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Nicholson Baker is a man with a mission. His pen is a lance with which he delights in
skewering those he considers fools, enemies, or just well-meaning people with wrongheaded
ideas.
The wrongheaded idea he battles against in this furiously eloquent book is that microfilm
is the salvation of space-starved libraries. The idea of throwing away old paper originals
of books and newspapers appalls Baker to the point where he has spent a small fortune of
his own money to rescue and store some of them himself.
He flatly contradicts many ideas that are pretty much taken for granted by librarians
everywhere these days: Old paper documents do not deteriorate with age to anything
like the extent popularly believed; microfilm itself is subject to deterioration over
time; microfilmed files, especially of newspapers, are often incomplete or unreadable; the
supposed space crisis in library storage is not a crisis at all; cost savings achievable
by microfilm have been greatly overstated; in library-speak, the word
"preservation" is really a euphemism for destruction of valuable old materials.
Even the newest technique, optical scanning, is dismissed by Baker as immensely expensive
and undependable, especially if the scanning is done from microfilm rather than from
original materials.
Baker's personal suggestion for how to handle the inevitable accumulation of old printed
materials begins with three words: "Leave them alone." Find offsite storage
space if necessary. Stop the wanton butchery of valuable old books and newspapers.
He has obviously done a lot of deep research into things like the deacidification of paper
and the economics of document preservation. He presents his findings in prose that glows
with a fine, almost contemptuous rage at what he regards as a crime against history. This
is no balanced, objective presentation; it is a summons to battle. He loves to play with
words, inventing delightful new ones like "gizmology," "digidump," and
"biblioectomies," and resorting to grandiose terms like
"counterfactualism" when he means untruth or "informationalist" when
he means researcher.
Baker drew his book's title from a test developed by some "micro-madman" to
assess the brittleness of paper: Take a corner of a book page and fold it over several
times. If it breaks off after only a few folds, the book is probably too brittle to
survive and should be discarded. Nonsense, says Baker; nobody treats books like that. The
true test is simply turning the page as a reader normally would --- and by that test most
supposedly dying books would have plenty of life left in them.
There is a large cast of villains in Baker's story, the two chief ones being Verner Clapp,
the chief apostle of microfilming at the Library of Congress, and Patricia Battin, a
library industry activist who took up the cause post-Clapp. They are depicted as perhaps
well-meaning but hopelessly deluded and often deliberately deceptive in manipulating facts
and figures to "prove" what Baker feels are spurious conclusions. And Baker
takes every opportunity to emphasize that when such people talk about
"preservation" via microfilm, they really mean destroying the originals.
Along the way too we meet lovable eccentrics like Dr. Isaiah Deck, who proposed digging up
millions of Egyptian mummies and using their linen burial cloths to make paper, and one
Fremont Rider, apostle of the Microcard, whose other interests included spiritualism,
travel guidebooks, mystery writing, and hotel management.
Nicholson Baker may be dismissed by some as a hopeless romantic seeking to roll back the
tide of "progress." Well, maybe so. But he has marshaled an impressive array of
evidence to back up his case, and his passion is contagious. One hopes that librarians
everywhere will at least give him a hearing. To use his own picturesque language, they
will not find Baker's discussion of "crumblement" in books to be in any way
"migrainiferous."
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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