“After reading [an] account of the astonishing possibilities of only one small branch of the 170,000 known families of insects, I began to wonder if there might not be some truth in the statement recently made by an eminent British scientist, in effect that ‘it is not the rising tide of color or the interdestruction of the various races that threatens civilization, but rather the steady attack of the lowly insect.’”
-Thomas Marion Iiams, “Preservation of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Huntington Library,” 1932
In the photograph below, a librarian uses a vacuum fumigation chamber to kill bookworms and their larvae with a poison gas called “carboxide.” Thomas Iiams, who worked at the Huntington, eventually would go on to treat all of the rare books in the Huntington’s collection, all “foreign” books to enter its collections, as well as some of the Pope’s books in the Vatican.
Far from being an isolated instance of a bibliophile using a chemical weapon against a threat to a media object, the gassing of books became an institutionalized state practice by the end of the 1930s. By 1938, every object that entered the National Archives was first fumigated in a chamber like this one. Iiams wrote his article on vacuum fumigation after learning from the National Bureau of Standards that, while they had carried out a variety of experiments on the causes of deterioration in paper records, they had not carried out experiments on preserving books against bookworms. Thomas Iiams’ vacuum fumigation chamber experiments contributed to an emerging field of knowledge being established through the BOS studies, a field I call “preservation science.” This field of knowledge emerged largely from the investigations carried out by the National Bureau of Standards (BOS), in collaboration with the National Research Council and the Carnegie Corporation, from 1929 to 1938.
Concerns about the preservation of historical records and national memory were particularly acute during the historical period of the BOS studies. A number of scholarly works on early 20th century American culture, such as Nayan Shah’s brilliant Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, examine state practices, public health policy, military intervention and imperial campaigns, and racial and immigration law designed to protect or preserve the American “national body,” “national stock,” or “body politic” against contamination, disease, genetic inferiority, and other agents of societal decay. What has not been thoroughly explored are concurrent efforts to protect national memory from contamination and disease by gassing and otherwise sterilizing media, such as books, manuscripts, and other paper records.
Thomas Iiams called his vacuum fumigation method the application of “an old method” to a “new problem,” as vacuum fumigation had originally been developed by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to fumigate plants arriving from foreign nations, and the U.S. Public Health service had used the same poison gasses to fumigate the bodies of foreign workers at the U.S.-Mexico Border. State officials protected the national body by gassing the bodies of immigrants; Iiams preserved national memory by gassing rare books and manuscripts.
The BOS studies sought to be the first to systematically and scientifically identify the causes of the deterioration of paper and film records, and, based on this new knowledge, recommend effective means of preserving them, for librarians, archivists, and custodians of records of all kinds. The BOS studies influence a range of professional fields. In the emerging field of business history and the early establishment of systematic corporate archives, the BOS studies established definitive guidelines for what kinds of records could be considered permanent. The BOS studies guided records preservation practices at the National Archives at a moment when the enlarged state bureaucracy under the New Deal required the maintenance of a durable mass of records for its operation.
I have much more to say about the trajectory of all this preservation over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, but for now, I’ll conclude with a quote from Pierre Nora about the effects of preserving all these massive archives. This is part of a broader project wherein I try to account for why we arrived where we are, with individuals requiring 1 or 2 terabyte hard drives to hold their personal information—more data than the entire contents of Depression-era time capsules meant to represent all of humankind’s knowledge up to that point. In “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Nora writes that “modern memory is, above all, archival.” No longer located simply in the minds, communal stories, “gestures and habits,” and “skills passed down by unspoken traditions,” modern memory is “the gigantic and breathtaking storehouse of a material stock of what it would be impossible for us to remember, an unlimited repertoire of what might need to be recalled. Leibnitz’s ‘paper memory’ has become an autonomous institution of museums, libraries, depositories, centers of documentation, and data banks.” Add to this list the ever expanding digital empire of data centers, data bunkers, and data barges, and we start to gain a sense of the vast infrastructure that supports our memory. Or should I say our forgetting?