about most things is that older will translate to more fragile and worse condition, this is really important and counterintuitive even for people who like books a lot but have never studied paper or preservation.
After reading Baker's explanation, I've pondered and mentioned to friends that the oldest book I own (the New Testament in Greek edited by Mills, published 1787 in London) is totally fine and you can easily read it by hand just as you would read any modern book. This despite the fact that it's *the same age as the U.S. constitution*. (It was rebound in cloth, in what looks to me like the 1940s or so.) This is a powerful reminder of Baker's point that eighteenth and nineteenth century paper is *awesome*.
(3) I remember the librarians' anger at Baker over this book. I met one librarian when this came out who said "this man who writes softcore porn has a lot of presumption in telling librarians how to be custodians of culture", or words closely to that effect. (This is a reference to *The Fermata*, Baker's 1994 erotic timestopping novel.) According to my friend who works for a major library system, some librarians have never forgiven Baker and still feel offended by his criticisms to this day.
(4) Regarding the dumpster issue:
> Many other books were, however, simply trashed. As a combination of bizarre rules, bureaucratic stubbornness, fear of publicity, and simple inertia, it’s apparently very rare for American libraries to simply donate discarded books to the public. Sometimes the books are sold, but usually they are thrown into the dumpster, regardless of their value.
My father was able to save a lot of books by discreetly asking librarians when they were going to put deaccessioned books into the dumpster. I think he said that, if he asked nicely, they would even put the books *next to* the dumpster rather than inside it. Presumably everything about this varies a lot from library to library—in terms of the quality, condition, and scarcity of what's deaccessioned, how the individual librarians feel about it, and how willing they are to cooperate with people who want to grab the books and give them a new home—but the "fear of publicity" part rings true to me. I think the librarians my father knew did not feel that any book lover would like to see, or even think of, books put out in the trash, even as a result of a reasoned deliberation by librarians about how best to serve library users.
I don't know how deaccessioning has changed over time, but it may still be possible in some places to ask for a heads-up and try to grab some of the books on their way out. I still have the impression it would be best to be discreet about that! But I bet computer cataloguing and online retailing have somewhat reduced the extent to which rare books end up in the trash, because it's so much easier today to check whether something is unusual and/or economically valuable.
FWIW, this claim appears to be false: "After 20 years, the book remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among librarians."
I'm a public librarian by trade, I've never heard of this book, nor heard anyone discuss it, or even it subject matter. Doesn't mean it isn't known by many, but clearly not universal.
I have a Library Science degree, and there are some constraining factors here. Just adding more shelf space is a lot harder than this makes it sound, and most library systems have *no money* for this. The librarians know the last time someone looked at an item in their collection; quite often it’s been decades. They can’t keep all of this copious, bulky material at the expense of new titles and risk stagnation. They have nowhere to put the damn stuff and no one will give you money to build infinite climate-controlled warehouses for books and papers that haven’t been checked out in decades.
How did libraries manage to do it before 1950? In the early 1900s, there were about 10,000 unique titles issued by recognized publishing houses in the US each year. That number in 2010 was over 300,000. Add in all the niche, indie and on-demand titles and you’re talking millions of titles. Every year. And that’s just books.
Is paper still the best storage medium going? Of course. Is it a tragedy to lose the entire run of a paper due to technical or coordination failures? Absolutely. But I don’t believe it’s physically possible for even the most well-heeled and interconnected system of libraries to keep everything we’ve been generating for decades, especially when those materials have been sought out by exactly no one in a human lifetime. The alternative to preservation by destruction in most cases wasn’t preservation, it was just flat out destruction.
Thrilled to see this almost forgotten book reviewed. The microfilming insanity was on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and Baker is a true hero. I was stunned while I read the original, and then stunned again at the vicious response by the library community. It ended my love of librarians.
Has anyone looked into deep learning based super resolution systems? Baker's juxtaposition of the full color and the black-and-white blobs could be used as training data.
I wonder to what extent the events chronicled here inspired Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End." A major plot arc of Rainbows End is a slightly-futuristic version of this: books being outright shredded, because the cheapest way to digitize books was to scan the shredda and geometrically reconstruct the pages.
The National Library of Australia has a very nice online collection of newspapers, imperfectly OCRed: e.g. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/126584988
I remember going to the library with my family as an elementary school-age child. Once I'd found the Red Dwarf VHS I wanted to check out and bring home, I had little to do. I usually ended up at the microfiche machines scanning through archived versions of our local news paper looking for the funny pages.
Maybe the technology was better by then (1990s), but I don't recall finding the images to be of low quality or difficult to read.
I'm not convinced.
I've never seen much empty shelf space at a library. Approximately every volume acquired means a volume let go. Microfilming it first is better than not.
