[In the following interview, Baker discusses his controversial 1994 New Yorker essay “Discards,” in which he opposed the destruction of library card catalogs.]

Nicholson Baker's new book taps the author's uncanny ability to capture in prose those minute, seemingly insignificant aspects of our daily lives and thought processes and turn them into inspiring reflections. The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber is a collection of essays on topics ranging from the evolution of punctuation (in which he defends, for example, the collash, which connects a colon and a dash) to the use of the word lumber throughout the history of the English language.

Librarians will enjoy this book immensely, not because they will always agree with the controversial Baker on all points but perhaps because he is the ultimate library patron: demanding, meticulous, often uproariously funny, and full of the kind of surprises that make working a reference desk worthwhile. Still, Baker's thoughts on libraries are bound to set library listservs abuzz: While acknowledging his deep affection and devout support of libraries, he nonetheless reveals his view that the library profession's repudiation of its own past reinforces a perception of its insignificance in the real world.

LJ book reviewer David Dodd interviewed Baker via E-mail to learn more about his book and particularly its most famous piece—in the library profession at any rate—“Discards,” which appeared originally in The New Yorker, April 4, 1994.

[Dodd]: Your piece on library card catalogs, “Discards,” aroused quite a bit of discussion among librarians when it appeared in The New Yorker. Can you give some background on the article—how did you manage to interest The New Yorker in such an arcane topic?

[Baker]: I called the books editor up and asked her if I could write about card catalogs, and she said sure. You know, it doesn't really strike me as an arcane topic for people who read. What could be more central to our affection for libraries than the card catalog? Libraries are repositories of history, and the card catalog is the crucial self-published document in the history of each library. It is a big, slow, beautiful thing, built over generations by many unthanked people. It has flaws and oddities and secret strengths. Why not write about it? When I began, I merely meant to celebrate the technology of the paper database in its twilight years, since there were already innumerable people celebrating its replacement, the online catalog. I had no idea until I began calling around that libraries across the country were, right at that moment, actually throwing out the catalogs, physically destroying them. It's one thing to denigrate an old technology and replace it with something that is faster and better in many important ways, but it's another thing entirely to gleefully pulp the past. It's an act of narrow-minded, unimaginative hostility toward the work of the librarians who preceded you. For example, Johnson's dictionary is out-of-date, it does not accurately describe the holdings, so to speak, of the English language now. Do we have parties in which we ceremonially burn pages of Johnson's in an atmosphere of white wine and cheese and crackers? Of course not.

Did you get much response to the piece, personally, from librarians?

I got hundreds of letters from catalogers, references librarians, library administrators, and others, at research libraries and business libraries and tiny public libraries. In fact, early on I had to give up answering the letters. All but three or four of the letters said, “Go, man, go.” But that isn't surprising, since the people who write letters to a writer are for the most part going to be people who approve of what he's saying. On the listservs, there was anger. There was ball-clanking and nostril-flaring and frothing at the mouth.

Why the outpouring of anger?

Because every institution that has gone through a retrospective conversion and then trashed its catalog has seen problems and questions arise here and there that would have been solved or answered by its late-lamented card catalog. Even when the cards are microwaved, or rather microfilmed, there are problems. MIT had the front of its cards microfilmed, but crucial information spilled over onto the backs. When I talked to them about their recon they were contemplating going to the original books to verify what edition a given microfilmed record referred to. There have been hundreds of small turf battles all over the country, and in almost every case, the card-trashers have won. Now I come along and question the wisdom of that victory in a general-interest magazine. I say things that everyone knows are true but don't quite want to face—that the recon is often incomplete when the card catalog gets dumped, for instance, and that local information is lost in the flip. I point out some of the areas in which online catalogs—though they are awesome achievements in many ways—are still weak areas where the frozen card catalog, out-of-date though it may be, would have been exceedingly helpful above and beyond its status as a historical artifact. It may cross an administrator's mind, reading this, that maybe, just maybe, he did an immoral and—worse yet—wasteful thing by junking his library's defenseless card catalog over the timid protestations of staff and patrons. You think he's going to like me for saying so? No; what he's going to do is scream that I don't know how to use the online catalog and that I'm a technophobe, which is dotty.

