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 it away.

This is the heart and soil of Nicholson Baker’s latest work of non-fiction: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. The title comes from the way libraries “test” whether a newspaper is to be kept or scrapped: the corner is folded back and forth repeated; if it remains, it is kept, while if it breaks off, the entire newspaper is thrown away. And this is no joke; this is taking place in many libraries across the country, with only a few people being made aware of it.

Double Fold is an in-depth work and study on libraries and how the invention of the microfilm revolutionized the way many papers are kept. This reaches all the way up to the Library of Congress. And these libraries do not even do a thorough job of checking that the microfilm is clear and legible, so entire issues are lost and can never be recovered, because the originals have already been turned to pulp.

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Originally published on October 15th 2001.

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