“You are the only one who can save it now,” they told him.
Baker’s career would never be the same. The writer who might have preferred an endless stream of mail-order subjects found himself flying into action, making formal legal requests to inspect the catalog in question, and then filing a lawsuit when the request was denied. The lawsuit worked. In September 1996, the San Francisco Library Commission voted to keep their catalog after all, but the victory was short-lived because when Baker finally got a look at the catalog he noticed that there were far more books on cards than there were in the digital record. That’s when he realized “the real story . . . [was] only incidentally about catalogs.”
The SFPL was dumping books. As everything else got bigger, the new library was actually smaller than the old, and they had begun culling their collection so it would fit. Books that had been checked out only infrequently were pulled and sent to a “Deselection Chamber” at an abandoned and decrepit medical facility. Many rare and valuable books wound up in landfills. Library administrators, the real villains of the saga, claimed that the weeding of the collection was part of a pragmatic reorganization undertaken in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Baker wasn’t fooled. The tragedy had been used to justify a long-standing plan the full scope of which he only now began to glimpse: The once simple and elegant machines of libraries were being turned into something far less efficient and far more expensive. And it wasn’t only catalogs being eliminated—it was books.
Did the librarians who impressed Baker to duty to save a single catalog know they were recruiting a reluctant commander for a much larger conflict? Impossible to say. Others are implicated too. Baker’s wife having once worked as a reporter surely helps explain why his attention soon turned to discarded newspapers. And his father-in-law, another medievalist, once called Baker’s attention to a new library practice of discarding books after their texts were preserved electronically, as though the books themselves were not of historical significance. Regardless, Baker soon found himself described as a “ringleader” in news stories. Just a short time after depicting the erotic blossoming of Marian the Librarian, Baker became an activist with, as one journalist described it, “an almost mystical sway over a ragtag collection of feisty librarians.” Even before Baker got involved, these librarians had been practicing “guerrilla librarianship,” secreting off books consigned to the Deselection Chamber. And perhaps because all this sounds a whole lot less like a rebel force mustered to combat an imperial army than an aboriginal resistance brigade smuggling away pockets of the oppressed, Baker soon found himself accused of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism? Yes. Didn’t “Deselection Chamber” sound a bit too much like a gas chamber? Wasn’t Baker—or whoever coined the phrase “Deselection Chamber”—guilty of hyperbole, of diminishing the suffering of the actual victims of the Holocaust?
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AT LAST! THE MYSTERY RESURFACES. METAPHORICALLY, AT LEAST.
The charge of anti-Semitism must have stung because Baker, via Mike of Room Temperature, once speculated that some of his “Quaker forebears were assimilated Jews,” and he “treasured” a hope that the shape of his nose was evidence that he was still “somewhat Jewish.” On a slightly related trajectory, I noticed when I reread U and I (as I wrote about it) that Baker had made fleeting reference to having read a partly fictionalized autobiography by Harold Nicolson. I wondered: Was Harold Nicolson related to Nigel Nicolson, Baker’s first publisher? I looked it up—yes, they were father and son. And beyond writing a book that had helped Baker refine his views on autobiography, Harold Nicolson had served as a junior minister of information in England during the years leading up to World War II. It got a little confusing from there because there was another intelligence field–related Harold Nicholson—this one with an h, like Baker—who worked for the CIA until he was convicted of spying for Russia in the 1990s, but it was Harold Nicolson, no h, who turned out to be one of the many historical threads running through Baker’s Human Smoke, which is, among other things, a history of war mongering during the 1930s. As it happened, Harold Nicolson had been privy to a number of the secret peace plans that had been proposed to avoid World War II, plans that might have prevented the Holocaust but that all failed because they attempted to avert violence by committing it: The German generals in secret contact with the Allies refused to go along with any plan that required the assassination of Hitler.
