SOURCE: Star, Alexander. “The Paper Pusher.” New Republic (28 May 2001): 38-41.

[In the following review, Star compliments Double Fold, but finds flaws in Baker's narrow defense of print artifacts and his failure to consider content value as a criterion for preservation.]

In the opening pages of The Mezzanine, his first novel, Nicholson Baker speculates that the world changed suddenly sometime around 1970. He is referring to the unfortunate moment when “all the major straw vendors switched from paper to plastic straws, and we entered that uncomfortable era of the floating straw.” How did this come about? Presumably the engineers had supposed that because a plastic straw weighed more than a paper straw, it, too, would rest on the bottom of a can. But the engineers were wrong. They had forgotten that paper straws were more porous than their plastic cousins, and therefore “soaked up a little of the Coke as ballast.” As a result of this miscalculation, the “quality of life, through nobody's fault, went down an eighth of a notch, until just last year, I think, when one day I noticed that a plastic straw, made of some subtler polymer, with a colored stripe in it, stood anchored to the bottom of my can!”

This is Nicholson Baker in a nutshell: a squinting attention to the tiniest specifications of everyday life; a half-satirical, half-maniacal expression of outrage; and a certain childish wonder and joy at the way things, in the smallest sense of the term, hold together. In his new book [Double Fold], Baker once again protests the abandonment of paper. This time the scope is larger: he writes as a self-proclaimed “library activist” who has composed a spirited polemic against the errant romance of librarians with technology. Examining the microfilm vogue of past decades, as well as the digitalization boom of today, Baker contends that librarians have too often preferred paper substitutes to the real thing. As a result, they have discarded and destroyed countless books and newspapers and have done irreparable damage to the very artifacts that they are pledged to protect.

A cabal of self-aggrandizing technocrats and philistines has taken the historical record out of circulation and stamped it for destruction. Together with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress in particular has been responsible for the greatest government-led destruction of books since Henry VIII sacked England's monasteries. And how did this happen? In Baker's view, modern librarians are unaccountably eager to be released from the burden of their possessions. They are mesmerized by the lure of technology and by the ideology of “steady space.” Rather than increase the size of their buildings, they have preferred to decrease the size of their books. If microfilm did not exist, they would have had to invent it.

In fact, microfilm was already being used in the 1870s, when it was employed to send military documents by carrier pigeon during the Franco-Prussian War. By the 1930s, it had become a business: the Recordak company promised libraries that it could replace their crumbling newspapers with tidy rows of boxed microfilm. With World War II, the prestige of the technology increased. University Microfilms received a contract from the Office of Strategic Services to photograph German scientific papers. The government—also reduced and sorted thousands of old postcards showing images of Bavaria or Berlin. When Allied bombers needed to know what a particular bridge or village looked like, they could consult the archives. In 1956, the microfilm revolution began in earnest when the Ford Foundation helped to organize the Council on Library Resources. A coalition of cold war strategists, library bureaucrats, and photo-emulsion entrepreneurs set out to make the world safe for the technologies of miniaturization.

Baker has a great deal of fun with the “grand old men of microfilm,” the patricians and the technocrats who combined an old-fashioned horror of waste with a futurist's enthusiasm for sleek gadgetry. Quite sincerely, they believed that the photographing of written text was as revolutionary an invention as the printing press, and that microfilm rolls would one day be as ubiquitous as eyeglasses or toothbrushes. In the service of this vision, they concocted a number of bizarre schemes that add up to a memorable inventory of technological failure.

Fremont Rider was perhaps the most eccentric of them all. An assistant to the great classifier Melvil Dewey, he later wrote ghoulish poetry, and immersed himself in spiritualism and real estate, and quite possibly suggested the phrase “new deal” to Franklin Roosevelt. As the librarian of Wesleyan University in the 1930s, he went to great lengths to act on his belief that waste is a “venal sin.” Enraged by all the white space in wide-margined books, Rider had the books cropped. In The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski adds that Rider was also consumed with making library shelving more efficient. To minimize the empty space on a shelf, he grouped Wesleyan's books by width and shelved them with their bindings facing up.

It was Rider's steadfast belief that library collections were doomed to double in size every sixteen years; and he believed that this iron law of increase was nothing less than a “problem … of civilization itself.” His solution to the problem was a variation on microfilm: the Microcard, which would reduce an entire book to tiny lines of script on the back of its own catalog card. By the mid-1950s, some 1,600 microcard readers were in use around the country. But the resolution of the image was not very good; the film stock was damaged by heat; and it was not long before the fad came to an end.

