Thugs vs. Pansies
I've just finished an odd book called Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, by Nicholson Baker (New York : Random House, 2001). It's an unexpected polemic against the destruction of books by libraries which in itself sounds odd.
Baker traces the rise of the idea of "brittle books" and the response to it. Beginning in the 1950s with claims that newspapers were crumbling because of acidic paper, many libraries, led by the Library of Congress and government funding, began microfilming and then destroying their newspaper archives. In the next decade they moved on, heaping hysteria on the idea of "brittle books" that were "turning to dust" in order to create an emergency that would feed federal funds from congress to their microfilming operations. Well, it turned out that the newspapers and the books weren't turning to dust, but that librarians with an administrative bent felt quite proud at having staved off the necessity for a few years of building new shelves to house their collections. There's more at my Science Besieged book note about it all.
Anyway, one catch-phrase for this operation was "destroying to preserve", since the bound newspapers and "brittle books" had their spines sheared off to make microfilming more efficient, after which the pages were discarded. This led to the rise of the technical distinction — not readily recognized to the lay person, much to the advantage of the leading microfilmers — between "conservation", in which physical books were treated with care to keep them intact; and "preservation", in which it was the text that was to be preserved, not the physical book.
This is all somewhat lengthy preparation for this little anecdote that amused me, about the battle between "thugs" and "pansies".
In the early eighties [i.e., 1980s], Wesley Boomgarden briefly ran the preservation-microfilming operation at the New York Public Library, where his crew filmed more than two million pages, or ten thousand book and journal volumes, per year ("a lot of material from the Jewish division," Boomgarden recalls, "a lot of material from Slavonic"); now he is the preservation officer at Ohio State. In 1988, writing in the pages of an anthology called Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, Boomgarden nicely captured the tension that existed between preservers and conservators:
When my hard-working preservation microfilming staff wheeled truck after truck of brittle volumes into the conservation laboratory each week–to use thei r"low tech" power cutter in the process of cutting off spines to make filming easer, faster, cheaper, and better–they were villified [sic] by the conservation shop staff and called "thugs" who were destroying books in order to save tyhem. And, because of the accusers' pitiful statistics in conserving those minute numbers of dainty things–we "thugs" in turn labeled our conservation studio colleagues as "pansies."
[pp. 109–110]