All this got me wondering about Baker’s given name. What if it wasn’t just fortuitous, as I’d originally thought, that Nicholson Baker had the same name as his publisher, h or no h? What if Baker’s father, or his grandfather, had been named for Harold Nicolson as a result of some old promise or heroic act? It wasn’t that far-fetched because even Mike of Room Temperature attests to “English Protestant” origins, and Baker, from where we sit with him in 1996, just as he was being sucked into the dark world of library activism, was already looking forward to shoving off for his mysterious year in England. To do what? Beyond write The Everlasting Story of Nory, I had no idea. But even if Baker hadn’t been named for Harold Nicolson—and I admit it’s a long shot—it was clear that the most direct route from the vast slaughter of Jews during World War II to Nicholson Baker ran directly through Harold Nicolson, whom Baker had long held in mind and whose son, for all I knew, was solely responsible for ensuring that The Mezzanine saw the light of day (in his Paris Review interview, Baker admitted that The Mezzanine was originally rejected by “nine or ten publishers” who “didn’t get the footnotes”).*
It was around this time, 1996, “in the middle of the controversy,” as the preface to Double Fold has it, that Baker was contacted by a man named Blackbeard, who claimed to have a library story to tell. That’s pretty enticing, but Baker was already weary of the war. He didn’t return the call for several weeks. What Blackbeard eventually told him made it clear that the SFPL was the tip of yet another iceberg: research libraries all across the country, and even the Library of Congress, were in the process of discarding rare books and newspapers, on bogus claims about the durability of paper. The book burning, if it was that, was not a small wildfire in a remote canyon, already surrounded by smoke jumpers—it was a massive conflagration, out of control and spreading in all directions. The holocaust, if it was that, was not some rogue state genocide conducted by a bankrupt tyrant already crippled by international sanctions—it was an ongoing global extermination executed by a superpower acting with impunity. At first, Baker “couldn’t quite comprehend” what Blackbeard told him. It didn’t come at a convenient time. The legal “squabble” was ongoing, he was packing for England, and he was trying to keep on an even keel by writing upbeat essays like “Books as Furniture.” Anyway, the subject had left him frayed: “I was tired of finding fault with libraries; in theory, I loved libraries.”
It wasn’t until two full years later, after England, and not long after his family moved to Maine, that he sat down and thought, “Why not find out what’s happened to the newspapers?”
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OR SO HE CLAIMED. THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THAT “Why not?” that didn’t sit right with me. It was too flip and casual. Those two years passed in the preface to Double Fold just as I’ve depicted them here, with a paragraph break, a strike of the return key, but what else was happening between Baker’s first chat with Blackbeard and his decision to follow the man’s story?
Well, The Everlasting Story of Nory was published, which in addition to not feeling like a particularly inspired book contains hints of Baker’s growing malaise. Nory’s writer-father is described as a man whose sole contribution to the w
orld is “books that help people go to sleep.” And a hint of frustration over readers who prefer first-order plot anxiety to books that celebrate the ordinary pokes up as the precocious Nory struggles to articulate her own emerging critical sensibility:
Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give the person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?
It’s ironic that Baker doubts his methods and impact as a writer now—if that’s what he’s doing here—because The Everlasting Story of Nory was published in May 1998, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which is the other significant thing that happened during these two years, broke that January. By April people were suggesting Vox had something to do with it. And now, a bit farther on with my Baker study, I realized that even if the Lewinsky Affair did in fact demonstrate the ongoing power of books, albeit tragically and accidentally, Nicholson Baker probably wasn’t snickering about it from afar because for him it all would have been part of a larger crisis, just now emerging. Baker had no real love for Clinton (he would soon criticize Clinton for waging war in Bosnia, and for having too blithely accepted the bunkum of corrupt library administrators), but even a profound dislike for Clinton wouldn’t have shielded Baker from disappointment over the fact that Vox appeared to have failed for Clinton and Lewinsky as readers, even though they had read a little of it.
How could Nicholson Baker not have been suffering through these years? He’d just gotten the first clues that a library drama he’d allowed himself to get dragged into was part of a crime so big he couldn’t even comprehend it: It was like digging up the first body of a serial killer only to have that body yank up another, and then another, like a long grisly string of paper-doll victims. And pretty much at the same time he’d learned that a book that he’d written with the simple hope of being funny and perhaps making the world a more honest place had backfired so badly that it had become evidence in the most famous legal case ever about dishonesty. In other words, how could Nicholson Baker not be in the process of concluding that something had gone terribly wrong with the state of books in the world, with libraries, with modern literature? And for me, from there, it got kind of meta- and time travelly, because of course I’d had my own thoughts about libraries, or at least what I’d thought were my own thoughts about libraries as prisons, thoughts that had gotten me thinking about reading Nicholson Baker. And as I’d been reading Baker for the past twenty months or so, I’d been thrilled to see those thoughts repeatedly echoed, as when “Lumber” summarizes Pope’s characterization of a critic’s personal library as a “gilded prison”; as when “Books as Furniture” notes that it was once common for books to be strung together on “Jacob Marleyesque chains”; and as when Baker, after coming into possession of twenty to thirty tons of rare first-run newspapers (more on this shortly), went shopping for a place to store them and was shown an abandoned naval prison near Portsmouth (he was “tempted,” but leased a renovated mill closer to home).
