"Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker

A crusading novelist indicts America's libraries for destroying precious archives of newspapers and books -- and puts his own savings on the line to rescue them.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Apr 27, 2001 | Anyone who cares passionately about anything -- it could be something as mundane as movies or as rarefied as, say, lighthouses or cactuses or antique kimonos -- has probably been told at one time or another, "Lighten up! You're taking it all too seriously." There's always an undercurrent of hostility to those words. Declaring a subject unimportant is a way for people to ease their own feelings of inadequacy, to make those who have bothered to care into the kooks, the aberrations.

That's why Nicholson Baker's exquisitely researched, gorgeously oddball "Double Fold" brought me to tears more than once: Among contemporary literature I've rarely read so passionate a book, and it's not just Baker's cause, the rescue from destruction of books and newspapers in our libraries, that got me. It's the way he's so willing, over and over again, to creep out on a limb, to risk readers' ridicule, taking them to and past the point where they are likely to say, "This guy just cares too much."

And Baker does care far beyond the realm of what might be considered normal, which is precisely the point. Some people (librarians especially) are sure to accuse Baker of being too heated, of not having enough distance from his subject to write a balanced treatise. To hell with that kind of balance. Baker gives us something much rarer. His passion is bound up in the very fibers of the pages; it's as concrete as the binding. Baker could have written a wholesome, boring, respectable tome about how the fate of the nation's books and newspapers hangs perilously in the balance. As it is, Baker's research is tireless and sound, and yet the tone of "Double Fold" is its own best argument: It's as close as a book can come to a living, breathing being.

Resolutely absorbing, "Double Fold" also reads like a spy novel. Baker cuts to the bone, layer by layer, of a secret tragedy that has been insidiously playing itself out in libraries across the nation since the 1950s. Claiming that they need to destroy in order to preserve, library administrators have been transferring newspapers and so-called brittle books to microfilm and other media and then destroying the originals. Why don't they keep the originals? Their chief excuse, as they squawk loudly and often throughout "Double Fold," is that they don't have the storage space.

Or, alternately, there isn't a storage problem at all, depending on whom you ask. "Oh, no, it wouldn't be the space," says Diane Kresh, formerly the head of the Library of Congress' Preservation Directorate, when Baker asks her why microfilmed newspapers were discarded. "It's the inherent vice of deteriorating paper, and particularly newsprint."

Baker has always been the sort of writer who builds strata of odd details; he's the guy who notices the little curlicue in the corner that everyone else misses. (In the introduction to "Double Fold" he begins his explanation of how the book came about like this: "In 1993, I decided to write some essays on trifling topics -- movie projectors, fingernail clippers, punctuation, and the history of the word 'lumber.'")

Next Page: Guess what? Microfilm decays fast, too

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