Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

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Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

3.3 of 5 stars 3.30 · rating details · 557 ratings · 75 reviews

The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustratio...more

Paperback, 370 pages

Published April 9th 2002 by Vintage (first published 2001)

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May 31, 2007 Jesse rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: libraries

Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a fiery polemic dedicated to the task of protecting what he sees as one of our nation’s most important resources: our libraries’ massive stockpile of seldom-used older books and newspapers. As Baker explains, the extent of our paper reserves of old newspapers and rarely read old books is dwindling, often being chopped up and “preserved” (that is, their content, rather than their form, is preserved) in either microform or a digi...more Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a fiery polemic dedicated to the task of protecting what he sees as one of our nation’s most important resources: our libraries’ massive stockpile of seldom-used older books and newspapers. As Baker explains, the extent of our paper reserves of old newspapers and rarely read old books is dwindling, often being chopped up and “preserved” (that is, their content, rather than their form, is preserved) in either microform or a digital format.
Baker’s position is not a nuanced one; we need to save everything. To do this, libraries need to purchase warehouses, warehouses basically without end, so that not a Sun-Times or musty tome is thrown aside. The very first sentence in the summary on the back cover reads “The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word” which shows Baker may have a basic confusion between the definition of a library and the definition of a repository, but never mind: the point is, Baker says, a library neglects its duties when it throws away disused materials.

Baker’s writing style is eloquent and engaging; however, the entire book is dominated by a one-sided and hostile tone, along with his distinctly uncharitable characterization of his opponents.

I think the basic philosophical difficulty in Baker’s position can be found in the chapter with the title “A Swifter Conflagration.” Here, Baker fully reveals his philosophical position that all pieces of written media are valuable as individual objects. It is not merely enough that a rarely-used book’s contents are preserved somewhere; merely disposing of a particular object is itself always a dereliction of duty.

Baker says:
“The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas [i.e. textual content]. They are things and utterances both. And libraries, [Baker’s ally] believes, since they own, whether they like it or not, collections of physical artifacts, must aspire to the conditions of museums. All their books are treasures, in a sense…”

This is a rather overstated thesis. Some books and newspapers are valuable essentially for their own sake, rare books such as the Gutenberg Bibles, for example. However, it doesn’t follow that every library must preserve every non-duplicate book or newspaper on its shelves, some of which, such as pulp novels, are almost certainly disposable once their shelf-life is over. What Baker calls for is for libraries to devote large portions of their physical holdings to items that, not virtually, but literally, do not circulate.

There are times in Double Fold when Baker seems to be using the sheer confidence of his vituperation to slip some questionable logic past the reader. At one point Baker complains that the Library of Congress threw out ten million dollars worth of public property. However, his criterion for this figure is replacement value. This is a somewhat meaningless, almost sneaky figure. A lot of otherwise worthless things might be rather pricey to replace. Being difficult to replace does not make something valuable in the first place.

This is not say there are not some worthwhile themes in Double Fold. Baker’s complaints about microform are well taken, his call for a national repository even more so. Baker also provides the reader with an entertaining and occasionally fascinating history of book “preservation,” including the disastrous use of large, book-filled, black-goo spurting tanks of explosive gas, formerly owned by NASA. Another memorable anecdote involves the creation of paper from the wrappings of Egyptians mummies.

The fact that Baker's book is quite biased and sometimes infuriating should not dissuade an intelligent reader from giving it a shot; however, some practical knowledge of libraries and a questioning attitude are prescribed.
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Feb 21, 2007 Lucy rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: NOBODY

Shelves: libraries-archives-museums

DON'T LISTEN TO HIM! Nicholson Baker is NOT a librarian or archivist; he does not understand the missions of these institutions. His argument, therefore, is uninformed and inherently romanticizes the concept of preservation. He is, in short, a nutcase willing to spend his life savings on a crumbling anti-legacy. For a scholarly response (from an eminent archives scholar), look to Richard Cox's Vandals in the Stacks?: A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assualt on Libraries.

