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<The Man Who Saved the New York World (Newsday) (fwd)
NEWSPAPER CRUSADER
Read all about it: Nicholson Baker
and his newly acquired archive --
The Man Who Saved the New York World
by Peter Terzian
Rollinsford, N.H. -- Nicholson Baker is leafing through a volume, cased
in red marble boards, of Joseph Pulitzer's legendary newspaper The New
York World dating from 1902. One might expect to find rows of dull type
on duller paper, but on a gray April weekend -- as we stand surrounded by
stacks of bound dailies in the American Newspaper Repository, a large
warehouse room on the ground floor of a mill in Rollinsford, New
Hampshire -- colors bloom like hothouse flowers on the pages of a Sunday
edition. Baker reads out the headlines of these profusely illustrated
features: "Sarah Bernhardt's Alligator Hunt." "Half a Hundred Ways to
Make Eggs." "Birds That Blush and Dance."
"It's very humbling," says the writer, "to flip through these things and
realize the infinitesimally small size of one's knowledge about the
history of human life. I know almost nothing."
He points to a short two-column article titled "A Visit to Bellevue."
"Here we have this snapshot of what Bellevue was like -- who was sitting
where, and who was managing it, and how things were going in 1902. That's
really a valuable piece of New York knowledge. These newspapers are
engines of diversity. You have Bellevue, but you also have the Eminent
400 and what they're wearing. Every Sunday you got everything."
If you were a historian of fin-de-siËcle canine spirituality, and you
visited the Library of Congress to examine the article "Have Dogs Souls?"
in this issue of the World, you would be handed a small box of microfilm
and directed to a machine. Instead of the sumptuous four-color graphics
of the original, you would most likely find a dark blurry smudge.
If you asked to see the actual newspaper, you would be out of luck. The
Library of Congress photographed its run of the World and dumped the
originals decades ago. The New York Public Library and Columbia
University have also disposed of their copies. "The New York Historical
Society were given a run from the World itself, the corporate files, with
bookplates commemorating the fact," says Baker, "and they turned around
and sold it to dealers." This small New Hampshire mill town may be the
last place where you can find Pulitzer's paper in all of its original
gaudy glory.
At its height, the World published a million copies a day. "What's so
poignant to me is, of those, how many remain?" asks Baker. "I think this
is the only run of the World from 1900 to 1930, which was when it was
publishing E.B. White, Dorothy Parker, Franklin Adams, Woolcott and
Benchley. This was the most influential paper in the history of the
United States. They completely changed the way people read the paper."
Nicholson Baker is a writer, not a librarian. His funny, erudite novels
and essays -- including "The Mezzanine" (1988), "U and I" (1991), and
"The Everlasting Story of Nory" (1998) -- examine with rare exuberance
the minutiae of everyday life and the complex interplay of time and
memory. He may forever be known as the author of "Vox," the best-selling
1992 "phone sex book" that had a second life when "that woman" gave a
copy to President Bill Clinton a few years later. But he has been
troubled by the willfully destructive policies of libraries for the past
few years. "Discards," his 1994 New Yorker article, deplored the
widespread practice of throwing out paper card catalogs, many of which
contain a century's worth of annotated entries, and replacing them with
faulty computerized databases.
"Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper" (Random House, $25.95),
Baker's new book, exposes the secret history of biblio-disposal; it will
seal his reputation as America's most passionate library activist. For
the past 50 years, our nation's research libraries, with the Library of
Congress at the forefront, have scrapped our country's collective
archives of post-1870 wood-pulp newspapers, claiming that these materials
are rapidly disintegrating. (Pre-1870 papers were printed on more durable
rag pulp.) Decrying a lack of storage space, library administrators spent
millions of government dollars on making muddy microfilm changelings that
have, with time, proven subject to disintegration by fungus and
blemishing. Meanwhile, originals were trashed or sold to dealers of paper
ephemera and companies that market vintage newspapers as pricey keepsake
birthday gifts.
Furthermore, microfilm copies are woefully incomplete. Indistinct or
simply missing are the lavish rotogravure sections, Sunday supplements,
paper- doll cutouts and golden-age comics that were routine features.
"All of these newspaper publishers were investing everything they had in
printing plants," says Baker. "That's what's so bizarre -- to think that
some guy standing there with a camera, just clicking pictures, is going
to rival these multi-million dollar presses that were tended by teams of
pressmen."
BUT PAPER doesn't disintegrate as rapidly as library administrators have
claimed; the American Newspaper Repository's collection offers empirical
evidence, a century's worth of paper in immaculate condition. "The worst
newsprint is still page-turnable and usable," says Baker. "And newsprint
is right on the bottom of the strength range of paper itself. There's no
question that the paper is fragile. But can the paper not be copied? Can
the paper not actually be used by someone who happens to know that
there's an important political cartoon?"
