Paper Tigers.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Review

Page slaves pressed by history's volume

Every educated person wants to be known as a "book lover." Hence, to be indifferent to, much less openly disagree with, Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, $25.95) is to declare yourself an illiterate, an enemy of history, a cretin of the first order. No wonder Double Fold has met with grateful hosannas proclaiming its author "a hero to book lovers everywhere" (as the San Francisco Chronicle put it in a representative rave review).

Acclaimed novelist Baker (The Mezzanine, Room Temperature) argues that the loss of a book, of a magazine, even of a late-morning edition of a newspaper, constitutes a terrible, irreparable loss to our cultural heritage. Double Fold posits that a vast campaign by the nation's biggest libraries, pushed in large part by CIA and defense industry veterans turned library Strangeloves, put irrational faith in microfilm and miniaturizing technologies. Not satisfied with microfilming, the mad scientists have in most cases destroyed the originals after copying. The result: Libraries have slashed and burned vast tracts of paper books and periodicals, destroying a massive part of America's cultural wealth.

At its best, the book is an effective expose of bureaucratic mismanagement. Baker demonstrates that the fragility of paper was exaggerated and that the technophiles ended up spending millions more than they would have by simply building bigger storage facilities for paper products. In the process, priceless gems--a full-color run of a Joseph Pulitzer paper here, some off-the-record Nixon comments there--have been lost to eternity.

At its worst, Double Fold allows its polemical purposes to overshadow the complex relationship between preservation of originals and new, often worse, technologies for storage and display. As poor (and self-destructing) as microfilm is, it provides more people with more access to the past than fastidious preservation of originals could allow. Baker's hectoring tone also precludes pondering the intricate politics of preservation in a world where we can never save everything and top-down organizations decide which parts of our heritage even get a chance at being preserved.

While it's a relief to see Baker getting away from the fussbudget pornography of his recent novels Vox and The Fermata, his genius for passionately detailed, morally complex descriptive writing rarely appears in this jeremiad. When it does, it is...