Hosted by Oberlin’s Friends of the Library, writer and self-proclaimed “lover of anything old” Nicholson Baker spoke last Saturday night to an audience crowded with students, faculty and staff, but also library donors, local book lovers and alumni.
Baker recently published his eighth book, “a book about what libraries kept and what libraries decided not to keep,” he said, starting his talk on the library movement’s mass destruction of printed newspaper and switch to microfilm. Titled Double Fold after the mid-20th century experiments that the government used to test the durability of paper, Baker’s third work of non-fiction takes readers through his investigation of 20th century book and newspaper preservation efforts.

“While I don’t agree with many of the points that Baker has made, he has impacted the ways I think of library science. He has raised libraries to a more prominent place in public conscience,” Director of Libraries Ray English said, introducing Baker to the Saturday night crowd.
Baker’s views challenge the library “old guard” as he refers to the aging cadre of librarians who in the past 50 years have restructured library preservation around technology upgrades, discarding paper for mechanized and then digital copies. This emphasis on improving technology has come at the expense of entire regions of newspaper history. “Everyone in the library community thought the Library of Congress was keeping everything but they have no legal obligation and over the years they have gotten rid of large masses of stuff,” Baker said. While at one point the Library of Congress had complete runs of all of America’s city and local papers, now their collection is limited to a few larger city papers. There is no complete run of the elaborately designed 19th century journal of popular news and culture, the New York World, anywhere in the country, not even in the massive Columbia University School of Journalism named in honor of the paper’s editor Joseph Pulitzer.
Baker works to convince local libraries that the common practice of microfilming collections and then discarding the unbound papers actually throws off their intentions of preserving the nation’s history in that the intricacy and much of the quality is lost in the translation from paper to plastic microfilm slide. “Baker has shown that there is an awful lot we don’t know about paper deterioration, he shows how open to question some of the assumptions about the process are,” English said.
According to Double Fold, the only testing of paper staying ability ever fully completed was done in the lab of MicroFilm Corporation. “The biggest problem is that microfilm was a business. We took the best papers and gave them over to the corporations. A for-profit company should not have been deciding how to compile history,” Baker said.
In the early ’90s Oberlin received grants to work with paper testing. At this point it also hired a corporation to microfilm their aging newspaper collection. By 1926 Oberlin boasted the country’s 16th-largest academic library, and while the bulk of Oberlin’s current inventory was collected in the 20th century, it is still those original collections that warrant special notice. The school is very strong in 19th century periodicals, the remnants of the school’s missionary days including rare hymnals, temperance bulletins and abolitionist records. “When we have done preservation it is when we have a very clear idea that something needs to be done because we see that the deterioration process is already underway and if we don’t microfilm the print will be destroyed,” English said.
While microfilm, if done correctly, will capture complete text and black and white photos, the intricacy of early newspaper lay-out, illustrations and engravings, inevitably gets sacrificed to the automated reel, to the space saving allure of the machinated reproductions.
Pointing to overhead projections of ornately illustrated 1898 New York World layouts, Baker described the careful engravings that filled newspaper inserts throughout the 19th and early 20th century.
“Looking at early 20th century newspapers and late 19th century I saw a New York I had had no clue about. The beautiful thing about the actual newspapers is the simultaneity. The Titanic is sinking but cigarettes are getting smoked at the same time,” Baker said.
Full-color New York World newsprint spreads, laid out around “Robotic Lover” comics, watercolors of ballerinas and engravings of the Iron Babel New York City Skyscraper prove Baker’s grievance with microfiche. The slant in the eyes of the ink-etched laborers, the tiny comic captions such as “Are Women Business Failures?” are still visible against the brittle-pages.
“Baker has shown with news of the late 19th century and early 20th century that they have a very rich visual world that doesn’t reproduce well. The American librarian community somehow lost sight of the importance of preserving these papers,” English said.
“Since World War II the country has been in love with technology and even now the government will give you money if you say you want to digitize or microfilm something but if you want a new staff position, forget it,” Special Collections and Preservation Director Ed Vermue said.
While the College did not begin collecting New York newspapers until after the movement to microfilm, a complete run of the Oberlin News-Tribune, and every Oberlin Review ever created are squirreled away in the College’s special collection. “It is the responsibility of area libraries to preserve their local newspaper. That is the way to preserve local history and we take it very seriously,” English said.
Frayed down the edges and shedding tiny paper shards like someone’s half-hearted attempt to make newsprint confetti, the College’s run of the Oberlin News –Tribune is fragile and can’t be taken out of its fourth floor environment-controlled conditions. The papers, however, are rich as primary resources of American history. With page three (The Science and Inventions page) headlines such as “Chinese Do Eat Cats” and front-page stories about “Women and children [that] serve yellow, almond-eyed taskmasters for even less than Chinese wages,” the turn of the century Tribune offers an authentic historical perspective, images of the past suitable for King’s overhead projection screens or a student’s paper.
While English believes in the importance of preserving these paper editions, he also finds some impracticalities in Baker’s unflagging devotion to paper. “I would disagree with Baker on the conditions necessary for paper preservation. He was talking about newspapers stored in tight stacks without air going in or out, he tends to think you are going to be able to preserve print for a very long time but I think he overestimates this lifespan and underestimates the aging process,” English said.
Right off the bat, Baker made it clear that Oberlin, even if it did store its New York Times in steel filing cabinets reminiscent of World War I ammunition boxes, was a place he liked. A brown-edged, cracked page hardback had proven Oberlin to Baker. Chicago Records Shop Talk On The Wonders Of The Craft had been written by Baker’s grandfather in 1896 and not sold many copies since. The slim volume, however, resided in Mudd’s storage, its still crisp and turnable pages open for check-out. “I have been wanting the book for a very long time but it is extremely rare and I could never access it, until I came here,” Baker said.

Although the book’s bindings hang off threads and its pages are the color of coffee stains, it is readable. This attests both to Baker’s theories on the durability of paper as well as to the fact that Oberlin is able to provide climate control storage and that this book has been largely untouched for a century.
Following the lecture one student, junior Neil Freeman, caught Baker’s enthusiasm and checked out the 1896 book, eager to see what Baker saw in the sepia pages, eager to look at a book that is one of five left in the world.

Since his purchase of 5,000 volumes of American newspaper from the British Library’s soon to be incinerated collection, Baker has been operating an American Newspaper Depository.
While the British Library is forbidden by law to discard British papers, it was up to the will of the librarian to deal with foreign papers. Now the collection resides in his Home Depot sized warehouse, in rural New Hampshire. “In the library community we joke about Baker now seeing the other side, now he has to deal with the costs of storing a warehouse of old newspapers, getting people to take care of it, the expenses of air conditioning, trying to get someone to take them off his hands. Now he is seeing the whole picture,” English said.