Among Rider's most ardent admirers was Verner Clapp, the first president of the Council on Library Resources. An amateur classicist, Clapp was proud of his old-fashioned erudition; but this did not stop him from complaining that books were “dingy, dreary, dogeared, and dead!” While human beings are thoughtful enough to die and decay, the “world's books have a way of lingering on.” The librarian's mission, Clapp maintained, was to extract the “profit and usefulness” from printed volumes while preventing them from “clogging the channels of the present.” (It is a sentiment that Emerson or Nietzsche would have understood, though Baker understandably finds it disturbing in a librarian.)

Disdainful of paper, Clapp wished to see little-used books “retired to microtext.” Ingeniously enough, he sponsored the exciting idea of combining an automatic page-turning device with closed-circuit television. In this way, patrons at one library could read a book that was located at another library with little need for human assistance. The television-reader went nowhere; but the Library of Congress did spend considerable amounts of money on other dubious gadgets. Deputy Librarian William Welsh promoted the “Optical Disk,” a highly efficient substitute for rolls of microfilm. Indeed, he boasted that the disk was so compact that its adoption would allow the Library of Congress to shrink from three large Washington buildings to one. Once again, the technology proved wanting.

These efforts are amusing failures; but less amusing is the story of microfilm itself. Even in the 1950s, it was clear that microfilm was not very reliable: the color of the original image was lost; the film buckled and snapped; the text was blurry; and often entire pages of an original source were simply absent from the rolls. (In a fit of what Baker calls “redefinitional insanity,” the Library of Congress deems a microfilmed newspaper run to be “complete” if “only a few issues per month are missing.”) Most important, readers did not like operating the machines. As Baker aptly puts it, reading a newspaper was like “mowing an endless monochromatic lawn.” Some terminals even came equipped with airsickness bags. Microfilm, one commentator would later explain, was an “information burial system.”

Even so, Clapp and the Council on Library Resources pushed ahead. Libraries, they believed, were eager to free up space on their shelves, and to be relieved of the need to care for old, dusty objects; one advertisement promoted microfilm as a “slum clearance program.” The 1970s became the “gilded age of microforming.” Before filming, printed volumes were typically sliced apart by an electronic guillotine, so that they could be photographed more rapidly and without any “gutter-shadow” between facing pages. Once disbound, the resulting heap of pages was unlikely to go back into a library collection. At the Library of Congress, entire runs of The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and The Chicago Tribune were thrown away or sold off to dealers, who would cut them up for the satisfaction of memento seekers. Books, too, were re-formatted and retired. Baker estimates that, between 1968 and 1984, the Library of Congress's Preservation Microfilming Office filmed 300,000 volumes and discarded a great number of them.

As the disbinding continued, the motives for microfilming began to shift. Microfilm, it was argued, not only saved space, it would also keep embrittled texts from disappearing. Beginning in the 1870s, newspapers and books had been printed on highly acidic paper made from wood pulp instead of rag pulp, and with time this paper tended to crumble and to curl and to become discolored. In 1957, the Council on Library Resources asked a document laminator named William James Barrow to look into the problem. Barrow promptly devised a “fold test”: he would measure the durability of old paper by bending the corner of a page back and forth until it broke.

Barrow believed that the number of bends a page could withstand provided an adequate measure of its expected life. According to his first calculations, some ninety-seven percent of the “non-fiction books printed between 1900 and 1939 will have deteriorated to the point of being useless by the end of the century.” Later tests were not quite as dramatic in their results, but even so they seemed to make a self-evident case for “re-formatting,” and “the eighties became the decade of the Barrow-inspired statistical-deterioration survey.” In 1985, Yale University found that forty-five percent of the library books that it sampled failed the test after four folds and were therefore ripe for replacement.

Baker attacks the fold test with considerable vigor. Obviously enough, the important thing is not how many times you can bend a page, but how many times you can turn it. If Barrow's numbers proved to be egregiously wrong, it may be because he failed to realize that books were not designed for origami. Conducting his own homemade experiment, Baker tried to crease a page of Edmund Gosse's Questions at Issue, and found that the corner broke off right away. But when Baker applied his “Turn Endurance Test” to the seemingly embrittled 1893 edition, he found that it survived eight hundred page turnings without any trouble. Barrow's fold test might be appropriate for maps or dollar bills, but why apply it to books?

