Double Fold
Nicholson Baker
370 pages, with index
published in 2001

Nicholson Baker is an US novelist and essayist who in 1994 wrote a somewhat loony piece about how card catalogs were thrown out in libraries all over the US in favour of computer based catalogs. This was the first step in his involvement with a far more serious cause, the reckless dumping of newspapers, periodicals and books by US libraries. Since the 1940ties libraries had been putting their periodicals on microfilm and throwing away the paper copies. This, so was the claim would both preserve the newspapers and magazines better then keeping the papers themselves and save the libraries both money and space. This book is the latest result of his crusade to change these practises.

Double Fold argues that the danger of paper decaying and books falling apart is far overstated. Baker finds, and I would tend to agree with him that the original copies of periodicals and books are far superior to microfilmed copies. He shows how microfilmed copies in fact are not only inferior in what they show of the original, but also in their durability. Microfilm is fragile and tends to decay rapidly, especially the kind which was used at first. Worse, after the microfilms had been made, the original paper copies would be thrown out or sold to collectors. In this way, a great many US historical publications have disappeared.

The main argument for creating microfilm or electronical copies of books has always been the fragility of paper. Especially the cheap, nasty acid paper which came into use in the nineteenth century and which is still used today has long been regarded as a timebomb, destroying books from within by making them brittle. The title of the book is a reference to this fear, as the double fold test is a way of measuring whether a book is in danger of it. Predictably Nicholson makes nonsense of the claim that this test is in any way a good predictor of how long a book will survive, as he makes nonsense of the whole acid paper scare.

It is clear from the first page that Baker is very passionate about this cause. This is a polemic, a call to action, but one which has been carefully and firmly grounded in facts. In his view, the whole trend to microfilm and digitise books is misguided at best, a waste of money better spend on preservation of the books themselves. At worst it's a cynical way for libraries to free space and various shrew entrapreneurs to make a tidy profit from the vast sums of money available for digitising. He does not go as far as saying that digitising or microfilming is always bad, but he does repeatedly show that it's not a panacea, not a magic method to safeguard a library's collection forever. Very much recommended to every booklover.