Double Fold

First edition (publ. Random House)
Author	Nicholson Baker
Published	2001 (Random House)
ISBN

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a non-fiction book by Nicholson Baker that was published in April, 2001. An excerpt appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." This exhaustively researched work (there are 63 pages of endnotes and 18 pages of references in the paperback edition) details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Double Fold is a controversial work and is not meant to be objective. In the preface, Baker says, "This isn't an impartial piece of reporting", (preface p. x) and The New York Times characterized the book as a "blistering and thoroughly idiosyncratic attack".

The term "double fold" refers to the test used by many librarians and preservation administrators to determine the brittleness and "usability" of paper. The test consists of folding down the corner of a page of a book or newspaper, then folding it back in the opposite direction—one double fold. The action is then repeated until the paper breaks or is about to break. The test yields a fold number. (In the late 1960s, preservation founding father William Barrow was fond of using a machine-run fold tester to back up his claims about the number of endangered books.) This experiment was used by library officials to identify their institution's brittle books, and, in some case, to justify withdrawing items from the shelves or replacing them with another format (most often microfilm). Baker describes the double fold test as "...utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami." (p. 157).

Double Fold's chapter titles include "Destroying to Preserve," "It Can Be Brutal," "Dingy, Dreary, Dog-Eared and Dead," "Thugs and Pansies," "3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars" and "Absolute Nonsense." Throughout the book, Baker argues against the destruction of books and newspapers by the institutions that, to his mind, should be held responsible for their preservation. He brings to light the tension between preservation and access: which should be the priority? Are libraries responsible for keeping books whole, for retaining books that may be in danger of falling apart, or are they mandated to do whatever is in their power to increase access to their holdings, possibly moving them to other mediums through methods such as microfilm or digitization, and sometimes destroying them in the process? Baker claims these goals need not conflict: "Why can't we have the benefits of the new and extravagantly expensive digital copy and keep the convenience and beauty and historical testimony of the original books resting on the shelves, where they've always been, thanks to the sweat and equity of our prescient predecessors?" (p. 67).