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Elise Cox is no Bibliographer. Baker's sources are good, his footnotes copious, and his argument important. This is required reading for all student in my b...more
Sep 07, 2007 08:44pm

Astraea Can you explain how the destruction of actual newspapers in favour of microfilm is beneficial?
Nov 08, 2011 12:56pm

Lucy Hi Astraea--Mostly because the mission of most libraries is to preserve and make available to the public the information contained in the newspapers....more Hi Astraea--Mostly because the mission of most libraries is to preserve and make available to the public the information contained in the newspapers. The lifespan of a newspaper makes it impossible to preserve forever in its original format--not just impossible and impractical and all those other things (including devastatingly expensive), but also not even the original intention of newspaper publishers. Newspaper is highly degradable and when balanced against the cost of preserving the original medium and preserving the information contained therein, public libraries in particular (those selfsame public libraries that are losing funding and can't keep their doors open on Sundays or keep their librarians employed, let alone retain an ephemeral format like newspaper) almost always have a mission based on making information available, not maintaining relics of a bygone era in acres of cold storage with every leaf separated by archival paper in newspaper-sized archival boxes far from public human handling for the relatively short period even that would keep them from crumbling altogether. Microfilm, on the other hand, has, as an estimate, a lifespan of something like 500 years in the proper environment and is stored on little space-saving spools and even without a microfilm reader can still yield its contents with comparative ease (unlike most storage media—magnetic, digital, electronic—useless without proper and almost immediately obsolete equipment). If Nicholson Baker wants to spend all his money on keeping original newspapers, that's his prerogative, but it's not the prerogative of libraries and archives with underfunding (or even with funding!) and a commitment to reaching as many patrons as possible for as long as possible with information and resources. Cox may not be a bibliographer, but he is an archives scholar and professor. Libraries can't keep newspapers. But I agree that it would be a sad thing if all the newspapers disappeared without anyone preserving their content--which seems to be the bigger issue these days as fewer and fewer people even read or subscribe to newspapers and their content is being stored (online) in a format that has not been time-tested and is far more unstable than either microfilm or print and nobody can agree on how best to maintain it.(less)
Nov 27, 2011 07:17am

May 28, 2009 Susie rated it 5 of 5 stars

It took me a ridiculously long time to finish this book, for reasons into which I shall not go, but that is no reflection on the book itself. It is about the decimation of our libraries by fiendish proponents of microfilm. Untold treasures of periodicals and books have been lost due to the persuasion of librarians by "preservationists" that the paper would soon crumble into dust. One test that would be done to prove the incipient crumbliness of a page was called the "Double Fold" test. Nicholson ...more It took me a ridiculously long time to finish this book, for reasons into which I shall not go, but that is no reflection on the book itself. It is about the decimation of our libraries by fiendish proponents of microfilm. Untold treasures of periodicals and books have been lost due to the persuasion of librarians by "preservationists" that the paper would soon crumble into dust. One test that would be done to prove the incipient crumbliness of a page was called the "Double Fold" test. Nicholson Baker has a field day with this one, as the root meaning of "duplicity" is "double fold." The test involves folding down a corner of a page, and then folding it all the way back, and repeating until the corner falls off. Not surprisingly, it doesn't take that many folds; that's why your mother/teacher/librarian always told you not to dogear your books. Baker makes up his own test, which is basically turning the pages of a book exactly as you would do if you were reading. Again not surprisingly, all the books tested in this way hold up strikingly well, even very old ones. So how can it be that so many librarians allowed bound periodicals and books to be "disbounded" in order to be photographed for microfilm, and then thrown in the trash? Especially when the microfilm was very often of very poor quality? The answer is not clear, but through no fault of Baker's. It's just one of those stupid outcomes of bureaucracy and false economy. Having actually done research on microfilm, I know from experience that it is a heinous technology, and a major cause of headaches among students. Luckily, digital technology has made it largely obsolete; however, that does nothing to bring back all the pages that have been lost. At the end of his book, Baker describes heroically trying to save many volumes of old, bound newspapers by buying them from the British Library; if only more people had cared before him about the preserving the actual objects than just the content of written works.

