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Newspapers and Bibliography: The Importance of Artifacts

Nicholson Baker, an established novelist, first came to the atten tio of bibliographers and members of related professions as the author of a series of New Yorker articles on bookish topics. "Discards" (4 April 1994) concerned the merits of computer catalogs vs. card catalogs in libraries, i.e., it discussed retrospective conversion (to use the techni cal term of professional librarianship) and the consequent discarding of many card catalogs; the article also pointed out the loss of certain kinds of information, as well as atmosphere, in the transition from one kind of catalog to the other. "Books as Furniture" (12 June 1995) commented on the widespread use of books as props in commercial settings and in pho tography for advertising. "The Author vs. the Library" (14 October 1996) reported on the weeding practices of the San Francisco Public Library. And "Deadline" (24 July 2000) provided the background and summarized the arguments subsequently presented in much greater detail in the book Double Fold (spring 2001). Double Fold, as was widely reported in the popular press and many professional publications, criticized the nearly universal library practice of microfilming newspapers and then discarding the originals, or more usually, purchasing someone else's microfilm and discarding one's own copies. The book sought to trace the genesis of this policy and identified the shortcomings of many of the films: poor quality, incompleteness, failure to account for variant issues, and lack of color. It also pointed out