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This title in other editionsDouble Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paperby Nicholson Baker
AwardsWinner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Since the 1950s, our country?s greatest libraries have, as a matter of common practice, dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. The marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it are the subject of this passionately argued book, in which Nicholson Baker pleads the case for saving our recorded heritage in its original form while telling the story of how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public trust by auctioning off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself — who eventually discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper is to buy it. Double Fold is an intense, brilliantly worded narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and controversy.
Review:"In a passionate cri de coeur sure to raise controversy and alarm, novelist Baker accuses America's librarians of betraying the public trust as they rush to microfilm and digitize....If even half of what Baker alleges is true, some of America's most honored librarians have a lot of explaining to do." Kirkus Reviews
Review:"Pulling no punches, novelist Baker (Vox) is a romantic, passionate troublemaker who questions the smug assumptions of library professionals....For him, the wholesale destruction of books and newspapers to the twin gods of microfilming and digitization is an issue of administrators seeking storage space not of preserving a heritage....Double Fold is the narrative of a heroic struggle....Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review:"Anyone who cares passionately about anything ? it could be something as mundane as movies or as rarefied as, say, lighthouses or cactuses or antique kimonos ? has probably been told at one time or another, "Lighten up! You're taking it all too seriously." There's always an undercurrent of hostility to those words. Declaring a subject unimportant is a way for people to ease their own feelings of inadequacy, to make those who have bothered to care into the kooks, the aberrations.
That's why Nicholson Baker's exquisitely researched, gorgeously oddball Double Fold brought me to tears more than once: Among contemporary literature I've rarely read so passionate a book, and it's not just Baker's cause, the rescue from destruction of books and newspapers in our libraries, that got me. It's the way he's so willing, over and over again, to creep out on a limb, to..." Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com (read Salon.com's entire review) What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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