So you're not a Luddite?

I've spent much of my brief and undistinguished life writing and thinking about technology. And for better or worse I have become something of a keyboard cowboy on MELVYL. A librarian at Harvard sums up the reaction well, I think. This person wrote in a letter to me: “Most of the responses that I saw to your New Yorker essay were vitriolic, let's-gather-the-wagons pieces, but they are not representative of what large numbers of librarians felt. Many of us know, or at least fear, that the quality of recon is even worse than you depict.” The people who are advocates of a single-strand approach to searching have not had to spend years submerged in a complex historical project involving centuries and languages other than their own. We need all the search tools we can get.

Including out-of-date card catalogs?

Every search tool has flaws and strengths. To a historian of scholarship, the flaws in a particular search tool are as interesting as its strengths, sometimes more so. We're not talking about a potted plant here. We're talking about a huge cooperative enterprise that consumed the time and best energies of hundreds of people over a century. What gives any single person the right to dismiss that particular achievement as worthless and unworthy of preservation? Librarians don't generally feel compelled to tell us what we should or shouldn't be interested in, because they understand that a library is bigger than any one mind or set of interests can encompass. I'm interested in card catalogs; I love them, and I am not alone. But there is another aspect to the debate that is very interesting. The card-ditchers disagree with me about the merits of card catalogs. They say I'm wrong in my claims about collocation, lost local information, etc. But in a frightening number of cases, we can't test whether they're right or I'm right because they've already thrown out the evidence! They've killed the tortoise to ensure that the hare will win the race.

It appears that you did quite a bit of research for “Discards.”

I did the things journalists do: I interviewed people, I did background reading. The research took a month. The rumor started going around after the piece came out that I once worked in a library, or maybe that I was a temp at OCLC. I've been a temp, yes, but never, unfortunately, at a library or any bibliographic institution. Before I visited the cheerful folks at OCLC, I'd never even set foot in the great state of Ohio. I'm just an ardent library user who thinks librarians are underappreciated. But here's the thing. If librarians fail to take their own past seriously, they're never going to succeed in convincing funders to take their present needs seriously.

In many ways, you seem to have pioneered hypertext writing before the actual thing came along. Do you have plans to work in electronic formats (e.g., HTML)?

Thank you. I used footnotes in The Mezzanine in 1988 because they are ways of entering a large hidden area of secondary analysis through the tiny portal of a superscripted numeral. The footnote symbol functions as a kind of directional switch next to the railroad track of the sentence, diverting the eye down to the stockyards at the bottom of the page, or, in accordance with the reader's wishes, allowing him or her to keep chugging along in the cross-country paragraph. I used footnotes again in the last essay in The Size of Thoughts, about the word “lumber,” because small thoughts (about the etymology of a single word) can have large footnotes hanging from them that cumulatively imply, or pay homage to, the thrilling enormity of the entire library. I really like tiny type of the sort used on toothpaste tubes and in footnotes in the great scholarly editions of the 19th century, so I'll have to wait until the typographic resolution of web browsers and word processing applications improves to the point at which truly fine print is legible onscreen before I relinquish the poor-man's hypertext of the ink-and-paper footnote.

If you had one request to make of the library profession, what would it be?

Could administrators please, please stop using the specious “out of space” argument when they want to throw out frozen card catalogs? Time after time, card catalogs are destroyed right when a library has more space than it has enjoyed in decades—that is, when it is moving into a brand new building. And it would be lovely if a librarian created a web site called The Catacomb, or something catchy like that, where any cataloger who wanted to could contribute a rare book-style MARC description of any surviving card catalogs or shelf lists or card-catalog fragments (say for serials holdings) at his or her institution, including things like number of drawers, date of inception of the catalog, date of freezing if frozen, principal catalogers over the years, notable features, etc., etc. The cataloger could even note in the appropriate MARC field that the catalog is on acid-free paper—after all, card stock is usually made of the highest grade archival rag-content stuff. Once thoroughly cataloged, a given surviving card catalog will be that much harder to throw away. Maybe the world will take libraries seriously again and fund them adequately when they stop repudiating their own past.