The reason, Baker believes, is that libraries were eager for a “marketable preservation crisis.” By warning of an imminent book disaster, they could win impressively large grants and continue to pursue their favored technological schemes. In the 1980s, the library-industrial complex turned the notion of a “brittle books crisis” into gospel. Warren Haas, the president of the Council on Library Resources, commissioned a report recommending that 3.3 million books be microfilmed within the next twenty years to save them from their own acidity. Since microfilming a book could cost ＄60, a considerable amount of money would need to be raised.

Fortunately, Haas convinced William Bennett to open an Office of Preservation at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now the librarians could lobby Congress for the funds to pay for microfilm and other paper rescue operations. At a congressional hearing in 1987, the guardians of the nation's cultural heritage gathered to warn that the brittle books crisis had become a “national emergency.” Vartan Gregorian explained that seventy-seven million books faced imminent extinction unless action was taken. Lynne Cheney graphically added that “every day, Dan Boorstin gets 6,000 more bodies brought into the Library of Congress,” and announced that the NEH favored “intellectual content” over “the book itself.”

Soon after, the producers of the documentary film Slow Fires employed the talents of the man who wrote The Asphalt Jungle to create “the most successful piece of library propaganda ever.” In the film, the chief of conservation at the New York Public Library laments that many books are “so brittle and deteriorated that they simply fall apart in your hands.” Baker retorts that this is nonsense: nobody has ever seen an embrittled book actually turn to dust. For Baker, the preservation crisis was essentially a hoax. Brittle books are fragile, but they are not about to disappear. Baker even speculates that their acidity might help them to survive in the long run, since it “discourages paper-eating bugs.”

Today, of course, microfilm is no longer very popular. And as Baker himself acknowledges, libraries have abandoned the worst excesses of their disbind-and-destroy policy. Many librarians have protested against “slash and burn preservation,” and there is some skepticism about the brittle books crisis. The fold test is rarely used. Even so, Baker fears that “a second major wave of book wastage and mutilation” is now beginning. The reason, quite simply, is digitalization. All that was once to be microfilmed will now be scanned. Once again, books are at risk of being disbound and discarded in order to undergo “reformatting” and “platform migration.” Everywhere librarians are heeding the “digitarian dog whistle.” And this time the threat to libraries is even more acute. Some members of the “scan clan” wonder why libraries need to exist in physical spaces at all.

Baker provides various examples of the digital library in the making. At Cornell, old math textbooks and works of history have been scanned and discarded; the university calculated that the scanning would only be cost-effective if the originals were given away to save shelf space. (The discarding stopped after a faculty member complained.) Baker also raises questions about JSTOR (an acronym for “journal storage”), a Mellon Foundation program that converts scholarly journals into digital files. JSTOR adheres to high standards of quality control; there are no missing pages, and the screen resolution of its scans is excellent. Still, Baker protests that JSTOR is marketed to university libraries as a substitute for, not a supplement to, their print collections. Libraries are advised to move back issues of journals to remote storage locations, or to discard them altogether.

Why is this disturbing? For one thing, digital documents may be far harder to preserve than paper ones. Hardware needs to be replaced, and software programs are continually altered. The maintenance of a large digital database can be extremely expensive. A true archive, as Baker points out, needs to be able to survive protracted periods of neglect and inattention. Can we count on every generation of future librarians to upgrade the relevant hardware and software? Even if the most popular items are safeguarded, many others may simply vanish.

Baker's book is an entertaining and in large part convincing exposé of the misdeeds of librarians. Microfilm certainly failed to live up to its promise, and it may have done more harm than good. And Baker is right to worry about the digital librarians and their dream of a day when the management of databases will replace the maintenance of books. Everywhere libraries are eagerly competing to reinvent themselves as information resource centers. They are cluttering their reading rooms with computer terminals even as their acquisitions budgets decrease. It is not foolish to worry that close reading and idle browsing, as well as actual books, will be squeezed out by all the modems and the power cords.

But Baker sometimes lets his passions get the better of him. Even an ardent bibliophile ought to be able to distinguish between a book guillotine and the other kind. It is also worth acknowledging that even microfilm brought some enlightenment to library users, especially at regional universities lacking large collections. Since he focuses on the fate of paper, Baker's assessment of the digital library is myopic. If digital text poses a greater threat to libraries than microfilm, it is as much because of its virtues as because of its vices. The ease with which text files can be searched and distributed is nothing to sneer at. (The keyword search “unquestionably helps researchers in their truffle hunts,” Baker writes.) Unlike microfilm, on-line search engines and databases are quite popular with library users. If libraries are metamorphosing rapidly, it is not due entirely to the machinations of a tiny cabal.

