In 1994, novelist Nicholson Baker wrote an epic essay for the New Yorker on, of all things, the merits of card catalogs. The now-famous article offered not only a staunch defense of the giant boxes and their scribbled-upon, dog-eared records, but a surprisingly convincing attack on the computerized tracking systems that were replacing them. Though far from being a technophobe, the author of Vox and The Fermata since then has become somewhat of a spokesman for forgotten media.
In Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, published this week by Random House (dossier), Baker takes that defense to its logical conclusion. As Baker reports, libraries have for years been quietly shredding huge stacks of old newspapers, periodicals and books. This is of course a near-Orwellian contradiction of a librarian's traditional mission of preservation. Baker argues, however, that the practice also reveals something important about humanity's obsession with new technology and change - the extreme's to which we will go to justify it. We asked him to tell us more about his own preservation work and his take on technophilia in general.
Q: In Double Fold, you describe your own battle against some of the institutions that are destroying newspapers and books. One might call such a crusade Quixotic or willfully eccentric. What makes these old records so important? And has the work of saving them taken a personal toll on you?
Baker: The enormous color presses that Pulitzer (PTZ), Hearst (dossier) and the other newspaper publishers installed in the 1890s, which could print, cut and fold a million copies of a newspaper every day, were the technological marvels of the age, and these machines, tended by squads of skilled pressmen, were packed with the specific joys and sorrows and beauties of a country that was beginning to understand its own ways and means, what it did right and where it was going wrong. The newspapers are a great primary source for the history of commerce, the history of immigration, the history of mechanical invention, the history of crime, the history of reform. Muckraking (of oil and streetcar trusts and of municipal corruption) and the Hoe newspaper printing press go hand in hand.
It doesn't strike me as particularly eccentric or Quixotic to want to keep one or even two original runs of artifacts that whole populations once paid money to own every day. We understand why old flags and old presidential letters are valuable as things - we don't believe that taking a photograph of Plymouth Rock amounts to a "reformatting" of Plymouth Rock - and we're even doing better with old mills and old train stations. But many of the great libraries are still in Cold War mode; they haven't grasped the fact that their collections are historical landmarks, not heaps of words that can be squeezed down with the help of expensive hardware.
A personal toll? Doing the research for the book was a pleasure - I got to call up weapons designers and ask them about the Library of Congress's pyrophoric deacidificational chemical, diethyl zinc, and I got to learn about the man who proposed to import mummies in the 1850s and turn them into paper. Double Fold is meant to demonstrate, in a small way, the value of large library collections - if a writer can't predict two weeks in advance what direction a line of research will take him in, how can a librarian do it for him decades ahead of time?
Yes, it was very hard to raise the money to buy some of the British Library's American newspaper collection (it cost $150,000 to buy it and another $20,000 to ship it across the ocean), which would otherwise have been destroyed, and I would, frankly, like some major financial help from people out there who believe in the importance of keeping these sources. Yes, having this collection has completely screwed up my
