[In the following essay, Kniffel discusses Double Fold and Baker's efforts to preserve historical newspaper collections from destruction.]

Author and activist Nicholson Baker has again taken aim at library preservation practices—twice. Once for real, in a new book, and once as the butt of a hoax perpetrated by someone he calls “a misguided supporter.”

Baker's new book, Double Fold, published this month by Random House, is a scathing assessment of the state of newspaper and book preservation. He is incensed by libraries' rush to embrace space-saving technology at the expense of unique print originals and particularly by the wanton discarding of newspapers after they have been microfilmed, based on an exaggeration of their fragility.

“Libraries that receive public money should as a condition of funding be required to publish monthly lists of discards on their websites, so that the public has some way of determining which of them are acting responsibly on behalf of their collections,” says the author, whose book brings together his findings since 1993, when he began researching an article that was published in The New Yorker in April 1994, criticizing the destruction of library card catalogs after the installation of electronic catalogs. The controversial article led to Baker's involvement with the San Francisco Public Library, where he protested the discarding of books to a landfill.

The Library of Congress should lease or build a large building near Washington, where it should store everything that is sent to it by publishers, Baker suggests in the new book. And if LC won't do it, Congress should designate and fund another archive that will. He also suggests that several libraries around the country should be saving the nation's newspaper output in bound form and that the National Endowment for the Humanities should either abolish the U.S. Newspaper Program and the Brittle Books Program entirely or require as a condition of funding that all microfilming and digital scanning be nondestructive and all originals be saved afterwards.

UNIQUE TREASURE MUST BE PRESERVED

Double Fold chronicles Baker's efforts to save the bound foreign-newspaper holdings of the British Library, defying the conventional wisdom that “if a newspaper was printed after 1870 or so, it will inevitably self-destruct or ‘turn to dust’ any minute. …” His solution to that dilemma was to liquidate a retirement account, buy the newspapers himself for about ＄175,000, and establish the American Newspaper Repository in an old mill in Rollinsford, New Hampshire.

“It is really a thrill to open these volumes,” Baker told American Libraries, “Everyone who sees these newspapers, the men who unloaded them from the truck, looks at them and knows they are priceless.” He said student volunteers have sorted 90٪ of the collection, but ＄30,000 still has to be raised annually, just for the rent. Labor is all volunteer. Shelves will cost another ＄12,000, and “in order to save other collections that libraries might want to sell to dealers we will need more than that,” Baker said. “This is an enormous job and not something a private citizen should have to do, but I am willing to do it since the institutions we formed to do this task do not seem interested.”

Among the newspapers deaccessioned by the British Library are a complete run of the New York World—“the most important paper in U.S. history,” and the only complete run left in the world, according to Baker, “in impeccable condition.” The repository's run of the New York Times is better than even the New York Public Library's, which “has enormous gaps.”

LUDD LIBRARY HOAX

In March, reports began to circulate that Baker had formed the Ludd (as in Luddite) Library Foundation to raise ＄20 million and build a library in San Francisco free of computers. A bogus news release claimed to quote Baker as saying, “Public libraries have emphasized gimmickry at the expense of books and reading,” and noting that the Ludd Library would be served by “real librarians” and a card catalog in a “quiet environment free of computers and computer games.”

Baker said he traced the hoax to Joe Schallan, a reference librarian in Arizona, who told American Libraries, “That was a spoof, and I regret ever posting it to Publib [electronic discussion list]. I thought it was so over-the-top that no one would take it seriously. Wrong!”

“I was trying to use a little humor to make a point about libraries having drifted away from their mission,” Schallan said. “The willingness of so many to take it seriously is psychologically interesting, though. It's as if deep down in the soul of every librarian is the realization that in our rush to be hip, ‘give 'em what they want’ infotainment centers, we may have lost our way.”

Baker told AL, “I'm amused by the implication that I'm some kind of wealthy dude who with a few pals can come up with seed money for a ＄20-million fundraising campaign. But when he made up quotes and attributed them to me, and then made up the high-toned-sounding, fictional ‘Lucia Ashton’ as press contact, with phone number, he crossed the line.”

Lucia Ashton is the heroine of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and when you dial her number the phone just rings and rings.