Old news

Fighting to save a historic newspaper collection, author Nicholson Baker makes his stand on the banks of the Salmon Falls River

By Doug Hubley

PAPER SAVIOR: Nicholson Baker in his New Hampshire warehouse with 60 pallets of old newspapers.

Last year author Nicholson Baker bought some old newspapers. Well, more than some; actually, he bought about four tractor-trailers’ worth, enough newspapers to fill 60 pallets, each stacked four feet high and wrapped in plastic. How many individual papers he bought is impossible to say, but most are bound into volumes, and there are about 11,000 of those, each about the size of a modest gravestone. The oldest were printed in 1866; the newest in the 1970s.

Baker is the author of such novels as The Mezzanine and The Fermata — in other words, he is not a paper recycler or ephemera dealer — and so the willingness to take on 60 pallets of newspapers sets him somewhat apart from other people. For most of us, the thing about a newspaper is its disposability. You read it, you get rid of it. We so disdain yesterday’s papers that a house heaped full of them is seen as a symptom of mental infirmity.

To his credit, Baker doesn’t keep his papers in his 18th-century farmhouse in South Berwick. Instead, under the aegis of the American Newspaper Repository, a nonprofit organization Baker founded with his wife, Margaret Brentano, they’re stored in a warehouse just across the river in Rollinsford, N.H. And if these long runs of some important papers — New York’s World, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune — weren’t here, they wouldn’t be anywhere. Not intact, anyway. If Baker hadn’t scrambled to buy them from the British Library, they would have died at a pulp mill or been sold off piecemeal to collectors and ephemera buffs.

“That was just an intolerable fate as far as I was concerned,” says Baker. As so often happens with this man who has written at length about toenail clippers and the size of thoughts (“most are about three feet tall”), his reason for rescuing the papers is both surprising and perfectly sensible. He wanted to save them and make them accessible to those who share his belief in the historic value of newspapers in their original form. From his perspective, if there’s any mental infirmity in this picture, it’s all on the side of an information-services establishment that since 1950 has systematically tossed out hard-copy newspaper collections in favor of microfilm. Even some of the nation’s most important papers are all but extinct in their original form, with the Library of Congress leading the rush to deep-six newsprint. Yes, microfilm saves space — but at a cost Baker finds insupportable, in the loss of color artwork, a significant amount of textual information, and the potential for making accurate new reproductions, among other assets.

“This notion that microfilm captures the intellectual content is not true,” Baker says. In short, he believes that when it comes to newspapers, the people charged with preserving the records of American history have sold our birthright for a mess of technology.

“If you can take this stuff that’s dirty and old,” he says, “and transform it into something that’s new in a little white box, it just appeals to a certain sensibility.”