The dominant use of microfilm was newspapers. They were printed on the cheapest paper of the day and they don't do the anaerobic thing as well as books. For that matter, they don't sit neatly on a shelf like books. And they're an absolute nightmare to re-assemble if some reader is less than careful. I remain unconvinced that a century of newspapers in their original form was ever a practical thing for a library to make available.
Microfilm may not have been a great format, but it's what was available and it's easy to scan to something more modern.
I see community libraries getting rid of books on a weekly basis. Twenty years ago when I worked shelving books in a local library, that library went by the date the book had last been checked out. I don't remember how long, but I think it was five years. If something wasn't checked out in that length of time it was "donated" to their nonprofit auxiliary where they were sold in a yard-sale type environment. I don't know what happened to the ones nobody bought.
I took a writing class from a less-well-known author in the 1990s. In that library in the early 2000s there were several of his books. In 2013 there were two and by 2019, one.
Where I live now, there are three trucks of "free" books out in front of the library doors every day. I don't know how fast they disappear, but I look at them once every few months and there is near-complete replacement. At least these are not being thrown out.
Last year I found a book of local history, created by a large group of volunteers and published in the 1980s by a community organization which no longer exists. It is an amazing book. It has a library of congress catalog number but is long, long out of print. The local community would benefit from this book but there it was being given away. I am confident in guessing that it was never digitized, and being that it was made 40 years ago, the people who were old when it was written and committing their personal knowledge to paper are probably long gone.
Whatever the profession says about their success, at least in Turkey, https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/15/europe/garbage-collectors-open-library-with-abandoned-books#:~:text=Garbage%20collectors%20in%20the%20Turkish,workers%20started%20collecting%20discarded%20books.
I can't find the citation but a few years ago I read online about the digital archives of a UK newspaper that had been focused on labor issues. They put the back issues online and threw out the paper ones. Then, IIRC, something happened with their web hosting and they chose to delete a bunch of those issues entirely, thus removing that perspective on UK labor history from the record entirely. What I read insinuated that the current leader of the organization wanted it that way. I'll keep looking for the link.
Good book review. Only I think I either needed less, or more, about Cox's rebuttal.
I am a hand bookbinder. I have done complete restorations on books from the 15th century to today. A couple of points I know from personal experience. One is that the wood pulp paper that was common for a century-plus starting in the early 1800s is complete garbage. Yes, if readers were super careful with the book, it was seldom handled, and it was always properly stored, it would still be OK. But a well-loved adventure book from the turn of the century will have half its leaves falling out, and trying to mend or repair that super acidic stuff is terrible. A second point is that librarians are often the worst enemies of books (no offense to any librarian readers here). I have worked on loads of books where a library perforated their name onto the title page, stamped their name in big purple blotches throughout the book, or had a 300 year old book cheaply rebound in buckram by a commercial binder. These are not acts of loving care. Yes, major research/specialty libraries have staff conservators and hand binders. However, as this review makes clear, exactly what librarians deem worthy of that treatment changes over time. I recently put a period leather binding on a very valuable three volume set of Plato from 1578 that had been bound in mid 20th century black cloth. At least there were no library stamps or perforations.
I must confess that this book review made me quite upset. Not so much because of the content as much as the "conspiratorial tone": "Did you know that librarians are really trying to cheat you out of your precious paper copies? They are so bad!"
A few things -- I completed my MLS (Master in Library Science) in 2013. Since then, I have been doing my MA and then PhD in a different field and been reliant on library collections as a researcher. Librarians, with all there quirks -- and boy are there many -- are a lot more heroic than this lovely review likes to suggest. A few thoughts:
1.) To read this review is to believe that librarians were wholesale throwing out books left and right and that one can no longer find significant numbers of physical books anymore. Not true. The main "victim" of microfiching was always newspapers, not books. Libraries have been very careful to preserve physical copies of book collections. The only "books" where I haven't been able to find physical copies but have been able to find microfiche versions are of dissertations. (Which aren't books.)
2.) The book reviewer speaks of one of the defenders of doing microfilm: "His main argument is that libraries can’t keep everything...He doesn’t explain how libraries managed to find enough money to do exactly this up to the 1950s"
So, first, this involves an extreme underestimation of the exponential growth of library collections after the 1950s. This wasn't linear growth in the postwar period. This was massive, explosive, exponential growth. And space: let's talk about space, since this reviewer seems to think it is so plentiful.