The same phobia has also led library administrators to dismantle,
photograph and discard millions of extremely rare books. The "double-fold
test" -- creasing and bending a brittle corner back and forth until it
broke off -- was developed to determine which volumes would be consigned
to the landfill. Baker holds up a book given to him by a Library of
Congress administrator that failed the trial and was slated for disposal.
A few particles of dust unsettle themselves, but the leaves remain
turnable and sturdy.
As might be expected, word of his project has met with a mixed response
from library professionals. "Librarians seem to be in general willing to
think about this, and sometimes to agree with what I'm saying. There's a
strong minority feeling that administrations have been too casual with
collections. And it's not very hard to make these kind of arguments
because the newspapers make their own argument." He smiles. "But that's
not to say that there aren't librarians who think that I'm a complete
flake, that I must simply not understand how to use microfilm properly or
must not have grasped how to use the computer."
When asked for an opinion of Baker's book, the Library of Congress had no
comment. "He's made some people very nervous," says Richard Kutha,
librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. "He's
gone after the biggest fish in the international pond. But I don't hear
anyone scoffing at his claims... He's clearly functioning as a conscience
for the community. Whether all his allegations are true or not is hard to
say, but clearly some of them are, and some of them are in a rather
dramatic fashion."
Three-quarters of the way through the writing of "Double Fold," Baker
discovered that the British Library was auctioning its collection of
important American newspapers. On the block was a century of the New York
Tribune and Herald-Tribune; 70 years of The Chicago Tribune; an extensive
run of The New York Times; a quarter-century of the World; and lengthy
runs of The Forward, The Daily Worker and The Standard. (Also included
were runs of numerous ethnic newspapers and such assorted odd trade
publications as Cement and Engineering News, Fur Trade Review and Street
Railway Journal. A complete list is available on the repository's Web
site, www.oldpapers.org.) Baker and his wife cashed in a $100,000
retirement account and bid on the entire inventory.
"It just became apparent to me that if I did not as of that night bid on
these papers, that they were going to go to dealers and they would be
destroyed. I happened to be the only person at that time who knew how
rare these papers were. American history was going to take a severe hit
unless I bid on them. I never really conceived of the idea that these
things would physically go into a shipping container, and that they would
arrive here."
They did.
To view one of the last collections of 20th-century newspapers in the
country, you must come to this anonymous-looking red brick building in
this unpretentious New Hampshire mill town. Rollinsford is a short drive
across the Piscataqua River from Baker's own home in South Berwick, an
old Maine town of farmers and furniture-makers, best known as the
birthplace of writer Sarah Orne Jewett.
On June 29, 2000, more than 7,000 oversized, randomly packed volumes,
wrapped in plastic, arrived in this rented 6,000-square-foot warehouse
from the British Library. The American Newspaper Repository was born.
The nonprofit organization is a work in progress: Some volumes are kept
tidily on shelves; others, in use, are piled on tables; most await
unwrapping and ordering. Baker and his wife, Margaret, were able to
recoup much of their personal outlay with the help of grants from the
MacArthur and Knight Foundations, and an early excerpt from "Double Fold"
in The New Yorker brought in a few generous donations from private
individuals. Margaret is the Repository's bookkeeper and accountant.
Local students have volunteered with shelving and organizing. Eventually,
it will be open to researchers. (Baker gets one e-mail every day or so
with a request such as this: "I'm trying to find out what life was like
in 1904. Can you help me?") And Baker and his wife plan to assemble "The
World's New York," a coffee-table collection of images of the city as
they appeared in Pulitzer's treasure trove.
For the American Newspaper Repository to continue, however, it needs
money to pay the $2,000 monthly rent and to cover other costs such as
buying shelves. "This is as if we're standing in front of Penn Station in
1962," says Baker. "Everybody five years later thought, Why did we tear
that fantastic building down? We have a chance to save something that's
equivalent to that. The World, the Tribune, all these one-of- a-kind last
copies -- we have the privilege of being able to save them."
Baker has finally returned to working on the novel he began before
"Double Fold." "I'll probably write about different things as a result of
having lifted all these books and looked at some of them and having had
to enlist support. I am a very solitary writer. I'm very private and
secretive. I don't want anyone to read my stuff until it's done and then
I only want my wife to read it. But with something like this, I have to
have help. That's probably going to mess me up in a big way," he says,
laughing. "I just am willing to take the risk that this is going to
silence some part of me."
"I'm just sort of staggered sometimes to look at all this stuff and
realize that it's all here and safe. Who knows where it'll be 10 years
from now? I hope that it's part of a major research collection or
something. But in the meantime, just the fact that it exists is
pleasing."
Baker seems far from daunted by the work before him. "I want people to
start talking about this. I want to change people's minds about what is
possible to save. I don't want to hear this line: 'It's not possible to
save everything.' It's a meaningless statement. We can't save the entire
print run of something, but if you're talking about the one remaining
copy of the World and it takes up 500 square feet, of course we can save
it. There is any number of storage warehouses that function perfectly
well because we've decided as a culture that court records or military
records must be kept. Well, great newspapers must be kept."
Peter Terzian is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.
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