Newspaper collections in Maine If you, like Nicholson Baker, feel that microfilm is no substitute for inky fingers, you’re well off in Maine. Thirty or so institutions in state and out maintain newsprint-newspaper collections of some sort. In state, particularly comprehensive collections are found at the University of Maine, Maine State Archives, Maine Historical Society, University of Maine, and Bates, Bowdoin, and Colby colleges. Maine participates in the United States Newspaper Program, an initiative the states and federal government have undertaken to catalog and preserve US newspapers. It’s another target of Baker’s wrath. Of the roughly $45 million the program has gone through, Baker writes in his July 24 New Yorker critique, none has gone to preserve original newsprint. The goal is to transfer papers to microfilm. In Maine, the Maine Newspaper Project has identified newspaper collections statewide, inventorying more than 1500 titles that date back to 1785 and the state’s first paper, the Falmouth Gazette. According to the federal USNP Web site, 356,000 pages remain to be microfilmed in Maine and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project’s chief funder, has amounted to some $424,960. “The cataloging took more time than we expected, so the program will not be able to do much microfilming,” says Janet Roberts, who oversees the state’s effort. (Roberts responded to questions from the Phoenix via email.) While $10,000 from the Davis Family Foundation will fund additional filming, most of the film completed under the project is of 50 years of Le Messager, a French-language paper published in Lewiston. The Center for Research Libraries in Illinois provided the run of the paper in exchange for a copy of the film. The project makes no mandate about the fate of papers after they’re filmed. After filming, the disbound papers are returned to the source repositories, which decide their disposition. “A great number of Maine’s papers, especially the small-town weeklies, have not been filmed,” Roberts says. While she seconds some of Baker’s complaints about film, she points out that bound papers are heavy, therefore difficult for many librarians to handle, and are hard to wrangle onto a photocopier. Many are too frail to copy. Moreover, dust and chemicals from the paper may cause respiratory problems for some. And, she says, “you can print multiple user copies of microfilm, greatly increasing access.” (Although if the film master is incomplete or flawed, as many are, then it’s tough luck.) Finally, film is easily distributed, Roberts says. “With originals, the researcher has to travel to the one place where the paper is. With film, the researcher may have a choice of places to do research, or may order a copy of the film. This also has obvious security ramifications — a disaster will not destroy the only copy.” “I think that some newspapers are important as original objects, particularly if they contain artwork, and should be preserved,” Roberts says. “Most newspapers are important for the information they contain, in which case, I advocate microfilming and preserving one backup set in the original format.” —DH

Small World after all

Tall, balding, loosely hinged, and wearing the writer’s obligatory tweed sport jacket and pallor, Baker has submitted to a sit-down interview. But not with total ease. For someone who has written books like The Fermata and Vox, two forthrightly sexual novels, and U and I, a forthrightly self-revealing memoir about his obsession with author John Updike, Baker has some trouble getting sentences out. He would rather take me through the warehouse, slit open pallet wrappers with a razor blade, and look at newspapers.

“These are some of the most widely read documents in the history of this country,” Baker says. In the 1890s, he says, “a million people read the New York World every Sunday.” He is speaking from a chair placed next to what may be the world’s last Worlds, or at least the last comprehensive run in the newsprint Joseph Pulitzer published them on. Now that you know the size of a thought, let me add that the size of the World is sufficient to fill six or seven pallets, or as Baker puts it, “one bathroom in one library.” His run of the World goes from 1866 to 1930.

And the World is not enough. Here too in this old textile mill are 70 years’ worth of the Chicago Tribune, 43 years of the New York Times, and a century of the New York Tribune and Herald Tribune. There’s six decades of the Saturday Review, three of Newsweek, and a treasure trove of trade journals and ethnic papers such as New York’s socialist Yiddish Forward. In all, the American Newspaper Repository has collections of 100 titles.

“What I find frustrating about libraries is that it is not difficult to store things,” Baker says. “Just keeping things in some sort of ordered physical arrangement somewhere is not that expensive.” He’s paying about $26,000 a year for 6000 square feet in this warehouse, a sum he reckons would make a decent salary for a microfilm technician. The fact that libraries would rather spring for film, he says, shows that the information-services world is too willing to compromise its primary mission — the preservation of information, and therefore culture — for the sake of transient values like space, modernity, and supposed convenience.

However reticent Baker seems on this cool October day, he was eloquent enough about the fate of America’s newspaper collections in the July 24 edition of The New Yorker. Part industrial history, part tirade against modern library practices, Baker’s 19-page piece is propelled by the tale of his desperate effort to save the American newspaper holdings of the British Library in Colindale, England. It’s a cliff-hanger involving frantic deadlines, pleas for clemency, and piles of money that he didn’t have.

“The difficult part was finding the will to decide that, since nobody else was interested in keeping these things, that I should keep them,” Baker says. “Of course there were some frightening moments.” But, as in all proper cliff-hangers, the good guys won. Practically overnight Baker and his wife raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, mobilized influential supporters, formed a nonprofit organization, and secured a significant chunk of the library’s holdings. (Its Chicago Tribune and New York Times runs went to a dealer in Pennsylvania, from whom Baker bought them.) In all it cost $150,000 to buy the papers and $22,000 to ship them to New Hampshire, compared to the $177,000 cost of the equivalent Trib run on microfilm.

