[In the following interview, Baker discusses his arguments for book and newspaper preservation, as put forth in Double Fold, and the controversy among librarians in response to his condemnation of library policies that promote the destruction of print collections.]

Since its publication in April 2001, Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper has generated a hailstorm of controversy in the library community. It is somewhat ironic then that Baker, sitting in a New Hampshire warehouse among the more than 60 pallets of newspapers he recently rescued from destruction at the hands of the British Library, says he is beginning to feel a little like a librarian.

In spite of his damaging indictment that librarians invented a crisis of brittle paper to justify the destruction of huge numbers of rare books and newspapers, it is evident in speaking with Baker that he does indeed harbor a great deal of respect for the work of librarians. Baker will bring his argument directly to the library community at this year's ALA meeting in San Francisco, addressing librarians in a speech that is certain to generate a heated response. What can librarians expect to hear there? LJ caught up with the author and talked to him about his book, about librarians, and, of course, about paper.

[Albanese]: Double Fold has generated a great deal of press and a lot of reaction from both inside the library community and from the public. What kind of personal reaction have you received?

[Baker]: Generally, the reaction I receive is positive. The truth is, what I'm saying in Double Fold isn't very extreme. I'm just pointing out a series of related mistakes that have happened. Now, there are some angry people who don't want those mistakes pointed out. And there are occasionally people who will stand up at a reading or call into radio shows saying I'm bashing librarians. But that is the kind of response you make if you haven't read the book. One of the things I do in the book is single out for praise heroic librarians, who did right by what was on their shelves and actually have increased their collections. The library profession isn't a monolithic thing. I'm not attacking the library profession.

Why would Nicholson Baker, a major voice in American fiction, choose to write a nonfiction book about libraries?

I've used a lot of libraries. I used the MIT library when I was writing The Mezzanine, and I found a lot of great stuff there. And I worked in the University of Rochester [NY] library almost every day when I was a high school student. It's worth spending so much time writing about libraries because once the past passes from human memory, once the people who lived through a certain time period are gone, the only way we have of knowing history is by reading the documents in libraries. These places, in which we have put our trust, are the sources for all our attempts to understand the past. If you want to learn about history, where are you going to go? You're going to go to the library.

But one gets the sense from your writings, from the initial New Yorker articles to Double Fold, that librarians have been at worst criminally irresponsible and at best incompetent. Does this reflect some underlying view of the library profession?

Oh, no, no. My view of the whole profession? No. But I do think there have been some librarians who had a different idea of the direction libraries should go. Patricia Battin is one example. In my opinion, she hugely inflated a crisis in order to extract what was essentially disaster relief money from Congress. I don't think she acted with ill intentions, it's just that what she wanted to do resulted in the destruction of things libraries ought to be hanging onto. I would hesitate to use the words criminally irresponsible. But there were people who acted irresponsibly because they were caught up in the excitement of revolutionizing the distribution of information. And as a result things that we can never get back were destroyed.

We at LJ have received a lot of feedback from the library community indicating that you have portrayed unfairly the work of librarians. Why do you think that is?

It seems like what some librarians do is read, say, [Princeton University historian] Robert Darnton's review [in the New York Review of Books] and conclude that that is what's in the book. Darnton is a smart guy, and he gives a precis of the book. But he is in error. He has misrepresented some of the points the book makes.

So what exactly was your intention in writing Double Fold?

I wanted to change the way librarians think about some of these collections and the nature of keeping things. I wanted to get the truth on the page so people could begin discussing these issues in an intelligent way. We have to learn what actually happened to these collections, so I wanted to tell the story in great detail of who did what and why. Having told that story, I would like libraries around the country to take seriously what's on their shelves.

You mention the Darnton review—how would you characterize the press coverage of your book? Does it accurately reflect what's in it?

The reviews that talk about there being an ugly conspiracy are not true to the book. I don't think there was a conspiracy. I don't use the word conspiracy anywhere. And if the review concludes that librarians are evil, that's also a mistaken inference. I couldn't have written this book if people in libraries hadn't told me that the Brittle Books Program was wrong. I just think we have to discriminate a little bit.

In hindsight, do you think you could have saved librarians some angst by offering a more detailed delineation between the handful of research institutions you chronicle in your book and the other thousands of libraries in this country to which your claims do not apply?

As I say in the preface to the book, the illustrious institutions I hold up for criticism “employ a great many book-respecting people who may not know of, or approve of, what their superiors or their forebears have done.” There's an awful lot of stuff in this book. It is not the kind of fierce attack that it is being portrayed to be by the people who want to defuse it. There is a beleaguered feeling among librarians because people are assuming that I'm saying things I'm actually not saying. There's this idea that Nicholson Baker says we have to save every issue of every edition of every newspaper. Well, that's silly. I never say that. But because the story is unpleasant and we will be contending with these losses forever, people think I am stacking the deck. On the contrary, I'm just trying to tell the history of some mistakes that we ought to be able to learn from as we go into this major phase of digital scanning.

A number of librarians note your argument for preservation comes at the expense of the primary mission of libraries—providing access to information. What do you see as the primary mission of libraries?

It depends on what kind of library we're talking about. A small suburban public library for example has a different mission than a large research library. They have to provide things like children's programs and other valuable resources. Their collections are fluid, one book in, one book out, and that is totally justifiable. Their task is not keeping the historical legacy. In my book I'm talking about large research institutions. I think librarians at the large research institutions have to respect what the librarians before them saw fit to collect.

There is nothing wrong with taking pictures of any library holding; it's what you do with the thing itself after you're done taking pictures that occupies my attention. So if you just take a picture of the thing, say a brittle book, and then you put the thing back on the shelf so you have a scroll of plastic and you have the book, then, yes, that increases access. And with newspapers there is unquestionably an argument that if you make microfilm of a newspaper you can mail around those rolls of microfilm and increase access. But what has happened is that the existence of microfilm, often terrible microfilm, has been used as an excuse to discard the originals. In that case, you have a net loss of access.

But with limited dollars, space, and staff and the limitless mission of providing wide access and service to patrons, how can libraries be expected to keep up with patron demands and also act as artifact repositories?

Yes, OK, but if you have the National Endowment for the Humanities pumping over ＄100 million into the library system all for one purpose, to microfilm things, you can't say there hasn't been a lot of money spent. It was just spent in the wrong direction. How did we come up with this strange feeling that a quarter of the books in U.S. libraries were brittle and crumbling to dust? Because people found that if you create a crisis, the money will flow. And at the time, those people found that there was only one way to spend that money. Not on book repair, not on storage, but on microfilming. I really do love libraries. I want them to be funded. And I want them to have enough money to store what we want them to store and have the kind of invaluable reference services that they have offered in the past.

While you do raise the important issue of preservation, librarians say you also seriously damage the public's confidence in libraries, which ultimately may make it harder for libraries to actually get funds in the long run.

This book does do a certain amount of damage to a philosophy of library administration that is terribly flawed. But I hope the long-term effect is that people will want to right these wrongs. I am not a librarian, but the people who ran the big research libraries did betray the public's trust. … It really is a level of irresponsibility that deserves a certain amount of public reproach.

There is already a great buzz surrounding your scheduled talk at the upcoming ALA conference. What are you planning on talking about there?

Well, I'm just going to expand on some of the same things I say in Double Fold. But I really want to hear from people. I'm resigned to the fact that many librarians don't agree with me, but, the truth is, many do.