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Dec 02, 2008 Molly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Equal parts elegy and screed, Double Fold mourns the disappearance of paper and the ascendancy of microfilmic and digital mediums in contemporary libraries. Although that makes it sound like a total yawn, Baker, the author of that phone sex classic (?) Vox, manages to make Double Fold a wholly absorbing page-turner. This is due in part to the outraged first-person narration through which Baker communicates his personal fury at the space-saving measures undertaken by libraries and especially (cer...more

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Aug 05, 2011 George rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is Nicholson Baker's obsessive treatise on the "assault on paper". I am somewhat sympathetic to his cause where he describes how libraries in the name of "preservation" and/or "creating space" have replaced rare newspaper collections with subpar technologies. In doing so, we have lost information that isn't being captured by microfilm, microfiche, and other technologies. These early technologies led to the destruction of irreplaceable collections. He instead advocates the preservation of pa...more

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Jan 28, 2011 Alex Telander rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2001

Attention college students: a great crime is being committed and right under our noses! It is no longer possible to enter reputed libraries like the San Francisco or New York Public Library, and call up a wonderfully preserved copy of say The New York World from 1912, because said issue no longer exists in its original form. All that remains is a badly lit photograph of each page on low-resolution microfilm. And what did the library do with the original copy they once possessed? Why, they threw...more

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Aug 07, 2010 Audra Deeer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: library

Nicholson Baker feels strongly about the importance of libraries as depositories of information. They are to hold for us now and future generations of information-seekers the original, physical texts of newspapers and books regardless of their current or past popularity. What may not be popular today may be tomorrow and if the original is gone, we may be left with an unreadable copy in the form of illegible or deteriorated Microfilm or even an obsolete digital form. Double Fold is a critical and...more

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Mar 16, 2010 A. Jesse rated it 1 of 5 stars

Unbelievably stupid.

In his first (and as far as I know his best) book The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker displays a charming affection for the antique, the mechanical, the ingenious. But in Double Fold this charming affection is stripped away, revealing an impractical Ludditism. Baker argues that libraries shouldn't throw away card catalogs once they've been replaced with online databases, and instead they should preserve these hulking and impractical monstrosities for the subtle data they contain:...more Unbelievably stupid.

In his first (and as far as I know his best) book The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker displays a charming affection for the antique, the mechanical, the ingenious. But in Double Fold this charming affection is stripped away, revealing an impractical Ludditism. Baker argues that libraries shouldn't throw away card catalogs once they've been replaced with online databases, and instead they should preserve these hulking and impractical monstrosities for the subtle data they contain: The marginalia on the cards, their patina that reveals the pattern of finger-handlings on their edges.

Bullshit. Card catalogs are obsolete, a bain of my childhood and the childhoods of millions, and they are rightly banished as a bad substitute for computers, a stopgap waiting for the invention of electronics.

Baker acknowledges that librarians were beside themselves with joy when card catalogs were discarded. He describes bacchanal parties in which librarians burned the catalogs. Apparently, the professionals who dealt with them wanted nothing more than to obliterate them for good. But Nicholson Baker knows better than librarians: He alone sees the true value of card catalogs, and libraries worldwide should take his advice and preserve them.

Such an argument, Baker's clarion call for inefficiency, a defense of deadweight, is just ossified curmudgeonery founded on nostalgia. Baker confirms the worst of our fears about his love of the worn and tactile, preferring such old-fashioned contraptions over new technology no matter what the cost, and no matter how firm the consensus among professionals far more experienced than he.

To see him so wrong-headed on such a trivial matter raises grave doubts about Human Smoke, his latest book, where he takes on the greatest question in history: Was war a justifiable response to the Nazis? Again, in Human Smoke, Baker takes the contrarian position, arguing that pacifism was the righteous path, even in 1939. I'd like to believe him. I'm a pacifist myself. But if Double Fold is an example of Baker's reasoning, I don't have much faith in him when it comes to the great questions.(less)

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Nov 21, 2010 Mikael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: booksiactuallylike

read this book during my nicholson baker phase. which came right on the heels of my john updike phase. in hindsight i only liked bakers non-fiction works, this, a tirade against microfiche which i thoroughly support and his literary stalking of updike in u&i. i kept trying to read his micro-detailed fiction like the mezzanine (ie, what i think about while tying my shoelaces during a lunch break) thinking it must be genius till i gave up thinking i dont give a shit about genius if its this fu...more

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Jun 08, 2012 Shonn rated it 2 of 5 stars

