The Way the World Works: Essays (15 page)

What was the source of this thinking? There was one especially influential person some of you may have heard about. His name was Fremont Rider, head librarian at Wesleyan. Rider’s first book, published in 1909, was about the amazing discoveries of spirit rappings and table turnings and levitation
—
he felt these things deserved serious study and that the tables did in fact turn. He wrote pulp fiction and he was the managing editor of
Library Journal,
and when he went bankrupt in 1929 after a manic episode in which he spent a small fortune founding a high-society supper club on Long Island, he wrote an indignant pamphlet in which he said that people were fed up with being indebted to banks, and they wanted a new deal. He sent the pamphlet to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Roosevelt shot him back a letter with a handwritten note saying you’re right
—
keep it up!—and then a few months later Roosevelt, in his nomination speech, pledged himself to a New Deal for the American People. So Fremont Rider was an influential person—and his new deal for librarians was this: make or buy microcopies of your book collection, sell off the book collection to dealers at scrap prices, and you will make, in his words, “an actual cash profit on the substitution.” You’ll enrich your library by getting rid of its books. Rider got the Librarian of Congress
and the Deputy Librarian of Congress and the head librarian at Michigan and the head librarian at Harvard and other big-time leaders all over the library world to blurb his book and serve on his Microcard committee. It’s a mathematical fact that book collections double every sixteen years, Rider said (he was wrong about that), and if we didn’t start buying Fremont Rider’s Microcard reading machines and selling off the collections, the stacks were going to overrun the entire square footage of New Jersey. Building a storage warehouse was, according to Rider, “a confession of past failure”—it was unmanly, somehow.

This way of thinking continues in some circles, and it was very powerful in the 1980s, when the Library of Congress had high hopes for its optical disk pilot project, which could, according to the Deputy Librarian, squeeze down the library’s three buildings to one. But the optical disk pilot program didn’t work out—nobody uses those big platters anymore—and over the past decade or so, some enlightened librarians have begun to accept the fact that the easiest way to keep a research collection is to keep the research collection. There is no shame in growth—it is not a confession of failure. Putting up shelves sufficient to hold what’s there is the crucially important primary task that research libraries must fulfill—they must do this because no other institutions, public or private, can be depended on to keep these things—the obscure things, the cumbersome things that even though they’re used only once in ten years or thirty years or fifty years are valuable because they are what people published and read. To a researcher, the fact that something is little used is a positive attribute—if a photo editor for a documentary on, say, Ellis Island pages through a forgotten autobiography and finds a picture that has never been reproduced before, she
is overjoyed, because the picture is interesting,
and
because it is unused. We till around in great collections looking for things that have lain unnoticed—the urge to search through obscurity is basic to scholarship. And if the research libraries don’t keep it—don’t keep copies of the stuff that we as a people publish—nobody else is going to do it. It just won’t happen. We can’t depend on businesses to save our past. The
New York Times
has kept no run of its own paper, for instance.

We understand why fragile old flags and old presidential letters are valuable as things—we don’t believe that taking a snapshot of Plymouth Rock amounts to a “reformatting” of Plymouth Rock, and after some long and painful decades of urban renewal we’re doing better with old mills and train stations. There are very nice postcards of Whistler’s painting of a woman in a white dress for sale in museum giftshops, but Whistler’s woman in white is still on the wall. Storage! That’s what this building is about. Keep it cool, keep it dry, but above all—keep it. Nice going, Duke.

(2001)

An Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America

E
arly one morning not long ago, I put on my coat over my pajamas and went out to the end of the driveway to get the paper. It was in a blue bag that said “The New York Times Home Delivery Service,” and “Warning: Keep This Plastic Bag Away From Children.” The bag’s knot was untiable—tied by the deliveryman in the knowledge that each recipient would tear it open and pour out the newspaper, which I did when I got inside. The paper was curled around itself, and when I opened it and began paging through it I could feel in every section the timed-release coolness that is always associated with newsprint. You keep getting outside air on your hands as you read. Newsprint is its own insulation. A single page makes a rattling sound when you turn it, but the whole issue is quiet, muffled by its own layered pulp.

