"Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker

This time, as workmanlike as a carpenter, he dismantles the careless logic of those who have championed this devastation of our heritage. He starts out by shaving away at the commonly held theory that newspapers printed after 1870 -- the year in which American newspaper mills replaced stable, durable rag pulp with pulp made from ground wood -- are destined to turn to dust anyway ("any minute, soon, in a matter of a few years," Baker notes, quoting the various nebulous time estimates for when this disintegration will be complete). He tells of bogus aging-simulation tests performed on sample papers and describes the fervor of early microfilming enthusiasts, none of whom bothered to make sure that microfilm itself would provide a consistently readable record of a newspaper or book (in many, many cases it doesn't) or even if it would necessarily last longer than paper (Bummer! It doesn't).

One of those early enthusiasts was Verner Clapp, the No. 2 man at the Library of Congress in the postwar years, who dreamed of a day when microfilm machines would be "as natural and as essential as the tooth-brush, the ball-point pen, or as eyeglasses." Clapp, a former CIA operative, believed so strongly in microfilm that he didn't seem to care if it could actually be read or not. Baker observes that all the notes Clapp kept on microfilming were written on paper and are easily readable today. On the other hand, his CIA file, copied from microfilm, is barely legible. "The copy that the CIA sent me," Baker writes, "is poignantly stamped with the words BEST COPY AVAILABLE on almost every nearly indecipherable page."

Baker explains how he came to rescue (in other words, purchase), from the British Library's newspaper collection, a rare complete set of Joseph Pulitzer's World, an exceptionally beautiful late 19th century paper. ("Double Fold" includes a set of dashing color plates that give you a sense of the World's splendor. One of the plates also shows a color page rendered on microfilm: The illustration, gorgeous and finely detailed in the original, is reduced to a puddle of gray mud on microfilm.) Baker also stresses that his bound volumes of the World and other newspapers of a similar vintage are nowhere near close to disintegrating. You can still read them; you can still turn the pages.

Once so many libraries found themselves comfortable with the idea of destroying newspapers, they turned their attention to allegedly fragile books. The title of "Double Fold" comes from a test commonly used by librarians to determine a book's fragility. They see how many times they can fold and crease a page corner until it breaks off. But who, says Baker, reads a book this way? He pulls from his own shelf a book that he has greatly enjoyed (an 1893 edition of Edmund Gosse's "Questions at Issue") and devises his own test, opening the book to a middle page and turning it first back, and then forward, 400 times -- that's 399 times more than you'd turn that page in a single reading of the book. His conclusion? "'Questions at Issue' was (by definition) a very brittle book, if you compared it with brand-new paper, or old rag paper, but my ten minutes of research indicated that I would be able to read it four hundred times, which was plenty."

Baker explains the creepy doublespeak of "preservation" and "conservation," two terms that library administrators use interchangeably to bamboozle the public, even though they mean very different things. "Conservation" refers to the repair or restoration of the actual object; "preservation," although it may encompass conservation, has generally come to mean the transfer of a book's contents to another medium, such as a photocopy, microfilm, microfiche or a diskette. Baker spends a great deal of time with micropreservation zealots like Patricia Battin, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Commission on Preservation and Access, who clearly doesn't seem to care much whether the originals are preserved or not. Baker repeatedly quotes Battin's dramatic statements, which amount to thinly veiled scare tactics: "80 percent of the materials in our libraries are published on acid paper and will inevitably crumble. The Library of Congress alone reports that 77,000 volumes in its collections move each year from the 'endangered' state to brittleness and thence to crumbs."

Next Page: Do old books really disintegrate?

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