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Book Review: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Nicholson Baker, the American novelist and essayist, is already well known to librarians as a critic of library practices. His essay in the New Yorker (Baker, 1994), on the intellectual loss caused by the destruction of card catalogues as automated systems replaced them, was a good story well told by a skilled writer who obviously loved books and libraries. A later article on the discarding of thousands of books from the San Francisco Public Library in order to compensate for the lack of space in the new library, also published in the New Yorker, enhanced his reputation as a stylish commentator and 'whistle-blower' (Baker, 2001, p.vii). In Double fold (the title comes from the term used by librarians for testing the brittleness of a book page by folding the corner until it breaks), he presents his most comprehensive condemnation yet of library administrators. He indicts them for their butchery of books in the name of preservation The book has its origins in the research that he carried out in preparing a further essay for the New Yorker (Baker, 2(00) on the loss of original newspaper titles through microfilming programmes, and the subsequent disposal of the originals. He writes, 'I became familiar with the efforts of a woman named Patricia Battin, and I watched a movie, Slow Fires. I began moaning and typing things like "Oh, my friends, it's worse than you think." I realized that I had something that was longer than a magazine article' (Baker, 2(01). As he admits, this account of the development and application of preservation microfilming isn't an impartial piece of reporting, and Baker hasn't made great efforts to suppress his 'dormant prosecutorial urge' (2001, p.x). He presents his case for the prosecution with seductive skill, using many of the devices of the investigative journalist to expose practices that he defines at one point as 'utter horseshit and craziness' (2001, p.157), where he recounts the University of Flor-