The Way the World Works: Essays (14 page)

A few days after I gave the speech, a member of the board of the Library Foundation told me I was a pawn of the employees’ union; later, when the San Francisco press picked up on the story, I became a sort of weirdo cultist, a “ringleader” who, in the company of a band of converts, was launching an attack on the library for personal glory. (“With some Rogaine and a few weeks’ more growth of his salt-and-pepper beard, the 39-year-old Baker might pass for Rasputin in tweed,” wrote a journalist for
SF Weekly
. “Soft-spoken, tall, and intense, Baker seems to hold an almost mystical sway over a ragtag collection of feisty librarians and disgruntled activists.”) In July, a letter signed by representatives of a number of the fund-raising affinity groups went out to every member of the library staff. The letter accused one librarian,
Toba Singer
—
who had written an op-ed piece for the
Examiner
critical of the library’s corporate sponsorship
—
of homophobia and racism, and it accused me of anti-Semitism, because I had used what were, the letter charged, Holocaust references by mentioning the so-called Deselection Chamber and by calling the book purge a “hate crime directed at the past.” I and the audience that “cheered [me] on” were, according to the letter, “intellectually dishonest, disrespectful to the library staff, and insulting to all Jewish, gay and lesbian, and other individuals who suffered the actual Holocaust.” Over the next several weeks, this letter began to appear on the desks of newspaper and radio editors.

Late in August, two librarians decided to measure the shelves of the old library in order to get a more accurate number for the oft-disparaged old building’s capacity. Walter Biller (a historian) and I came along, tape measures a-dangle: it was impossible to resist this last chance to tour the old floors. We measured the card catalog, and we read the legend high on the wall to the right of the entrance to the catalog room:
HANDLE A BOOK / AS A BEE DOES A / FLOWER / EXTRACT / ITS SWEETS BUT / DO NOT / INJURE IT
.

The four of us spent several hours at our work, nervously listening for footsteps, and then we locked up and left. Unfortunately, the librarian in charge of coming up with the spreadsheet didn’t, in her haste, note down one of the crucial numbers for the seven floors of the north stacks and relied instead on a faulty diagram that was taped on the wall; her newsworthily high preliminary numbers were then immediately leaked to a reporter.
OLD LIBRARY HELD MORE BOOKS, SAY CRITICS,
read the headline of the front-page article in the
Examiner;
and then, a few days later,
FOUR CRITICS OF LIBRARY MUST EAT THEIR WORDS
. Mortifying though it was, the
episode had the unforeseen effect of prompting Kathy Page to write a constructive memo to all employees, which said, among other things, “The unhappy fact remains that we have less storage capacity in the new building than we had planned for and less than we need.”

I have been able to speak only a few words to Dowlin, Page’s boss, directly. At the end of May, he consented to an interview with me, provided I sent him, three days in advance, a list of questions. I mailed off the list; then, a few days before we were to meet, he (understandably) canceled the appointment, because, in the words of his likable secretary, “we are being sued.” In the
Library Journal
piece, Dowlin is quoted as saying, “I’m not convinced Mr. Baker understands the people of San Francisco and what they want. There are some people who disagree with what I wanted to do, but they’re about six years too late.” Dowlin told the reporter for
SF Weekly
that my account of the library’s extreme weeding was “bullshit,” and that my writing was “crap.”

—

Long ago, the library kept a “Withdrawal Register”—it appears on a WPA list of city records in the ’40s
—
but nothing like that is available now. (In the words of one librarian, “The card catalog is the mute witness to all of this destruction.”) As part of another public-records request, now Exhibit D of
Baker v. San Francisco Public Library,
I asked for “all records, including lists, card files . . . computer records and printouts thereof, of books withdrawn, discarded, dumped, weeded, given away, sold, pulped, or otherwise removed from the library’s collections from 1987 to the present.” In the same letter I wrote, “Surely there is a record of the
disposition of millions of dollars’ worth of city property.” The library administration’s official response, via the city attorney’s office, was “No list or compilation exists for books discarded or destroyed since 1987.” There was, however, a thirty-two- megabyte computer report entitled “Purge of Items Declared Withdrawn,” which principally covers items removed from the collection between January 1, 1995, and April 1, 1996. That report has never been printed out, for it would fill almost five thousand large-format computer-paper pages. It includes only things that were deliberately withdrawn, nothing missing or stolen; and it does not include NOFs, which were never in the computer. It took me two and a half hours to download it from the library’s file server. Kassim Visram, a systems analyst, ran some frequency analyses, which indicate that there are about 146,000 non-paperback books in the file
—
along with many phono disks, periodicals, cassettes, and so on. Amazingly, there are columns in the report headed “Last Copy” and “Last Main,” under each of which there appears either a “yes” or a “no” for each book; Visram could thus produce a file made up entirely of last-copy discards. I downloaded that smaller list of more than 17,000 books and sorted it again several ways myself. Some of the discards are not troubling
—
the departure of yet another edition of
Gone with the Wind
doesn’t represent an irreplaceable loss. But the last copy of Darwin’s
The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants
(in a 1901 edition) caught my eye; and I saw more than a thousand Chinese books, hundreds of books in German and Italian, and an appalling number of research-level monographs in the sciences. History was hit particularly hard in my sample, especially (for some reason) history published by the Cambridge University Press: listed were the last copies of works by Sir Herbert Butterfield, Henry
St. John Bolingbroke, William Stubbs, C. V. Wedgwood, and Lewis Namier. There were last copies of hard-to-find books by Muriel Spark, Goethe, and William Dean Howells.