Because newspapers are such patchworks of visual miscellaneousness, we read them differently than we read books, which are, except for an occasional excursion to check a footnote, linear experiences. The newspaper’s front page is both binding and title page at once, and it offers its above-the-fold headlines first, so big, often, that you take them in without even knowing you’re reading them—and then the underworld below the fold comes up out of the shadows into view with a quick turn of the wrist. Next the unfolding begins, and once you open up a section and hear the rattly sounds of the singled-out pages, the rest of the world falls away—the newspaper is so big now that it becomes the landscape. Your eye loops and leaps, lighting on a photo and then dropping to read the caption and then circling to find the article that is associated with it; and you jump from page one to an inner page to finish the article, and then hop across to the adjacent page while you’re there, where you notice an ad with a funny image and an article that looks interesting that is continued from page one, and so you return to page one. And when you turn the page, you don’t turn it as you would turn a book page—you close the whole paper and hand off the right-hand page to the left hand—and then you open the paper again. And at the top of every page is the date: all this happened now.

That constant assertion of nowness is precisely what is so appealing and instructive about old newspapers, yellowing and fragile though they may be. Great libraries turned the newspapers into books—big, heavy books with, in some cases, vellum corners and marbled boards—by binding fifteen or thirty consecutive todays in one. And then the policy changed, beginning in the ’50s, and the libraries got rid of most of their twentieth-century newspaper collections—meaning that the
remaining runs are unspeakably rare, rarer than early Chaucers or Dantes. We are very close to losing our own twentieth century. So what I’ve been doing is opening volumes up and taking pictures of pages that interest me. Like a microfilmer of the 1930s, I’ve set up a digital imaging workstation, which consists of a wooden pallet on the floor over which I’ve put a sheet of plywood and some foam core and some white banner paper from Staples. For lighting I use the clamp-on utility lights that you can buy for five dollars apiece at the hardware store; these are supported by an old coat tree and a cast-off intravenous drip-bag stand on rollers. I could use the tripod to steady the camera, but I don’t, because you have to be able to make tiny angle adjustments that are clumsy with a tripod. I just bend over the open volume and frame the picture and hold my breath and try not to quiver at the wrong moment and I end up with a reasonably good four-megapixel digital picture. Now, a four-megapixel picture is better than a three-megapixel picture, and it is in color, but the resolution isn’t as good as 1940s black-and-white microfilm. But even if I had a four-hundred-megapixel camera, and could record from five feet up the ink-slippage marks on each Linotyped line, and the faint fuzz of paper-hairs that fringe a tiny tear in the margin, would I feel that I had successfully reformatted the pages and could now throw them away? Of course not. I like old things because they are old—their oldness and their fragility is part of what they have to say. They hold the record of the time in which they were printed, and the record of the years that have passed between that time and now. The copying of an old thing is, or should be, like the publishing of a scholarly edition, an act of homage to the physical source from which one is working—a way of saying thank you for holding the riches you hold.

So anyway, I’ve been taking lots of pictures; I enjoy doing it, because when you take a picture of something, you are forced to think about only it for a little while. You draw a mental frame around it, with the help of the camera’s viewfinder, and everything else recedes, and after a minute or two, the thing that you’re photographing takes on a fetching particularity—one page in a universe of possible pages. As a result of this camerawork, I have done a great deal of a certain kind of newspaper reading, and I am full of little ill-digested snippets of knowledge about 1898 and 1903 and 1939—and a feeling has grown in me that is difficult to convey. It’s a sort of primitive amazement at how incredibly much has gone on. So much has happened. Massive numbers of named people have done an enormous number of things—some good, some horrible—and each good or horrible thing is potentially interesting. My head is crawling with old headlines—
SUSAN B. ANTHONY SAYS THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN POLYGAMY,
from the front page of the New York
World
at the turn of the century, or
ONE WOMAN AND A THOUSAND RATS,
also from the
World
, about a woman who raised rats and guinea pigs to sell to laboratories. And from the
Chicago Tribune
in 1909,
HOW SUFFRAGE MADE ME BEAUTIFUL
. Around 1900 there was a tiny, two-paragraph article entitled
WILD EYED MAN ATE STAMPS
. A man became deranged and ate some stamps—that was the article.

