Nicholson Baker



April 28, 2001

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You may know Nicholson Baker [sp?] as the author of Vox. The New York Times Book Review calls him "one of America's most radically original fiction writers. What you might not know is that he is now also a quasi-librarian. While researching a story on card catalogs, Baker discovered that historic documents were being trashed by the truckload by such venerable institutions as the Library of Congress and the CIA. His new book, Doublefold, is both investigative journalism and a kind of stop-the-madness screed. Nicholson Baker, why'd you call it Doublefold?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well Doublefold refers to a test that libraries came up with for paper. Originally the fold test was done on a machine that looks sort of like an electric can opener, and you'd take a strip of paper that you cut out of an old book and you clamp it in this machine and it folds it back and forth, and the machine counts how many folds the paper can survive. And there is no scientific validity to it, but it was used by librarians to predict that '97 percent of the books published in the first third of the 20th Century wouldn't survive into the 21st Century. Then they adapted this test, because they didn't have the equipment, and they wanted something very simple and cheap, they did a manual test where you take the lower corner of a book page and if it folds back and forth less than say 2 times, 2 times in a pinch, and if the corner pulls off, that means that the paper is brittle, and a brittle book is a doomed book that won't survive and must be microfilmed or civilization will crumble.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Now you maintain, as you say, that these tests aren't any good. How do you know they aren't any good?

NICHOLSON BAKER:Well, what do we ask of a book? We want to be able to open it and turn its pages. Turning a page inflicts a very different set of stresses on a book than folding a corner back and forth. I took a book that, that flunked its fold test - it, its corner came off after one double fold, and I took that same page and then I just sat there and turned the page 400 times. I - and I didn't stop because the page had crumbled or anything; I just stopped because I felt that a book that can be read 400 times is probably okay to keep on the shelf.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:As you say in your book, a chair made of stainless steel may be stronger than a chair made of wood; that doesn't mean the chair made of wood can't perform good service for hundreds of years.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Exactly. And there - and I talked to Peter Waters [sp?] who has probably handled and thought about old paper more than anyone else alive; he's a master bookbinder and the former chief conservator at the Library of Congress, and he said there is no population of crumbling books. This was a myth that was intended to raise money for preservation, and the preservation movement was really a movement about creating microfilm that could then be scanned to kind of feed the digital stockpot.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the argument that well, but paper does crumble and, and microfilm lasts forever?

NICHOLSON BAKER:I think that, that's one thing that I feel the-- microfilm lobby was very irresponsible about. They did not disclose the, the kind of frailties and vulnerabilities, and they still haven't really that archival microfilm is subject to. They say that if it's stored properly, it will last 500 years. What they mean is if you keep it in an ultracool place at 25 percent relative humidity, it will last a very long time; but a lot of microfilm isn't stored that way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now all these flaws in the reproduction methods we have now would be academic if we were keeping the originals; but we aren't! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

NICHOLSON BAKER:Exactly. I, I e-mailed somebody in England at the British Library saying what's your policy on keeping newspapers, because I wanted actually to get a quote from a, another national library saying we would dream of throwing out our newspaper collections because that's, that's our history. And the, the British Library is indeed very good at keeping its own newspapers. So they told me that, but they also said we have a foreign newspapers disposal project in motion. We're getting rid of all these titles and you might want to take a look at them, and I looked down at them, and I realized that this was the last surviving great U.S. newspaper collection anywhere. You can make all kinds of fancy predictions by baking pieces of paper in ovens, but if you have the w-- lowest grade of paper which is newsprint made to last 2 weeks that is 110 years old, and it's still going strong, and it's beautiful, and it's holding its colors magnificently, obviously there's something wrong with the scientific tests.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Getting back to the beginning of the interview when I said your book was a kind of stop-the-madness screed, [LAUGHTER] where are we in that madness now? What is set to be destroyed?

NICHOLSON BAKER:[SIGHS] Well that's a very good question. What - we're in the middle, still, of a true wipeout of newspaper collections, because almost all 20th Century and late 19th Century newspapers, when they're microfilmed, are thrown out afterwards. So that destruction is just going on at high speed, all funded by the U.S. government as part of the U.S. Newspaper Program. The problem is that right now we're - there's a lot of money for digitizing things, and some of those projects are done very responsibly where people open the book and take an overhead called a planetary shot of the pages, and they don't hurt the book -- they just turn the pages. But some of those projects involve cutting the book out of its binding and guillotining the pages and scanning them just as the old microfilm projects do. So what I'm saying is we have to learn from this set of mistakes that happened with microfilm so that when we do an even broader kind of copying in the digital world, that we will do it right this time; we will make the beautiful copies; put these things on the network; but then close the book and put it back on the shelf.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you very much.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nicholson Baker is the author of Doublefold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.