This is part three of a four-part series. Part one covered the early years, up to 1900. Part two covered 1901 to 1940.
As we continue our retrospective on 125 years of binding at the Library of Congress, we should also note the important partner to the Library for much of this time, the Government Printing Office (GPO). This post is being released on May 8th, which is the 125th anniversary of Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam writing Public Printer Frances W. Palmer to request a binding branch be installed at the then new Library building. For the GPO, it was just another step in a history that started 40 years earlier.
The GPO was created in 1860 as the official print shop for Congress, which had previously tried contracting and electing individual printers. In 1857, the House of Representatives elected the firm of Wendell & Van Benthuysen of Albany, NY under owner Cornelius Wendall. Wendall’s firm had previously won a bid for a term and quickly found itself overworked. To better handle the workload, he built a new print shop and bindery at the corner of H Street NW and North Capitol Street in the District of Columbia. The act creating the GPO empowered the Superintendent of Printing to build or purchase a bindery, and he agreed to purchase Wendall’s District of Columbia plant for $135,000.
The government didn’t just purchase the building and equipment, but many of the staff were then hired on for the new Government Printing Office, including a journeyman binder named Henry Clay Espey. In 1895, Congress mandated that all printing and binding for the government must be done by the GPO. By that time, Espey had risen up the ranks to become foreman of the bindery. When Putnam came calling in 1900, Espey would be the one to personally oversee the setup of the Library’s binding branch. Shortly after it began service, Espey stepped back to take over the Library branch as foreman, serving under his former assistant, P.J. Byrne. Espey would remain at the Library branch for the next 12 years.
As the decades moved on, the collections of the Library of Congress grew exponentially, and the need for more space was constant. This and the increase in reading rooms both contributed to the displacement of the Binding Office from the main Library building. At the start of the 1940s, the GPO branch and Binding Office moved to the Library Annex, the building now known as the John Adams Building. The new bindery space was decked out with all new equipment and was also three times larger than what they had in the Jefferson.
As detailed in the Librarian’s annual report for 1939, new steel tables with Maplewood or Masonite tops, depending on the work to be done, filled the space. Thirty steel tables with Masonite tops, shelves, and large drawers for supplies, were part of the finishing unit. The sewing unit was spread out across 10 steel tables, each 10 feet long with special chairs designed for the women that typically worked in that unit. Compressed-air presses replaced hand cranks, and new, larger paper cutters were provided as well as ball-bearing grinders on pedestals.
The Binding Office was now expected to be able to process up to 100,000 books per year, as well as the repair of selected documents. The staff and their skills grew, and the overall collection benefited from the new equipment and services. Items such as newspapers, print books, gifts for heads of state, the Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence itself would be cared for by the staff of the Binding Office.
In the late 1930s, new Librarian Archibald MacLeish began to restructure the Library and found the Binding Office was outside of the regular organizational chart. The first attempt to find a home was the creation of the Keeper of the Collections position within the Library’s Reference Department in 1940. The Binding Office only remained in this department for one year until it became a part of the new Library Supply Office. George W. Morgan, the assistant in charge at the time, had been promoted to Supply Officer, but continued to perform duties for both positions. With its new placement, the Binding Office was redesignated as the Binding Records Section.
In 1941, David Wahl was charged with drafting a plan for binding operations at the Library. His report called for the creation of a Binding Officer, with all binding duties within the Library to be centralized in the new Binding Office. The report was accepted and approved with Wahl being named Binding Officer preliminarily, but he stepped down soon after. In 1942, George E. Smith was hired to be the new Binding Officer but was unable to take the position as he was drafted into service in World War II. Ruth Kline, a long-time staffer in the Binding Office, then became Binding Officer and held the position until Smith returned from his military service in January 1946.
Now part of the Processing Department, the work continued but costs would fluctuate necessitating the establishment of a binding committee. Originally an interim task led by Smith, then Librarian Luther Evans decided to make it a permanent standing committee. The report made a series of changes to curtail costs, including supporting the new technique of microfilming for newspapers and periodicals. But two specific changes remain with us 70 years later: the report officially established all buckram to be Ruby red, and it also established the final resolution to the endpaper problem created when marbling became less available after World War I.
New ideas were welcome on the Binding Committee and at the Library overall, and so they welcomed William J. Barrow of the Virginia State Library in Richmond, VA, with his thoughts on collections care. Despite no formal training in chemistry, he identified deterioration in acid paper and created the first deacidification process. To preserve text from brittle and damaged books, he created a print transfer process that allowed ink to be moved from one paper to another. However the most notable of his innovations was also the most harmful, called the Barrow Method, which introduced the idea of lamination for the preservation of documents.