Yes, space is always available to be purchased. But not always at the price and location where one wants it. For example: the New York Public Library long ago ran out of space. And space in Manhattan and the surrounding Burroughs has not been cheap. (They've even dug deep under Bryant Park behind the main branch to make space.) They ended up having storage in New Jersey -- because it was actually affordable. But this involves shipping materials back and forth and it can take a bit of time. And boy, do patrons get really mad when they can't get what they want and NOW! [Lest you think this only is a problem for the NYPL, think a bit about property prices in Washington, DC -- or Cambridge, MA -- the location of two other storied library collections in the US)
So second: Microfilm is as much about convenience -- I can get it now, I don't have to wait for it. Which is important for a world where patron (*cough* customer *cough*) is King/Queen. And New York Public Library just could not afford to keep half as many physical newspapers as it could microfiche in its main branch. [Btw, this convenience factor also extends to physical libraries in small Illinois towns where real estate is cheap such as the University of Illinois -- they also have remote storage]
And third: let's say that NY Public library did keep that Prague Newspaper Kafka published in in print form. They wouldn't dare ship it across the country to a university in South Carolina to allow a student there to look at it for her research. But they would allow microfiche to travel that distance. Because it was a copy. [Based loosely on a true story] Microfiche -- before the computer, before the Xerox machine -- this was also about democratization of access.
3.) Paper -- paper has its pros and its cons. We've just read a review of a book that fetishizes paper as the greatest of all media. And let's be fair: it is a great medium. No question. But as this review allows, but doesn't fully appreciate, not all paper is created equally. Important: not all newspapers used the same quality of paper. Let me just say that I have been in the bowels of a library and seen a crumbling newspaper that they wouldn't touch, because they hoped to figure out a way to preserve it for future generations and not hurt it before they secured the funding.
Yes, the New York Times provided a nice rag/cloth paper edition. That's nice. But do we lack access to copies to the NY Times today? Digital, microfiche or paper? This isn't about the NYTimes. This is about the radical Yiddish newspaper from Cleveland that ran for twenty years in the early twentieth century. And the queer independent newspaper that didn't pay its staff and had to get cheap paper to print-- "Rag what?" they would ask.
[I would also suggest someone look at Steven Hale's comment about wood pulp paper.]
4.) Destructive preservation: let's be clear, there were destructive forms of microfiching that took place. There are also destructive forms of digitalization -- although anyone who takes a course on this in library school today is informed that this is the nuclear option. And this was, in hindsight, not great. This is something that the library community -- the limited parts I have had access to -- regrets.
5.) But what is this review *really* about? I actually don't think this review is about microfiching as such. It is really about an anxiety about digitization. Although only briefly touched on in this review, I take this to be the real anxiety driving the hand-wringing about all those bad librarians throwing away books. (A brief look at the comments confirms this suspicion) And I understand the underlying anxiety: but I can't read my paper book anymore. I don't want to read an ebook. What happens if Amazon decides to delete my ebook from my Kindle! [Has happened] A simple internet search reveals how widespread this anxiety is. I understand these anxieties.
Yet paper fetishization can not allow us to be blind to the many virtues of digitization. (In my research, for instance, it allows me to search whole swaths of 19th- and 20th-century German-language Jewish newspapers and find things that I never could have even seen 15 years ago. And all without having to go to fifty different libraries that each only contain piecemeal collections of each of these newspapers.
And the need for lots of copies -- including of digitally-born products? Librarians are thinking about that, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS)
In sum, I apologize for this long post, but I think it's important to be a little less hysterical about librarians playing executioner with our precious collections. Preservation of and access to cultural products has never been more rampant, and we largely have librarians to thank for that. Have they made mistakes -- yes. But some of these mistakes start to look a lot less like blatant mistakes than like decisions with pros and cons if understand all the factors in play.
Wait, we use acid-free paper now? I've got plenty of books I bought in my teenage years (the first decade of the 21st century) and they are noticeably more yellow than the more recent ones.
Another very solid review! I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries including a few hours scrolling microfiche so I enjoyed the behind the scenes look.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)
2nd Double Fold
4th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
5th Order Without Law
6th Why Buddhism is True
This was fascinating, and the book review I have enjoyed the most so far. But it made me smile to think of film (I believe Kodak TechPan was developed for microfilming) being described as unreliable and fragile. I can't tell you how many digital photos I have lost through corruption, crashes and simple obsolescence of a file format! Yet I can scan or wet-print a negative or slide I took 50 years ago and have a perfect image.
Deaccessioning is hardly a problem unique to libraries. Museums have been embroiled in similar controversies, and people in the musem and library communities tend to take a very paternalistic tone on the matter.
They also tend to see their role as a pedagogical one aimed at the general public, with much less interest in preservation or appealing to specialists.
This review has produced a strange effect on me. I would ordinarily be sympathetic to the topic, I hate the destruction and disposal of items merely because they're old and out of the fashion, and the review broadly makes me agree that what is recounted as happening was indeed a tragedy.
And yet I disliked it. I think it's the tone - the reviewer seems to absolutely agree with Baker on all views. But I don't think that the librarians involved were uniquely and comprehensively all book-hating barbarians who only wanted an excuse to chop up and throw away old books, magazines and newspapers.