According to the Automation Services Department, there was at least one earlier purge report, run in 1995, covering discards from some point in the past through the end of 1994. That purge report was itself purged, however; it doesn’t exist on any backup tape or disk. “That’s a report that hasn’t existed on the system for a long time,” I was told. “We did do a purge of withdrawals in May of 1995, but generally we don’t keep those files around for very long, because once they’re withdrawn and gone, there’s really no need to keep a history of that.”

I can’t agree.

(1996)

Remarks Delivered at the Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony for the Library Service Center, Duke University Libraries

T
hank you, and good afternoon, everyone. I’ve never commemorated the opening of a building before, and I must say it’s an enormous pleasure and an honor to be here, standing in front of this large beige building, to talk about the storage of paper. Paper storage has been on my mind a great deal lately, because last year I started a little library that has in it twenty or thirty tons of bound newspapers, all sold off by the British Library. When the sale actually went through
—
I didn’t want it to go through, I wanted the library to keep the papers
—
but when it did, I began to have yearning thoughts about storage. I would drive by some undistinguished steel-sided building, painted some shocking color, and I’d spot those beautiful words
FOR LEASE
on it, and it would call out to me:
storage
. I saw a
FOR LEASE
sign on a converted mill one day and I called the number; the developer said, “I can show you the mill, but I’ve got something better for you. I want to show you something that is a dream space, top of the line, and I know it may be more than you can do costwise, but I just want you to see this and I want you to think about it.” I said okay, and my wife and I took a drive with the developer to a navy base, and we parked in front of an enormous stone building with towers and parapets. It looked like a gigantic medieval fortress. What was it? It was the navy prison. There was a vast rusting cell block with prison cages that went up many stories, and a crumbling men’s room that in its bleak ruination stretched back into the shadows, with maybe thirty sinks along one wall, none of which worked. I was very tempted
—
but in the end, it just didn’t seem like the right place to keep the last surviving twentieth-century runs of the
Chicago Tribune,
the
New York
Herald Tribune,
and the New York
World
.

So I now know, more than I ever did before, about the deep and abiding joy that comes from having enough space
—
and even now I sometimes feel a slight envious resentment rising within when I cruise down a big highway near New York City and I see buildings that have fifty truck bays. What are they holding? They’re holding cheese products, or truck parts, or Happy Meal toys, or Pentium computers that will be scrap in five years. They’re not holding books. One tank depot or tire warehouse would hold everything that our national library has been sent, free, by publishers and has rejected every year. Our national library says that they don’t have enough space, and they are unwilling to lease space, even though they’re willing to budget 94 million dollars for digital projects.

So here we have a building that has one purpose
—
to
store books
—
books that we can carry around, flip through, and read just as they were meant to be read by their creators. There’s a cherry picker machine inside, a state-of-the-art cherry picker, that lifts a book retriever up thirty-two feet, where he or she gets the book out of a cardboard tray and comes down with it. And there will be two and a half million books in here. The cost was seven and a half million dollars
—
so this brand-new place cost about three dollars a book to build. Very few of the books that are going in here have been digitally scanned
—
and here’s the dramatic comparison. To store a nineteenth-century book, it costs three dollars a book, plus an estimated seventeen cents a book in maintenance and staffing; to scan a nineteenth-century book, it costs a hundred dollars a book. And the book doesn’t even need batteries! Not that it’s a bad thing to take digital pictures of books, as long as the picture-taking doesn’t require that the book be cut out of its binding
—
the electronic versions can be extraordinarily useful. The point is that offsite book storage, even traditional storage in call number order, is cheap, and any scanning or microfilming we do should be done with the expectation that the original book go back into the collection when the copying is done. And it’s compact, too
—
2.5 million books go in here, and across the street, an even bigger building is devoted to doing the laundry. Besides being things of intrinsic beauty and interest, books are marvelously compact.

Now there are some futurists, some central planners, who don’t agree with any of what I’ve just said. There’s a man named Michael Lesk, of the National Science Foundation in Washington, who is in charge of giving away millions of dollars in federal grants for digital library projects, who told me that he routinely says to libraries, hey, maybe you shouldn’t repair your library building, you
could scan everything in that building, and let the building fall down, and you would save money. Lesk refers to an analysis by a library director from Minnesota who claims that libraries would save about 44 billion dollars over the next one hundred years if they digitally scanned about twenty million books and got rid of more than four hundred million duplicate books. Our libraries would be better off, in other words, if they dismantled about 95 percent of their accumulated collections, according to this analysis. Many
—
not all, but many
—
in the digital library world believe that the destruction of local research collections will help hurry us toward the far digital shore. They inflate the cost of keeping things, and they denigrate the durability of paper, because it’s distressing to them that it is so inexpensive to store what was long ago bought, cataloged, and shelved.

Research library collections grow. That’s what this fine building recognizes. Your children’s feet grow, and you buy them new shoes
—
the bigger feet do not represent a “growth problem” but a developmental fact, something to be proud of. For the past half century or more, though, growth has been an embarrassment to some Washington visionaries. They were swept by a kind of Cold War fervor of informational reform, and they wanted all growth to stop. Libraries would reach a certain fixed size, a few million volumes, and then the weeding parties would gather and the microcopying would crunch down the excess, and when the microfilm spools themselves took up too much room, then they could microcopy the microcopies at ultra-high resolution, and crunch things down more, and the stacks would function like a vast trash compactor, squeezing the words. Because words were squeezable, weren’t they? They were disembodied astral presences that had nothing to do
with the ink that formed them or the paper that they were printed on or the bindings that held the paper together; they could be “reformatted”
—
preserved by being destroyed
—
because they were immaterial; the books would still exist, they would just not exist; they would be there, but they wouldn’t be there; you could hold your head high and say you had the finest U.S. newspaper collection in the world, when in fact you had gotten rid of 90 percent of it and replaced it with microfilm, much of it unchecked for quality.