It’s been months since the papers arrived, but Baker still looks worn out. He has just finished a book for publication next spring by Random House. The title is Double Fold, the name of a library process for testing the brittleness of old paper. The book, sort of a J’Accuse for the Information Age, expands upon the issues Baker raised in The New Yorker.

“I’m questioning certain assumptions,” Baker says. “I’m questioning the story that libraries have told about paper and paper science for the past 50 years.” Baker’s campaign against library practices is nothing new. A piece he wrote for The New Yorker in the mid-1990s described how libraries, in replacing their lovingly annotated card catalogs with computer indexes, have given themselves a sort of institutional amnesia.

Similarly, he believes that long runs of newspapers in hard copy constitute a cultural resource that’s irreplaceable by any other medium. In the macro view, 100 years of the World in bound volumes constitutes an entity — a kind of artifact, really — that far transcends the sum of the individual papers (even if no human mind could possibly wrap itself around that entity). In the micro view, Baker says, converting papers to microfilm, at best, always obliterates four-color art. At worst, text and monochrome art too are lost through sloppy processing and film deterioration. Moreover, when the original papers are trashed after filming, the chance to replace the lost material is itself lost. “[I]n a marvellous bit of redefinitional insanity,” he wrote in The New Yorker, “a microfilmed newspaper is ‘considered complete’ by the Library of Congress . . . if ‘only a few issues per month are missing.’ ”

Nationally, a handful of significant hard-copy collections remains, at the Boston Public Library and Ohio State University, among other places. But many of the national-class collections are gone, the most egregious loss being that at the Library of Congress, which before 1950 had 20th century runs from every state.

The fact that original bound runs of the World, The New York Times, and other national papers were systematically eradicated is “just confusing,” Baker continues. “It’s strange. It indicates some kind of instinct to purge that is not rational, because it takes a lot of money to buy the microfilm that replaces it.” If the Smithsonian can save space capsules and bombers and Archie Bunker’s TV chair in their original forms, he asks, why can’t we keep the true messengers that explained those things to Americans each day?

See you in the funny papers

All this from a man who rarely reads the morning paper. “The beauty of a run of a paper is different from the interest in following world events,” he says. “It would make more sense if I was a guy who just loved newspapers in every form, but it isn’t necessarily that way.”

But, he says, “there’s just something miraculous about opening up newsprint from 100 years ago.”

So we do.

Here’s a San Francisco Argonaut rushed into print right after the 1906 earthquake, labeled “Earthquake Edition.” Photos of crumbled buildings fill the small pages. Before radio and TV, this was how the world came to your home. This was all media. “This was everything,” Baker says.

True, much of “everything” appears as expanses of tiny type that would confound today’s impatient news junkies. It’s also true that a microfilm reader will magnify that tiny type and print these pages out for you, a side benefit of which is the break you get from the motion sickness induced by scrolling through film. But a microfilm reader can’t sharpen up type that was shot out of focus or at the wrong exposure. And it can’t bring back the information lost because the film was badly processed and the emulsion has faded.

Here’s a Chicago Tribune from 1907. (Baker believes he may have the last extant long run of the Trib.) The pages are huge, and a single page seems to have as much happening as an entire issue of a modern newspaper. There are features and geegaws and treats — fiction, poetry, profiles, sewing patterns, even sheet music that the British Library archivists carefully bound in with the broadsheets.

There’s stunning artwork: engravings, hand-drawn illustrations, flamboyant typefaces and graphic ornaments. “These papers are really interesting as objects, as works of human artistic ingenuity,” Baker says. And microfilm, especially 50-year-old microfilm, doesn’t do a very good job of reproducing them in detail.

