The Lessons of Shredded Paper

Baldwin Louie — Fri, 06 Apr 2001 15:00:00 -0700

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 life, and my back hurts from lifting so many volumes of the New York Tribune. But the papers themselves are in such great shape, despite their sometimes rough treatment, that it's a thrill to have them and to see them being used.

Q: You write in Double Fold that "certain purificationally destructive transformations of old things into new things seem to excite people." This implies that people are excited by destruction as well as by creation. Why do you think people are excited by, so to speak, clean slates?

Baker: I once had a neighbor who cut down a tree on his front lawn. I asked him why. "It was dirty," he said. There are always going to be people who like paving things over, cleaning things up, getting rid of junk, neatening the edges - who aren't susceptible to the charms of age or heterogeneity. Urban renewal wouldn't have had the long run it had if nobody was excited by starting fresh.

If you have a floor full of shelves of old newsprint, and you can replace it with new cardboard boxes full of fresh scrolls of microfilm, and all the boxes are exactly the same size, the temptation - if you are a neatener-upper - may be almost irresistible, even when what is on the scrolls of plastic is not a good copy of what was on the pages, and even when it costs you millions of dollars to buy the scrolls of plastic. Same goes for a rack of electronic file-servers. Tidy people have an important place in libraries, of course - it's just that the tidying instinct can't be allowed to run amok.

Q: Is it possible to determine whether a technology truly is an improvement before people actually start to use it? What should the people who make things like microfilm or bio-engineered food or Web search engines ask themselves before they do it? Should they bother at all?

Baker: It isn't possible to predict the way things will go wrong. But if early reports of problems begin to come in, don't actively suppress them - don't pump up the propaganda campaigns in order to convince people that those who are objecting to microfilm (say) suffer from some irrational resistance to technology. If thoughtful people are objecting, listen to what they have to say. I'm not fussing about Web search engines, incidentally. I think they're miracles of speed and coverage that feel to us the way the big newspapers felt a hundred years ago - e.g., in the size and efficiency of their fishing nets and in the strange catches that sometimes surface.

Q: You of course have a complex relationship with technology. This interview, for example, is being conducted by e-mail. Some of your critics, nonetheless, will accuse you of "Luddism." How do you as a consumer of technology decide what is harmful and what is not?

Baker: In the case of digital copies of old books, the technology is not intrinsically harmful. Take a look at www.octavo.com - they take lovely page-by-page pictures of antiquarian books without doing anything more harmful than turning their pages. The harm comes when you decide that it's OK to "disbind" a scarce book - cut it out of its binding - in order to get its pages to lie flat on a scanner, and when you decide that the digital pictures you have just made can permissibly substitute for the reality that was safely (and inexpensively) on the shelf. That's the destructive approach that projects like Making of America and the Mellon Foundation's JSTOR have taken.

Keeping things is not expensive. It costs less than five dollars a book to build remote storage for a book collection; it costs over a hundred dollars a book to microfilm or scan it, more if you want color and a searchable OCR text, and we mustn't forget the hardware and software upgrades necessary to keep the machine-readable copies alive and kicking. If people stop thinking that the existence of a copy, however faithful, makes possible the discard of an original, we'll be okay. There are very nice postcards of Whistler's "Woman in White" for sale in museum gift shops, but the woman in white is still on the wall.

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The Lessons of Shredded Paper