The Wondering Warrior

It's hard to picture Nicholson Baker causing a media riot or even an argument over a game of Pictionary. A lanky man with a gray beard, he gives off professorial vibes floating somewhere between The Paper Chase and Wonder Boys: warm, disarming, his voice a riff on the fireworks inside his head. His half dozen novels and two essay collections give a full body massage to the little objects of everyday life. The Mezzanine, published in 1988, is a 135-page description of a lunch hour trip to buy new shoelaces. Its follow-up, Room Temperature, gives the same zoomed-way-in treatment to feeding a newborn baby. Critics love his brilliantly crafted mini-treatises on toenail clippers, flatulence and writing on rubber with a ballpoint pen. Baker's popularity has also grown steadily since the Starr Report leaked that Monica Lewinsky loaned her copy of his third novel (the book length phone sex conversation Vox) to President Clinton. Vox got the author labeled a pornographer, for a while. But that was nearly 10 years ago and American Psycho it ain't.

Meanwhile, his latest book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, has caused a stir among the nation's librarians, a group that gets riled up about as often as a tray of peat moss. Gone is Baker's leisurely, ornate prose, once described as watching someone turn slow summersaults on the lawn. Instead, he sees something ridiculous going on and says so. Double Fold argues that, over the last century, institutions like the Library of Congress and the New York Public have thrown out old newspapers en masse and replaced them with poor quality microfilm. In a frenzy for federal grants, libraries have fomented hysteria around old books and periodicals "turning to dust," while simulataneously charging forward with wasteful preservation research -- all of which Baker contends is abhorent. The words "mass destruction" and "holocaust" appear more than once in the book.

Such stridency has resulted in Baker being branded a crank, a luddite as well as an eccentric novelist with a strange hobby. Cornell and the University of Pittsburgh, among others, have published responses to Double Fold, commending Baker for raising important issues while pointing out their own extensive preservation efforts. Jim Neal of Johns Hopkins was quick to point out that his university has built state-of-the-art storage for older manuscripts. Scott Bennett at Yale and Shirley K. Baker, president of the Association of Research Libraries, both stress that large scale pulping of books and newspapers hasn't been library policy for over a decade and that, given budget constraints, "choices do have to be made."

Baker isn't convinced: "This is how libraries will defend themselves by saying this is part of the distant past," he told me over the phone. "Some are doing much better. But we had a terrible problem for a while. My book is saying: 1) This was a mistake, let's learn from it; and 2) 'newspaper projects' are still going full throttle where bound volumes are cut, microfilmed and tossed out. What I'm hoping is that we'll get it right this time."

Baker has taken this message on the road. At a recent book promotion he compared the original art nouveau illustrations from Joseph Pulitizer's New York World to its grainy, blurred microfilm duplicate. The slide show elicited gasps from the audience.

"The concerned people are a larger circle than I thought," said Baker, later. "The man on the street understands why we want to keep these things around. The people who don't seem to get it are certain library administrators."

In researching Double Fold (the name comes from a test used to determine the sustainability of an old book), Baker put his time where he mouth was and became a librarian himself. Last year, he founded the American Newspaper Repository, a nonprofit storage facility near his home in Maine that preserves old newspapers in their original form.