DOUBLE FOLD: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

DOUBLE FOLD: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

By Nicholson Baker. Random House. 384 pp. $25.95

Baker, best known as a novelist, has a new obsession. Previous obsessions have included John Updike (U and I) and sex (Vox, The Fermata). Vox, of course, is the Moby Dick of phone-sex narratives, the book Monica gave Bill so that he’d get the idea; The Fermata, duller but longer, is no one’s idea of a gift. What’s got Baker heated up these days is, of all things, the misbehavior of the nation’s librarians. No, not that kind of misbehavior, but rather the librarians’ complicity in a decades-long conspiracy to rid themselves of a good portion of the stuff that so complicates their lives: those spacehungry books, newspapers, and periodicals.

In Double Fold (the term refers to a way of testing the durability of a page), Baker argues, with a master rhetorician’s tricks and a clever lawyer’s selective regard for facts, that our great research libraries, led by the Library of Congress, have betrayed the cultural heritage they were supposed to guard. And what is the implement of their treason? The microfilm camera. The libraries have transferred to film—brutally and imperfectly, in Baker’s version—the contents of hundreds of thousands of books and newspapers and destroyed the originals in the process, or discarded them subsequently, on the grounds that they were no longer required. (The destructive procedures he rails against, by the way, are no longer the preservation standard.) The justification for the filming was the inexorable workings of chemistry: The acidic content of paper produced in America throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries has doomed it to inevitable darkening and weakening.

What’s in dispute is just how weak, and therefore how useless, the printed materials will eventually become. Baker challenges the scientific evidence that persuaded the librarians, though he cannot dismiss what is plain to anyone who has ever left a newspaper too long in the light, or even in the dark. Baker discredits the microfilming process too, but how hard is that? Who in his right mind has a good word to say about using microfilm, which ranks as a form of torture with economy-class air travel or reading The Fermata?

There’s no denying Baker’s charge that we’re the poorer for having destroyed the original copies of books and newspapers that represent—often uniquely—aspects of the nation’s historical temperament; the microfilm versions are no adequate replacement but a mere grim expedient. Of course, we’re a lot poorer for the loss of most of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles too, but life goes on. The world’s a destructive place, and to pretend otherwise, to insist, as Baker is disposed to insist, that we save every scrap of original printed matter—book, magazine, flier, inscribed Post-It—because you never know what the future may decide was significant about the past, is to be blind not just to economics but to reality.

So is half the truth better than none? Not when the result is a deceptive half-truth. What’s shameful about Double Fold is its systematic distortion of motive—its attribution of malice or madness or, at best, massive ignorance to individuals who acted in good faith and, indeed, out of a sense of obligation that, if they did not do something, chemical decay would take from the world a significant chunk of the materials they were charged to protect. Librarians saw no option but to film. Should they have moved the materials instead to ideal storage conditions (salt mines, Himalayan caves) and kept them forever from light and thumbs, inaccessible but intact? Perhaps Baker is just too thoroughly a novelist. Led astray by imagination, he can’t help but make fiction.

—James Morris