"Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker

"Thence to crumbs?" Baker asks -- a very good question. How many of us have actually seen or held a book that has been reduced to crumbs? Baker doesn't need to make the case that these people's arguments are based on loopy logic -- that's self-evident. Even more outlandish, Baker explains in detail, is a costly (and, for now at least, discontinued) Library of Congress project that involved the use of large quantities of a highly reactive substance called diethyl zinc to de-acidify books and thus keep them healthy. Just what is diethyl zinc? "For one thing," Baker says, "your nose would promptly burst into flame if you opened a test tube of it and took a sniff." If you read that in a James Bond novel, you'd call it preposterous.

Baker, polite but mule stubborn, goes about the business of gathering and presenting this information much as Jessica Mitford did in her muckraking exposi of the American funeral industry, "The American Way of Death." Musing on his conversation with the Library of Congress' Kresh about the "inherent vice of deteriorating paper" -- or was it the storage problem? -- he writes, "The library has spent huge sums on microfilming, and its preservation budget is more than eleven million dollars a year -- enough to buy, build, and outfit a warehouse the size of a Home Depot, which would hold a century of newsprint." The common-sense zinger comes next: "Are the library's senior managers really so grotesquely inept that they can't plan for the inevitable growth of the single most important hoard of human knowledge in this country?"

Does Baker care too much? The nation's high-profile library professionals probably think so. It's certain that, at the very least, they would just like him out of their hair.

The angle that makes "Double Fold" so extraordinary is that Baker isn't just criticizing from the sidelines. In August 1999, he received the list of American papers that the British Library was discarding; it would first offer the papers to interested libraries and nonprofit institutions and then sell off to private dealers anything that hadn't been claimed. In an effort to save the papers, Baker scrambled to form his own nonprofit organization, the American Newspaper Repository. The British Library refused to grant the papers; Baker would have to put bids on them, as if he were a private dealer.

And so he did. Putting up his own money, he was able to purchase the World and several other papers, but he lost a number of others, including the complete Chicago Tribune from 1888 to 1958, which went to a rare-newspaper dealer in Pennsylvania. With a combination of grant money and donations, he was able to acquire those papers as well. At his own expense he now stores those papers, along with the ones he purchased himself, in a warehouse in New Hampshire, where they will be accessible to scholars who need them.

The most telling exchange in "Double Fold" occurs near the beginning of the book, although its significance snaps into the clearest focus at the very end. Baker has made a trip to the warehouse of Historic Newspaper Archives Inc., in Rahway, N.J., a company that buys discarded bound volumes of newspapers and slices them apart to sell individual papers, through catalogs such as Miles Kimball or Hammacher Schlemmer, as keepsakes.

During his visit, Baker explains to Hy Gordon, the head of the company's archives, that it bothers him that so many libraries are effectively destroying history by getting rid of their bound newspapers.

"Don't be distressed," Gordon says. "There are a lot of things more important in life." By the time you've reached the last chapter of "Double Fold," where Baker baldly reveals that he and his wife put up their own retirement savings to rescue and house all those condemned newspapers, I defy you to name even one.

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