Word: microfilm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...director, never trained to work with books, makes daily judgments based on arcane facts, such as knowing that European printers between 1860 and World War II used acidic paper. Books made of that paper, which decays quickly, now must be photographed on microfilm to be preserved...
Slipping rolls of microfilm into briefcases, the thieves evaded detection so effectively that their heists went unnoticed for weeks at the libraries of 13 major universities. When the operation ended, apparently in July, their collection of 3,000 reels was complete: a microfilm record of nearly every patent issued in the U.S. since...
...steal patents? Even a curious spy can buy a copy of any single patent for $1.50. Still, a roll of the microfilm sells for about $100, and the full set could be worth at least $100,000 to inventors who must explore the past before pursuing a new idea. The FBI's best guess is that the thieves hope to sell duplicates at cut-rate prices...
...course, as Schoon says, an easy way to read the magazine is on microfilm. "The microfilm does not have centerfolds," she adds...
Americans don't take books that seriously anymore. Perhaps Russians don't either: their popular culture has begun to succumb to television. In America one rarely encounters the mystical book worship. Everything in the West today seems infinitely replicable, by computer, microfilm, somehow, so that if a book chances to burn up, there must be thousands more where that came from. If anything, there seem to be entirely too many words and numbers in circulation, too many sinister records of everything crammed into the microchips of FBI, IRS, police departments. Too many books altogether, perhaps. The glut of books subverts...