title: “Paper Tiger” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Lois Trowery”
Over the past half century, Baker claims, the custodians of America’s premier research collections–with the Library of Congress often leading the way–jettisoned millions of irreplaceable newspapers and books. And they did most of the damage in the name of preservation, insisting that the high acid content of old paper was turning books to dust on the shelves. So they microfilmed as much as 60 percent of their inventory. But then, instead of backing up their paper collections with the microfilm or digital copies, they kept the copies and junked the originals.
Plainly, Baker is a zealot and a polemicist. But he has one towering and inarguable fact on his side: when it comes to books and especially newspapers, nothing beats the original. Historians know this. Librarians, who are after all curators of physical objects, ought to. The real lunatics in this story are the bibliobureaucrats who’ve come close to destroying the nation’s libraries in the name of saving them.
Double FoldNicholson Baker (Random House)
