NICHOLSON BAKER IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS NOVELS, but his latest volume is a lengthy rant against our major libraries and their policies regarding the preservation of old newspapers and books. Written in the warm-tapioca style of modern journalism, Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper has at least the virtue of exposing a serious problem in the contemporary conservation of knowledge. But its effectiveness is undermined by the author’s leftist polemics and relentlessly tedious exposition. Baker, who previously protested the switch from card catalogues to computers, caused a minor uproar in the San Francisco Bay area a few years ago by his agitation against the destruction of volumes considered redundant by local public librarians. Baker was clued into the disposal of bound volumes of old newspapers by a San Franciscan named Bill Blackbeard, a septuagenarian who collected comic art. Baker learned that libraries had been engaged for some thirty years in cleaning out their collections of such largely forgotten daily newspapers as the New York World (founded by Joseph Pulitzer) and the New York Journal (owned by William R. Hearst). One excuse given for selling or, when there are no takers, simply throwing away collections of old newspapers is the refinement of microfilm technology. But, according to Baker, microfilm fades over time, degenerating and providing incomplete images. Baker complains that the digital conversion of text is even worse. He argues at length that newspapers and books are not as fragile as functionaries at the Library of Congress would have us believe. Indeed, the author warns with increasing hysteria, the government is lying to its citizens. Baker thus turns this long-needed investigation of how libraries manage their collections into a hunt for CIA and military mischief. This shift in subject matter gives Double Fold a nutty, Californian flavor. Baker recently moved to Maine, but it’s obvious where he left his heart. Words can’t describe how thoroughly wacky it is to hitch the wagon of library preservation to the old leftist campaign horses of anti-CIA and anti-Pentagon paranoia, but Baker manages it. A chapter on scientific de-acidification of books turns into a commentary on why American missile launches failed in the 1950s. A reference to a picture (in an annual report of the Council on Library Resources) of Kennedy-era secretary of state Dean Rusk would not, it seems, be complete without noting that Rusk “was that same year trying to figure out whether the CIA should use Mafia hit men or poisons to assassinate Castro.” Baker is obviously among those who think it dastardly to try to get rid of Fidel Castro. He seems not to realize that Castro himself has destroyed many precious, often irreplaceable, examples of pre-revolutionary Cuba’s once revered literature. To say nothing about the authors Castro has had imprisoned and killed. Such an example should be as alarming to any friend of the written word as, say, the dumping of old copies of the Chicago Tribune after they have been microfilmed. It is nevertheless clear that too many old newspapers and books have been, and are being, junked by libraries. Something has to be done to arrest such cultural vandalism — and as Robert Darnton noted in his New York Review of Books treatment of Baker’s tome — something is being done: The Council on Library and Information Resources has just issued a draft report recommending measures to preserve books, newspapers, and audiovisual and digital materials. Although written in a professional jargon that is almost self-parody, the council’s report does take note of some common-sense possibilities, like the establishment of new regional libraries. Baker compares the destruction of print resources to the tearing up of railroad tracks across America after World War II — a waste that became apparent thirty years later, when the streetcar systems once written off as obsolete suddenly became fashionable again, under the new title of “mass transit.” He is certainly right that modern library policy gives the impression of a society rushing in the direction of the new and abandoning its past achievements. Still, it’s doubtful that rotogravure advertising, the star of newspaper production at the turn of the twentieth century, or comics like “The Yellow Kid” will undergo the kind of revival seen in mass transportation. Indeed, considerations of journalism and newspaper content in general are entirely absent from Baker’s harangue. Old newspapers are important to him because he likes to play with them, to fantasize, apparently, that he has just bought a copy of the 1934 New York World off the street — fondling history rather like the characters in his novel Vox (the book Monica Lewinsky bought as a gift for Bill Clinton), which dealt with people talking dirty to each other on the telephone. He almost never discusses how historians use newspapers or what ordinary people, as well as scholars, are liable to learn from them. The result is that Baker himself is a minor participant in the promotion of historical forgetfulness about which he complains. With a magpie’s sense of the life of the mind, he views libraries more as places to look at nifty samples of old printing than as repositories of the past. Let’s be clear: A cadre of leftist academics and politicized librarians have created an Or-wellian memory hole down which our collective knowledge of a more civil, even “progressive,” American past is being consigned, and that is indeed a matter for great alarm. American li-braries, in fact, increasingly resemble intellectual ruins, in which traditional literature and study are giving way to something not very different from video games, and it is disgraceful. In addition, librarians have — via the godforsaken college-degree system known as “library science” — professionalized themselves into mandarins. The art of bibliography has grown pompous from the advanced degrees now required for even the lowliest job in a local library. Debates over paper and microfilm are merely a reflection of a much deeper crisis. This is a struggle over space — in our minds, hearts, souls, and identities — that the enemies of America hope to fill with lies. In Double Fold, Nicholson Baker is entirely right to hate the destruction wrought by the modern policies of America’s libraries. But what he can’t bring himself to see is that those policies were born from the leftist political views he embraces. Stephen Schwartz is the author of From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind. May 21, 2001; Volume 6, Number 34