The reviewer says "How did Slow Fires get away with showing the dismemberment of rare items to the public? By pretending that nobody wants to be doing any of this." Well, how does the reviewer know they were pretending? I haven't seen this film, I have no idea if it was all performances and crocodile tears, but at least consider it possible that some of the people involved genuinely were regretful about the necessity (as they had been taught it was) to destroy the books in the process of recording them. Attributing ill-will and malice to *everyone* involved in the grand project is too much, I feel.
This is, after all, the lure of modernity. We are living in the Space Age! We have all this shiny tech! We want to prove we are modern and relevant! So here is the futuristic method of preserving and accessing material, why *wouldn't* we want to use it? Instead of multiple bulky copies of dusty papers taking up space, we can have modern clean microfilms that are easy (in theory) to store, share, and move. Besides, it's not like other places don't have copies of these, anyway, so what is the loss?
I challenge everyone here who ever threw out a newspaper: did you ever consider that in fifty years time a researcher might be dying to have an original copy of The Weekly World News or The National Enquirer? So we should be a little more sympathetic to people of the past.
Whether Baker or Cox are in the right, I can't say, but I can definitely see why Cox would want to fire off a rebuttal called "Vandals in the Stacks?" in response to the charge that all the librarians and archivists were no better than the Golden Horde descending on the Rus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%27
As to the ban on giving copies of discarded books to the public or even the shredded remains of the guillotined books, I wonder if it has something to do with the stripped books rule? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book I have definitely seen stripped books for resale in second hand book shops, even ones with "if this book has no cover, it cannot be offered for sale" type warnings included on the front pages. Also, there seems to be a tax rule about remaindered books and inventory that may affect the disposal of books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commissioner I do think libraries probably are covered by some kind of contract with publishers where they can't just give away old stock to the public.
I think I probably have some sympathies to the unfortunate guillotiners here, despite the grave error the entire project represented in destruction of original sources, because it's one of the perennial accusations against Christians by some subset of atheists: they destroyed all the books! as in this silly book (er, I may elsewhere have written something of a negative review about it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age
So it is proposed that the wicked and obsessed Christians deliberately destroyed as much of pagan Classical learning as they could because they were just that big of meanies. See palimpsests, which get much play in this debate - scraped off the genius works of old in order to write over them with boring old sermons! But the real explanation tends to be more complicated https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/the-disappearance-of-ancient-books/
So therefore my sympathies are invoked on behalf of the misguided who thought they were preserving by destroying and I am less inclined to ascribe to every single one of them a sinister policy of book-hating and deliberate, knowing, destruction.
Well-done review, but made me hate the original (unread by me) book 😀
This is a nice video showing how the Internet Archive digitizes books, with more info in the comments:
https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1358090982189719552
I found the review as interesting and well-written as everyone else here. Just wanted to make a small point about Brasilia. By the most inclusive definition of skyscraper (at least 100m), Brasilia has only one of them (the Central Bank) or two (depending on whether Congress is considered 100m or 96m). If we adopt the definition of 150m, there are no skyscrapers at all.
Residential buildings are all six stories or less. Legend has it that the architects wanted a height such that all parents could call their kids at the street for lunch from the window.
Curiously, very few structures are ever torn down in Brasilia.
The internet and scanners have existed for a quarter of a century now. Why isn't everything digitized and available for free on the internet yet?
Not to be too nitpicky, but I'd point out that the "Obama memoir is more historically interesting than a wal mart catalog" is exactly backwards. I've read catalogs from 1883, and they're fascinating glimpses into the real lives experience of the people.
Not just what they bought, but how they spoke, viewed themselves, how they idealized themselves. What they desires and what ailed them.
I can't say I've ever bothered to learn jack about uh...
*Googles*
Chester A. Arthur. Couldn't tell you a damn thing about him.
Obama seems important now, but in 2250? He'll be as notable as Chester A. Arthur. He'll probably get a footnote as the first black president, but otherwise?
People barely learn about Teddy Roosevelt anymore, and he was an astounding president.
I refer to you to 5 Sustainable Alternatives to Paper.
Going somewhat meta: I'm astounded at the number of librarians & archivists in the ACX readership.
Great review! In my opinion the reviewer's message is profound. We should protect our legacy in all the ways possible. Thank you for trying to show us "the bigger picture".
I'm late but I really enjoyed this one and want to compliment the author. Great choice of book and outstanding review! The Book Review contest seems to be a huge hit, at least I am enjoying this a lot.
call that Farenheit 451 lmao
Late to the game, but excellent excellent review. Struck the perfect balance between coverage of the book, its critics, and personal opinion. Damn well written too.