Double Fold by Nicholson Baker, Random House, $25.95, ISBN
0375504443
TAKE a book, open it and fold over the corner of a page to form a small
triangle, smoothing down the crease. Then unfold and fold it back the other way.
Smooth down the crease. Unfold. Now give the corner a brisk tug. If the page
breaks, throw the book away. That, believe it or not, is seen by some as a
scientific way of appraising the physical condition of a book.
Writer Nicholson Baker has been watching the barbarians camping at the gates
of libraries. In Double Fold he tells a sorry story of rampant technophilia
wedded to a belief that modern is intrinsically better than ancient.
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A scare story that emerged about 20 years ago claimed that books everywhere
were about to crumble to dust. The Library of Congress tried a quick fix to
de-acidify the paper using highly reactive diethyl zinc, which not only
destroyed books but also blew up a NASA installation. Then came the problem of
how to find enough shelf space for books. This was, and is, a formidable
problem, both to find space and pay for it. Now librarians in the US and Britain
scan runs of newspapers and books and abandon the originals. For some rare maths
books, Cornell University now has only a photocopy plus a scan.
Trouble is, digital scanning has a huge error rate: out of every 100
characters, three may be wrong. What鈥檚 the point of scanning books and
newspapers, destroying the originals in the process, if no one edits the
scan?
It seems extraordinary to base the wholesale junking of books on something
like the double-fold test, which doesn鈥檛 begin to reproduce how books are
handled. But, sadly, there is a growing lobby for replacing books with
microfiche (liable to break or blister), coarse photocopies or unedited
scanning: 鈥済m-eat suibtermanean nonvumision鈥� in place of 鈥済reat subterranean
convulsion鈥�, to quote Baker鈥檚 example.
Baker raised money to buy the world鈥檚 last remaining copies of the New York
newspaper The World from the British Library, which had scanned them and wanted
rid of them. As he points out in this passionate and compelling book, the
spectre of decay that is haunting librarians is a false one. Have you noticed
mass decomposition in your library? The problem is really about funding
libraries.
Not long ago I bought a book, slightly damaged, for 30p. It had been printed
in 1674 in England. Books are survivors.