I have read articles on opium dens in New York and on how John D. Rockefeller acted in church, and I’ve come across stories by P. G. Wodehouse and F. Scott Fitzgerald, poems by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Frost and Dorothy Parker, essays by Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, war dispatches by Stephen Crane, and I have a better notion of the grain of the past, the texture and rhythm of events, which
is, I think, a prerequisite to doing many kinds of history. But I’m not a historian. I’m just someone who thinks that what historians do is important, and that they ought to be able to consult, if they have a mind to, what we as a nation published and read, and read in huge numbers.

Is there any publication that has had so wide a readership—that has entered so many people’s lives at precisely the same time? Somewhere between half a million and a million copies of a big-city paper like Pulitzer’s
World
, or the
Chicago Tribune,
went out every day. A million people read the
Tribune
’s headline from 1945,
BOMB FOUR DOOMED JAP CITIES,
and saw its front-page color cartoons, with their drawings of the Jap Buster Bomb. If you look at that page on microfilm, it seems to come from very long ago. It is lost in a rainstorm of scratches. Its words are heard through static, its immediacy is destroyed, and you think therefore that the people who read that paper must have been entirely different creatures than we are. But they weren’t.

Again, think of the number of copies.
Life
magazine had a huge circulation at midcentury—five million—but that was five million copies per month. The
Chicago Tribune
printed six times that many copies every month. And each daily issue had much more in it—more brute wordage, more advertising, more miscellaneousness, more rough edges—than
Life
. Not that
Life
isn’t fascinating, of course. But there are hundreds of bound runs of
Life
magazine in research libraries today. No long runs of the
Chicago Tribune
survive in libraries, and none of the twentieth-century New York
World
, and even the
New York Times,
especially the real
Times,
and not the rag-paper library edition, which though it cost more for libraries to subscribe to wasn’t nearly as well printed, is on the edge of total oblivion. Hands placed all those tiny want
ads, each representing some particular human want, the stories were typeset piecemeal by hundreds of compositors, and when they heard “Give it away” they knew to space out the remaining lines of Linotype so as to use up the rest of the column, and when the composing was done, the compositors clamped their three-hundred-pound forms tight and watched them roll away. All the editors and composers could proofread at high speed upside down and backward. Pulpy paper squashed over the forms, making a mold for more molten lead, and the curved plates were clamped to the presses and the paper began writhing through, twenty million or more sheets cut and folded each day, leaving those softly fluted edges that a newspaper has, and then bundlers tied them and truckers drove off into the city with them and they went out, hitting the sidewalk near the newsstand with a whoomp of something heavy—a big cube of todayness. Every day it happened. No matter what is in a newspaper, even if every word is untrue, we know for sure that these particular words and drawings and pictures happened—were published—on that day—and that is a precious sort of elementary knowledge to have.

(2002)

Written for the 150th-Anniversary Issue of the
New York Times

B
eing a backward-looking person, I was curious to know what the
New York Times
was like in 1951, on its last big birthday. I happen to have handy an original bound run of the newspaper from that era, in all its wood-pulp bulk and glory—a set of daily papers which once looped and cavorted through the groaning machines that dwelled in the basement of Forty-third Street, in an atmosphere heavy with ink mist and paper dust. I pulled out some of the old volumes, set them on a long table and began turning my way through them.