And the comics! Single strips like “Polly Sleepyhead” or “Buster Brown” get full pages in full color. Common wisdom has it that color is relatively new to newspapers, especially in the news pages, but a century ago publishers like Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst used color to build circulation numbers now unimaginable. Another big boost was the advent, around 1880, of the process for making newsprint from wood pulp. This reduced the cost of the paper stock so much that papers became much bigger and much cheaper.

Yellowed and slightly crumbly at the edges, these century-old pages are fragile. But they are still turnable and eminently legible, largely because of the benefits of being bound into a book, Baker believes. That defies the common wisdom, unsubstantiated by real-time testing, that wood-pulp lasts just a few decades. This really galls Baker. “The usefulness of this collection isn’t just that it’s interesting and beautiful,” he says. “The usefulness of this collection is that it’s evidence that paper does last an extraordinarily long time, even when it’s rather casually treated.”

A reluctant pitchman

Baker is not averse to passing the collection along to an institution that will absolutely guarantee its perpetual survival, but at present the American Newspaper Repository is negotiating the difficult transition from heroic gesture to functioning archive.

An intern has been hired to help with inventory and shelving, which will be about the extent of the archival treatment the Repository can afford. Early this month, as a community service project, students and teachers from Berwick Academy undertook the massive task of sorting the New York Times and the World. And Baker has already heard from potential clients. Clio Inc., a Vermont company that does historically oriented multimedia projects, is using political cartoons from the Chicago Tribune and the World that relate to Sinclair Lewis’s meatpacking scandals. “These original images don’t exist in any library anywhere else,” Baker says. In March he’ll address a conference in London inspired by the British Library’s purge of its non-British holdings, and in June, perhaps taking his life in his hands, he’ll take the topic of newspaper preservation to the American Library Association. Meanwhile, thanks to the New Yorker article, checks and letters of support for the American Newspaper Repository are rolling in.

So, which is it: Nick Baker, writer, or Nick Baker, newspaper archivist?

He ventures reluctantly that he can do both. A morning writer, he can give afternoons to the Repository, he says, and Margaret is helping run it, and anyway they hope to have a real budget for staff at some point. But Baker admits to some worry about the pull between new and old careers. Double Fold stalled for months while he pulled the Repository together.

But will the papers have a positive effect on Baker’s writing? Here are 60 pallets of minutiae and there is a man who, after all, once spun the topic of lumber out into 150 pages (The Size of Thoughts, 1997).

It’s a double edged-sword. From one perspective, these thousands of volumes of newspapers constitute a mind-boggling pile of stuff to organize and make accessible, to say nothing of reading it. But another perspective sounds more like our Nick, the author who wrote an entire book about an office worker’s thoughts during lunch break (The Mezzanine).

“I tend to like the feeling of opening up a single day,” Baker says. “There’s a kind of a thrill knowing that I can imagine any day — August 6, 1906 — and then look at that day via seven or eight newspapers. That day which is an unknown, it’s just a cipher now, will suddenly yield this puzzling and absorbing specificity.”

Baker isn’t too worried about issues that gum up many librarians and archivists, like proper storage environments and how to reach the biggest audience. These papers are too fragile to withstand too much use, and fortunately they probably won’t attract it, drawing instead specialists — graphic artists, newspaper historians, or media producers.

“Part of the romance and excitement of the word ‘archive’ is that you will go to a place that is in large part unexplored,” Baker says. “So the idea that things must be heavily used, or that things that haven’t been used in 15 years are of no interest, is antithetical to a genuine archival instinct.”

Ah, another statement guaranteed to win friends among industry insiders. Even faced with the need to raise money, develop a peer network, and attract clients (if only the chosen few), Baker admits he’s still getting his act together as the American Newspaper Repository’s pitchman. “I don’t feel any great desire to convince people of things,” he laughs. “And that’s the hard part. I don’t feel any great desire to convince — I just would like certain things to happen.

“I’m not pretending that I’m an experienced archivist,” Baker says. “I just know, in kind of a primitive way, that something is worth keeping.”

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.