As a member of the Library profession, I have to say that I found Baker's book alternately horrifying, enlightening and infuriating. I get his vendetta against microfilm, I really do. A major Master's degree project of mine involved reading German newspapers from the 1920's available only through microfilm. Reading microscopic newsprint in that horrific gothic font they used over there until 1945 was bad enough. Having to do it on old, blurred film versions of the the papers was worse. That said...more As a member of the Library profession, I have to say that I found Baker's book alternately horrifying, enlightening and infuriating. I get his vendetta against microfilm, I really do. A major Master's degree project of mine involved reading German newspapers from the 1920's available only through microfilm. Reading microscopic newsprint in that horrific gothic font they used over there until 1945 was bad enough. Having to do it on old, blurred film versions of the the papers was worse. That said, it was what was available, so I used it. Hence, I wonder somewhat at his rather bold claim that historians have ceased to use newspapers as primary source materials since the era of mass microfilming began.

However my major issue with Baker lay in his confounding of Librarians with Library Administrators. The majority of Baker's villans in this book fell into the latter category, though he lumps them in with the rest of the profession as if there were no daylight between your average reference librarian, and the head of the Library of Congress' Preservation Division. As my colleagues in other professions will no doubt agree, such a generalization is gross oversimplification. Library Administrators, like most administrators are largely divorced from the day to day operations of the institutions they administer. A Head Librarian may have a MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) degree, and may well have served time "in the trenches" at some time in the past, but their work is mainly focused on matters of funding, budgets, personnel and policy.

Furthermore, like administrators in other professions, Library administrators don't usually stick around to witness the damage their policies may have caused. On average, an administrator sticks around 5-10 years and then moves on to the next brass ring. In contrast, the professional librarians and paraprofessionals who form the backbone of a library may stay in the same post 20, 30, or in some extraordinary cases up to 40 years. They carry out the policies of their administrators, or at least they try to adapt the pie-in-the-sky expectations of the "higher-ups" to the realities on the ground. Often, such efforts are thankless tasks.

Hence to have Mr. Baker lump all of us (many of whom, like myself, are dedicated bibliophiles) into the same category as the individuals whose short-sighted policies deprived many of our great repositories of treasured intellectual content leaves me somewhat affronted.

Finally, while I accept Mr. Baker's assertions that ultimately, the construction of more storage space is cheaper than the expense of massive filming or digitization efforts, try convincing government or University administration of that. The current crop of leaders in both the political and professional world have drunk the digital Kool-aid. They expect that eventually all materials will be available digitally, and that print will go the way of the hand-copied manuscript. They may well be right, if somewhat early in their expectations. Either way, having convinced themselves that there is no point in expending a steadily dwindling set of monetary resources on facilities for a medium that is on the road to extinction, when these same funds can be invested in that medium's replacement.

Time will tell if they were correct, or if an immense sum of money is being sunk into what will one day be remembered as the BetaMax of digital preservation strategies.(less)

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Nov 27, 2007 Elaina Vitale rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who aren't swayed by nice writing

Baker has some good points but largely knows absolutely nothing about libraries, preservation and microfilming.

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Nov 22, 2007 Michael Fitzgerald rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: libraries

A fascinating book, but incredibly biased. Needs to be balanced with Vandals in the Stacks by Richard Cox.

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Feb 21, 2009 Wesley rated it 1 of 5 stars

Baker has some serious hoarding issues. The premise of the book is that libraries are throwing away tons of old newspapers and books and we're supposed to feel bad about it. He even mixes in some conspiracy theory to connect this practice to the military. Overall I just didn't buy any of it. Really all it did was make me wonder how Baker's wife could stand living with him, since he blew all of their savings to buy a bunch of old newspapers, and spent his free time bending the pages in all of the...more

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Jun 16, 2012 John Miedema rated it 4 of 5 stars

Remember the microfiche machines in libraries during the 80′s? As high school students, we were told to use them as part of research assignments. The machines were futuristic … in a 60′s way. A mammoth black box, with a lamp projecting black and white text and images from plastic cards onto a screen. A fan blew off the considerable heat it generated. Maybe you can still find one of these behemoths tucked away in the corner of your library. I don’t use them. I still use books.

Double Fold: Librari...more Remember the microfiche machines in libraries during the 80′s? As high school students, we were told to use them as part of research assignments. The machines were futuristic … in a 60′s way. A mammoth black box, with a lamp projecting black and white text and images from plastic cards onto a screen. A fan blew off the considerable heat it generated. Maybe you can still find one of these behemoths tucked away in the corner of your library. I don’t use them. I still use books.

