Book Review: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001) xii, 371, index. Hardback $25 .95 (ISBN 0-375- 50444-3).

We've all been hoodwinked, bamboozled, and flimflammed! Librarians for the past fifty years have waged an unnecessary war against so-called brittle books and newspapers, generating rolls upon rolls of microfilm of dubious quality, all in the name of preservation. As a result, countless original paper copies of microfilmed print materials have been needlessly discarded when they could simply have been warehoused at minimal expense. At least, that's what Nicholson Baker would have us all believe.

Baker first drew the attention of librarians in 1994 with his article in the New Yorker titled "Discards," an article which lamented the destruction of the physical card catalog in favor of the computerized, virtual version. In his latest examination of the library world, Nicholson Baker takes issue with the practice over the past several decades of preserving the content of original printed works (particularly newspapers) by microfilming them and then discarding the originals to save space. By his math, we could have saved a lot of money and a lot of valuable research material by building warehouses to keep all of the originals, rather than by creating microfilm that is often badly made, is always inconvenient to use, and is generally less valuable for certain types of research. Baker takes particular aim at the Library of Congress and other major research libraries for their apparently irresponsible actions and utter carelessness with our published heritage.

While I agree that decisions have undoubtedly been made which, in retrospect, were not the best preservation solutions (lamination is one glaring example), I also understand that only in retrospect do we become aware that today's problems are generally a result of yesterday's solutions. More importantly, though, while Baker's arguments demand our attention, the problem that he identifies is really not the central issue; in short, far more is at stake than he seems to realize. 

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