Nicholson Baker: Debunked on the road from preservation martyrdom

Nicholson Baker, champion of all those wonderful but yellowing newspapers that those wretched libraries were once thoughtlessly tossing away in a policy of “destroying to preserve” (read Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper if you’re not catching my sarcasm here), has surfaced again. No longer is he the investigative journalist ‘Siva-ing’ or bringing to light and public discussion the questionable enterprises of otherwise do-gooder libraries in the name of preservation, access, and stewardship. Rather, it seems he’s traded in the role of artifact martyr (”pillaging his own savings, Mr. Baker purchased some 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library …”) for a new hat as poster boy for user damage of circulating library collections.

Mr. Baker is now a user of Post-it notes as bookmarks, a keeper of more than a Nissan Sentra’s backseat full of the University of New Hampshire’s books in his Maine barn (”piles of Churchill; of Herbert Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters, diaries),” a user of microfilmed and online newspapers (!!), and an exemplary culprit in the proper care and handling of library collections (he “fumbled and allowed Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp”).

Oh yes — and about all those newspapers he’d saved from certain extinction: “’I went a little over the edge,’ Mr. Baker said recently about some of his newspaper-gathering efforts, and he added that being able to send his bound volumes to Duke was ‘a blessing.’”

Check out the full article from the NYT, but also breeze through the publicly viewable discussion on the PADG listserv. The author “Concerned in Bethesda” provided me with my first and best laugh of the day: “Leave the poor artifacts alone I say!”