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper was published by Nicholson Baker in 2001. He reported his indepth research into librarians’ mass destruction of books and newspapers scanned to microfiche. If microfiche is antiquated now, Baker’s observations are still valuable lessons for our our present day e-book revolution.

1. A crisis will be invented to fund technological change

There are always those who resist change. Baker was not among them. He endorsed scanning to microfiche if the original print materials were not destroyed. There’s the rub. It takes money to buy and use the new technology, and money is always tight in libraries. The budget of the old technology, print, is a tempting target. A switch in budget requires justification, a problem with the old technology to be solved by the new.

A 1987 film, “Slow Fires”, by Terry Sanders, was used as evidence of the acid decay that was causing print books and newspapers to become brittle. A “double fold” test was performed by machine, working a strip of paper back and forth by 90 degrees, subjecting it to the force of one kilogram. The test was used to classify the durability of books and make predictions about their life expectancy. Baker’s research found little science in this method. Carefully preserved, many such works last much longer. Furthermore, microfiche also degrades with sunlight or improper care. The double fold test was pseudo-science, invented to legitimize the conversion from print to microfiche.

In the present day we hear many dubious claims about e-books. One popular claim is that e-books are greener than print books. In fact, e-books exist only on the backs of the environmentally costly externalities of digital technology: power generation, product manufacturing, and toxic waste in landfills. It is another spurious claim, a marketing strategy used to drive technological change.

2. Readability is the typical victim of changes in reading technology

My memory of microfiche is grainy black and white text and images, difficult to read and view. The scanning process took hand-drawn images and illustrations, colored photos, and textured documents and reduced them to degraded black and white film. It seems too obvious to say, books exist for reading. Did the scanners eat their own dog food? As absurd as it sounds, readability is the typical victim of changes in reading technology. Today’s e-books enhance readability in some ways, e.g., changeable font-size, while remaining limited in other ways. E-ink still only presents text and images in black and white, though apparently coloured e-ink is on the way. Tablet devices have monitors with colour but are backlit, causing eye strain.

Print books are by no means a perfect technology. They take up a lot of space, are often heavy to transport, slow to search, and hard to remix. Digital technology can help with these things. Any conversion entails loss. The important question is whether the overall gains outweigh the losses. Weirdly, we often jump to the new technology if it is merely close in quality to the old. I will restate the question as an axiom: a new technology should be better than the old one. If the technologies serve different needs better, then like Baker I have no objection to the new technology if it does not entail destruction of the old. Ask yourself, given the accelerating demand for e-books in libraries, how long will librarians keeping purchasing both formats? On a broader scale, given current market trends, how long do you think both print and e-books will be continue to be published?

Review originally published at my blog: http://bookreviews.johnmiedema.ca/201...(less)

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Nov 28, 2009 Jenny rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read09

"The library has gone astray partly because we trusted the librarians so completely."

Nicholson Baker has written a heavily researched retelling of when the first digitization (microfilming) movement hit the major libraries in the United States, leading many to dump the only originals of major newspapers, journals, and books. He zeroes in on the Library of Congress and other government agencies (CIA, NASA, and the NEH) who have had major roles to play in the destruction of print.

While I found s...more

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Aug 31, 2008 Rebekah rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: grad-school-reading

Baker basically makes his point in the first chapter. Libraries across the country are putting all of their newspapers onto micro-film and discarding the originals. Microfilm and its cousins are bad because they degrade easily, do not record text clearly, are incapable of capturing the color of images, cartoons and are often incomplete. Libraries would actually save money per volume if they simply rented warehouses to store materials in, instead of paying to have the newspapers photographed and...more

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Jul 24, 2009 Andrew rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The elegance and irreverence Nicholson Baker usually brings to his fiction work (especially the sublime vignette "The Mezzanine") is completely absent in "Double Fold", Baker's screed about the replacement of library books with microfiche and other digital storage. While the author's quest -- to rally for the preservation of rare and old tomes -- seems noble enough, his methods are more in line with conservative news reporting. Whenever he interviews someone who shares his viewpoints, they are d...more

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Dec 07, 2007 Meredith rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-school-books

I read this for my class on preservation and conservation in library school.

