Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker. Random House, 370pp., $25.95. We humans throw things out; it is a fact of life, and when we desist from a sometimes painful task, it is ultimately done for us, if not in life, in death. Institutions, societies and cultures also discard, but it is a more complex, far-reaching process often involving controversy, violence, even revolution when change does not come swiftly enough. Double Fold, so named for the way librarians test for the embrittlement of paper by folding the corner of a page and bending it back and forth until it breaks, is about one institution, our nation's libraries, and their changing attitude toward paper. The first several chapters describe how numerous libraries systematically divested themselves of a treasure trove of information, their newspapers; the bulk of the book takes us unpleasantly up to present time with a discussion of the developing strategies for "preserving" books now taking place within the nations's forem ost governmental agencies responsible for shaping educational and cultural policy.

Baker, by calling a novelist, became involved in library issues some years ago when he suggested to an editor of the New Yorker that he do an article on card catalogues. Its publication in 1994 brought him a certain notoriety in the library world as an ascerbic critic of technology, but also as a timely spokesperson of conservation. So when administrators of the San Francisco Public Library sent a few hundred thousand books to a land fill because their new building was too small to house them, the institution's librarians naturally turned to Nicholson Baker to publicize the matter. That controversy put him in touch with yet another person, and another library issue: how libraries, even hallowed research institutions such as the Library of Congress and the British Library, were destroying their newspaper collections, replacing them with neat spools of microfilm. That became another article for the New Yorker, and the blueprint for Double Fold.

But why newspapers? Why were they targeted? They are undeniably bulky and cumbersome and difficult to store. After 1870 American newsprint mills gradually replaced papermaking pulps consisting of cooked rags with pulps made of stone-ground wood or wood pulp. Hence, the commonly-held belief throughout the library profession is that newspapers self-destruct; they inevitably turn to dust sooner or later. When companies such as Kodak in the 1930s developed a novel invention, microfilm, the stage was set for the massive destruction of the nation's newspaper heritage. Ironically, before the carnage was finally completed, newspapers, wood pulp or rag, had been guillotined; newspapers had somehow come to stand for something outmoded and awful, thus permissible to be destroyed.

Baker has amassed a vast quantity of very convincing data to dismantle the myth about newspapers and their penchant for self-destruction. Some are, of course, in a terrible state, crumbling to the touch; double folding is unnecessary to clinch the proof. Many are in fine condition, however, at worst just frayed around the edges. Further, microfilm, the medium of choice that was to replace newspapers, and the accompanying filming techniques, were highly suspect, at least in the early days. As a result, some microfilm is unreadable, but the originals were destroyed without a conscientious check of the finished product. Once the government made available vast quantities of money for microfilming, newspapers, at least as a quantifiable entity, were a doomed species. By that time, the 1980s, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the agency in charge of oversight, imposed stricter procedures, but quality still cannot be taken for granted. Accidents, such as the "ace comb effect," where the microfilmer ac cidentally misses pages or whole years, continue.

With the flaws of microfilming so blatant, how and why did the policy prevail? After "newspapers turn to dust," the next and probably most important reason to discard them is storage space. Space is a very real concern; Baker is somewhat naive in suggesting that all that is needed is a warehouse the size of any Toys R Us. He conveniently discounts the costs of even minimal staff, lighting, heating, maintenance. But there is more: the will of boards of trustees, funders, governmental agencies who became convinced in increasing numbers from the 1930s and 1940s that it was old fashioned to preserve certain kinds of materials. And, of course, there were respected spokesmen such as Verner Clapp, second in command of the prestigious Library of Congress, who campaigned vigorously for the introduction of microfilm. Baker regards these men as misguided at best; for him there is some evil genius at work in fomenting something akin to a conspiracy based on unreason. He pays less attention than he should to an aesthetic rooted in an idea of progress, of modernity, which was born during those years; it comes down to a new sense of order that is clean and systematized, from which newspapers, by their very nature, are barred. (European industrialists like Coco Chanel supported fascism for similar reasons; there it was democracy that was unwieldy.)