Whatever the fate of a library's paper documents, this metamorphosis raises questions. Does the very abundance of easily accessed information on the Web lead researchers to ignore more-valuable information that is not on the Web? How can digital text be catalogued and preserved when it is constantly being updated and altered? Should libraries grant the same access to their virtual collections as to their actual collections? Right now, libraries are battling the Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires all libraries that receive federal funds to install clumsy filters blocking their patrons' access to pornography websites—and much else besides. Many libraries have refused to install the filters. In turn, a New York state senator is threatening to sue the Brooklyn Public Library for “providing a taxpayer-funded peep show for our kids.” It all sounds like something out of a Nicholson Baker novel. (In The Fermata, Baker's narrator leaves a sex toy in a library's garbage bin so that he can watch a woman walk away with it.)

Baker does not address any of this. Instead he puts most of his energy into arguing that libraries should acquire more space and preserve more paper. He recommends that some libraries begin retaining current newspapers in bound form. In his estimation, “a century of newsprint” could be sheltered in a Home Depot-sized warehouse. It's a big country, after all; there must be room. He also urges the Library of Congress to keep everything it receives from publishers and the NEH to fund only scanning that is “nondestructive”: the original newspapers and books must be kept intact and “saved afterward.”

These are sensible ideas. But in arguing so eloquently for the preservation of original sources, Baker leaves open the question of how many original copies of a book or a newspaper must be kept, and by whom. For most libraries, this is the essential question. How tragic is it for a library to discard back issues of a scholarly journal if original copies of the journal are kept elsewhere and the library has access to high-resolution scans of its pages? What is the difference between hastily photocopying an article in a library and printing out a high-resolution image of that article from one's desktop? Should nobody ever discard a bound volume of anything? Baker seems to imply that everything is worth keeping.

Now that books are rumored to be obsolete, they have attracted new lovers. Historians rightly stress that a book is a meaningful artifact and not simply a disposable container of words. Readers exclaim about the ecstasy of turning the page or using a bookmark. Software firms attempt to secrete digital ink or to reproduce the look of a water-marked page onscreen. The book is a marvelous invention, and it may be better to fetishize it than to seek its replacement by multimedia displays and hand-held reading devices. And yet bibliophilia, too, has its vices. It is a form of piety. It is frequently indiscriminate. The appreciation of fine bindings and antique bookplates can become an exercise in preciosity. It is much easier to admire a book's embroidery than to wrestle with its meaning.

Baker is not a snob, though he sometimes poses as one. He can be marvelously attentive to the uses of language in everything from seventeenth-century prose to junk mail. In his eagerness to defend old newsprint or calfskin, however, he sometimes forgets that finally it is the experience of contemplative reading and the availability of valuable information that are most worth safeguarding, not the sheer quantity of paper in the world. Of course, any decision to value one piece of paper more than another may turn out to be mistaken; but this hardly means that such decisions can be avoided altogether.

If all the money spent on microfilm and scanning were used instead to build warehouses of print, librarians would still have to make some choices about what to keep and what to discard. The assumption that space is limited is not only an artifact of their stinginess and their aversion to paper. As the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out in 1993, an increasing number of books are printed every year, and a vast number of them have little obvious intrinsic value: “They are parts catalogs, census reports, Department of Agriculture pamphlets, tide tables, tax codes, repair manuals, telephone directories, airline schedules. … Who would have any reservations about putting texts like these into electronic form, if it will make the world a roomier and greener place?”

Baker would probably have plenty of reservations about this skepticism. The brittle pages of old repair manuals and tide tables are just the sort of things that he savors. Indeed, a reader of his previous books might think that there is nothing at all that he would willingly discard. In U and I, his account of an obsession with John Updike, he regrets peeling the price sticker off a pair of clogs: “It is a piece of information I will always want to have.” Later, he reflects on a page of Proust “stained with drops of … suntan oil.” Baker imagines “the near transparency that the drops of lotion must have created in the paper as methylparaben portholes in Marcel's prose through which we glimpse for a moment the knowable, verifiable life we have now, in America, with spouses and deck chairs and healing sunlight, as opposed to the unknowable life of a homosexual genius in France before the First World War.”

It is this intense effort to extract meaning from even the most ephemeral things, and to turn willfully away from the reality of oblivion, that gives Baker's writing its energy and its wit. But it also renders him incapable of considering what is worth saving and what is not. Oblivion sometimes has its uses. Given that libraries really do encounter more words and more paper than they can handle, this reluctance to make judgments of value is a serious lacuna for a library activist. Sometimes, one imagines and even hopes, ephemera are just ephemera.