The Secret Life Of Paper. - book review

Industry Standard, The, April 16, 2001 by Rob Walker

A novelist curses the folly of technophilia and the failure of microfilm.

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker (Random House, $24.95)

By now we are all familiar with the destructive power of technology. We are especially familiar with the havoc it can wreak on the distribution of information. And finally, we are all familiar with luddites.

It's tempting to stop right there in assessing Nicholson Baker's Double Fold. Here's a man who is worried about the fate of yellowed copies of the Laramie, Wyo., Republic ond Boomerong. A man whose distrust of technology begins with microfilm. Here's a man, you could say, who is stuck in the past. Who cares what he has to say about information's future?

Baker is a novelist and essayist whose work -- The Mezzonine, Vox and others -- is remarkable for its obsessiveness. This quality serves him well in Double Fold, which makes a surprisingly persuasive argument for the preservation of all kinds of old records. Beyond his immediate plea to halt the removal of newspapers and certain old books from library shelves, he has something to tell us about our blind faith that the new will invariably prove better than the old. That the technology in question is not even digital only underscores Baker's larger argument about passing fancies and technophilia.

In libraries, the contest between old paper and new microfilm -- the hot technology of its day -- seemed no contest at all. Microfilm is easier to store, easier to transport and far more durable. It contains the same information, but it doesn't turn to dust. Sound familiar? The future works better and the past takes up a bunch of space; why not just junk it?

And indeed, libraries have been junking old newspapers at lightning pace, dumping them in landfills or selling them by the pound to knick-knackers who then resell them as souvenirs.

Baker says almost all of this is wrong. "Librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper's fragility" for 50 years, he charges. Moreover, microfilm has problems of its own, including a propensity for fading to unreadability after a few decades. Baker says the change agents of the library world would have been better off doing nothing.

In our current backlashy times, "we would have been better off doing nothing" is an argument we are likely to hear a lot of. But one of the interesting lessons here is not that librarians are evil people bent on ruination -- as Baker sometimes portrays them -- but that it's just plain hard to sit back and do nothing. Many of us have a tendency to romanticize, and maybe even fetishize, new technologies, which seem like the very essence of progress. Microfilm's early zealots, in a phrase Baker borrows from the former editor of Microform Review, were "blind as lovers" to the fallibility of the newfangled medium. This is a handy phrase: Even if Baker is right, it's hard not to believe that these people meant well.

But it's good for the forces of change to run up against resistance and be asked to prove that they will make things better, not merely different. As Baker writes: "The truth is that certain purificationally destructive transformations of old things into new things seem to excite people -- otherwise polite, educated, law-abiding people -- and it's up to other normally polite people to try to stop them."

Change has a way of associating itself with lofty missions, grand visions and highfalutin ideas. Baker reminds us of something easily forgotten in the heat of creative destruction: Creativity can take a long time to prove itself, but destruction is immediate -- and forever.

Rob Walker is a columnist for Slate.