Nicholson Baker is a very passionate writer, but his disgust with library preservation policy is often misdirected in this rather caustic critical work. While he does have solid points, for example the problems of preserving the various editions of each newspaper and the microfilming of color illustrations, he seems to imply that these weren't issues of concern in the library world before he brought them up. However, Dou...more

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Dec 23, 2008 Emily rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-science

I gave up on this book. It is due back to the library in a couple of days. Even though it was highly recommended by my professors, I just couldn't get into it. Lots of people say how great this book is. However, I can't stop thinking that he doesn't even work in a library! He doesn't go into enough depth explaining things that NEED to be highlighted about preservation. He gives strange examples of things.

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Mar 05, 2009 Padraic rated it 4 of 5 stars

Baker sounds like he hasn't actually been in a library in years. And yet, and yet...who does keep the last copy of something? Why is redundancy such a suspect concept in the world of information? And who did throw out all those papers? A cranky uncle preaches on the primacy of the particular.

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Oct 30, 2012 Sarah rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: grad-school-books

Although Baker makes some valid points, he totally lost me when he started portraying people who didn't share his view on paper hoarding as criminals and idiots. I'm also not buying his conspiracy theories. I think he went a little overboard and succeeded only in making himself look like a complete loon.

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Sep 19, 2011 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, media, non-fiction

When he wrote this, Baker was passionately devoted to saving books and newspapers. His passion shows through, as does his meticulous research. Unless you are, like me, concerned about the loss of content through microfilming and digitalization, this book may seem tedious.

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Mar 25, 2011 Dawne added it

Suddenly I feel the urge to hoard evey newspaper - or at least the desire that some library would. Excellent cautionary tale about our ill-conceived thoughts that technology can replace original archival source documents. Let's hope the lesson is not entirely too late.

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Jul 05, 2011 Kandice Newren rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a really interesting book on a preservationist's view of how technology has changed the way books and paper are looked at. I liked the book, but I can't help but wonder if the author skewed some of the facts to fit his purposes. I had no idea librarians were so destructive, and it gives a new perspective to how libraries have evolved with new technology. I wonder what he would say about eBooks.

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Sep 29, 2009 Goatville9 rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

a good point about the flaws of digital archives told over and over and over again to the point of maddening frustration. what i remember is a story about during the 19th century egyptian mummies were dug so the wrapping cloth could be processed into paper.

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Sep 09, 2009 Samantha rated it 1 of 5 stars

I wanted to feel sympathy for this author and I think I could have if he has stated his point and quit after about 4 - 5 chapters. But after some 200 pages I just couldn't care anymore. I think it's terrible that so many primary sources were destroyed to make sub-par copies of them, but the horse is already out of the barn.

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Aug 24, 2009 Rachel rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

This book is mostly infuriating. I can see Baker's points (and love his fiction), but he seems to be over-zealous about protecting paper. In an age of the internet, there is an overabundance of paper and things said, does this equate the need to save it? Does one save everything they ever bought? His concern I agree with, but I think he draws the picture way out of proportion.

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Oct 12, 2010 Guy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-non-fiction, history, political-social-science, science, 20th-century-history

The extent of Baker's research and detail is admirable, if a little tedious to read. Double Fold sits somewhere in the middle of a scathing expose on the murder of books and a science textbook presented to the reader in a manner that reminded me of a courtroom testimony.

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Sep 14, 2011 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very interesting read- I'll say this for Baker, he's an engaging writer. There's some fascinating stuff about paper-making and preservation methods here too. Not a fan of his librarian blame-game, though.

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Aug 16, 2009 Diana Turner rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Nicholson Baker is being reactionary. In my opinion, the benefits to libraries of archiving, scanning, and de-accessioning newsprint are still far greater than trying to maintain the collections.

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About Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, his writings focus on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. His unconventional novels deal with topics such as voyeurism and planned assassination, and they generally de-emphasize narrative in favor of intense character work. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability...more

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“In 1855, as the price of paper rose, Dr. Deck proposed to dig up 2 1/2 million tons of Egyptian mummies, ship them to New York, unroll them; and use their linen wrappings to make paper.” — 2 people liked it

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BBCode	[url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28228.Double_Fold?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320395589l/28228.jpg[/img][/url] [url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28228.Double_Fold?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker[/url]

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

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