The Library was now processing and preserving thousands of items each year, with microfilm becoming the preferred method for newspapers, lamination for manuscripts and maps, and binding for books and periodicals. The GPO bindery branch could not keep up, and as costs escalated, the Library moved forward with contracting with commercial binderies. Smith had personally visited several dozen binderies in the mid-1950s to learn money-saving techniques, but also gauge interest in contracting.
In 1956, Smith put out to bid two binding contracts, each for 500 items. The first for “Class A,” the common sewed binding done by GPO, and the second for “economy binding,” a new style that used glued pages and cheaper materials. Sixteen firms bid for Class A, and 12 for economy, but only the economy contract was issued that first year, to the DeNol Binding Company of Philipsburg, PA. The items were picked up by truck on May 28 and returned one month later. They were considered an improvement on the quarter-binding done by the GPO, where only the spine and corners of the covers were bound in buckram, with the additional advantage of costing four cents less per book than those done by the GPO.
Space continued to be at a premium, and with the Library sending more books out to commercial binderies, the space the GPO bindery required was no longer tolerable. In April 1960, Librarian Quincy Mumford informed the GPO that the branch bindery would need to be returned to the main office. This work was done over the course of the month, causing a disruption to the production of the GPO binding division, according to the Annual Report of the Public Printer. As of May 1, the bindery was gone, just a week short of the 60th anniversary of Putnam’s letter to Palmer requesting the establishment. The GPO-manned print shop, however, remained as well as 14 GPO staff who were setup at repair stations in various reading rooms.
Though Congress saw fit to take steps to approve a third building, including the novel approach of combining it with a memorial to our fourth President, James Madison, the development of the third building went slowly as space continued to tighten. The Washington Navy Yard was targeted for reassignment of certain buildings in the Navy Yard Annex, which was built in the run up to U.S. involvement in World War I. Building 159, originally called the Machine Shop, having produced torpedoes, fire-control equipment, and specialized tools for work on base, was renovated for Federal office use in 1964. The five-story building was described in the Society for Industrial Archaeology Newsletter of Spring 1992 as a “looming hulk,” that “epitomizes new technologies of the period, both in scale and design.”
The GPO printing branch and the Library’s Card Division were one of the first offices to move to the Navy Yard Annex, leaving Capitol Hill in 1964. The Binding staff would follow in 1976, at that time as the Madison Building was well underway and hoped for completion by 1978. In 1969, the Library requested a formal transfer of the GPO repair stations to be part of the offices now dedicated to the preservation of the collection. Nine of 14 GPO staff took the offer to join the Library as the staff of the new Restoration Office, keeping all their same duties, same workstation, just under the Library’s umbrella.
The Navy Yard Annex was only a temporary fix, in addition to 15 other sites rented out by the Library during the 1960’s and 70’s. The GPO print shop closed for good in 1980, not due to space considerations, but technology. Automation had brought an end to largescale printers and necessary space for review and storage. The creation of MARC and coming digital databases would end the card catalog for good. With that, a close-knit partnership of 80 years came to a close. The new Preservation Office was processing millions of items on microfilm, 200,000 items per year for binding, and several thousand items for other treatment including lamination. All this with the largest yet addition to the Library’s office space being just around the corner.
Thank you to Cheryl Fox of the Manuscript Division for her help in developing this post and providing various items for review from the Library of Congress Archives.
Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four
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Sources:
- 100 GPO Years, 1861-1961: A History of the United States Public Printing
- Annual Reports of the Administrator of General Services 1963-1967
- Annual Report of the Government Printing Office 1980
- Annual Reports of the Librarian of Congress 1940-1980
- Annual Reports of the Public Printer 1940-1979
- For Congress and the Nation: A Chronological History of the Library of Congress by John Y. Cole
- International Bookbinder 1900-1919
- The International Bookbinder 1920-1964
- Lamination and other Methods of Restoration by Ray O. Hummel, Jr. and W. J. Barrow
- Library of Congress Archives, 1800-2015
- Library of Congress Departmental & Divisional Manuals: No. 5 Binding Division 1950
- Library of Congress Information Bulletin 1945-1980
- Lincoln and His Printers – GPO in the Civil War
- Naval Gun Factory (Washington Navy Yard) Facilities Data
- Official Register of the United States 1940-1959
- Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter, Vol.21, No.1 Spring 1992