At first I regarded these echoes as additional confirmation of Naipaul’s claim that we read to confirm what we already know, though I recast it in Jamesian terms: As readers we’re like adventurers seeking the source of our streams, and when our river collides with other rivers we infer a great collective headwater and continue upstream, chugging bravely forward on our voyage. But when Baker turned his attention to libraries, and when I started to sense him sinking into negativity, suffering as I’d suffered before I started reading him, it began to seem as though my stream had no current of its own, that I flowed only as a function of the mind of another. Was that even possible? Could I have started thinking about reading Nicholson Baker not because he wrote an important book of memory criticism, or a book about an anthologist just as I’d become an anthologist, but because his thoughts on libraries were not the echo of my thoughts because I was the echo? Or more simply put, could my crisis of 2010 have been the resurrection of Baker’s midnineties crisis? If so, then I had a whole new crisis. The angst I’d hoped to cure with Baker had been caused by Baker. Could a weapon that inflicted a wound also heal it?
In any event, it was clear that “Why not?” was an insufficient explanation for why Nicholson Baker had turned his attention to the history of libraries. He knew, I believed, that he was making a formal declaration of hostilities in a private Cold War. But “Why not?” was less a false statement than a note of reluctance. What seemed obvious now was that Double Fold was Baker’s revelation, both in that it stemmed spontaneously from a deep hot cinder of concern, and that, as with prophets, he hadn’t asked for the job and didn’t particularly relish it when it arrived.
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SO WHY DRONES? WHY, IN 2012, WAS NICHOLSON BAKER INSERTING drones into peculiar interviews and writing protest songs, most of which were about drones? It wasn’t a new concern, as even Checkpoint, the 2004 assassination book, lashed out at drones, meaning Baker was well ahead of the drone curve. But why drones and not nuclear proliferation, or cluster bombs, or land mines, or any of a whole host of weapons stored in the well-stocked arsenal of needless death innovation? Partly it was the cavalierness of it that bothered him—a president could sit in an office and decide who lived and who died—but that still didn’t explain why a drone attack was a particular problem for a pacifist.
That’s the other thing: Nicholson Baker was now a pacifist. “Why I’m a Pacifist,” published in Harper’s in 2011, reads as though it’s been stitched together from scraps salvaged from Human Smoke’s cutting room floor, and like “Discards” it’s a much more ideologically forthright document than Baker has generally produced. I reluctantly add that “Why I’m a Pacifist” credits Baker’s pacifism to his wife—reluctant because when I met Baker he told me that his wife was an extremely private person. The more I had learned about her, however—for example, the playful tidbit she added to Baker’s midnineties keep-the-chin-up piece about gondolas: “Come into my gondola, I’m going to fondle ya”—the more she seemed to rank right up there among influential literary spouses.
Yet the question remained: Why, if you’re going to kill someone, was it better to do it with a simpler and more elegant device like a club or a manned aircraft, something that might get you killed too? Sure, a degree of attendant personal risk might reduce the chance that you’ll follow through on your murderous impulse. Or you can make the argument, as Baker did, that computerized weaponry leads to higher body counts, so that if your measure is total quantity of death then drones pose a problem. But wasn’t the real problem why anyone would want to be killing people in the first place? Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out how to stop that? Drones don’t have anything to do with that, one way or the other. What they do have something to do with, in the context of Nicholson Baker’s career, is Double Fold and libraries and the Holocaust.
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DOUBLE FOLD IS A BLEAK PORTRAIT OF MODERNITY VIEWED through a translucent paper lens. Early in the book, Baker uses a pocket history of Egyptian mummies to link civilization’s devaluation of human intellect to the evolution of print technology. For many years, as though they were an inexhaustible resource, mummies were used to power Egyptian trains, the ancient corpses shoveled into locomotive ovens. In 1847, a geologist proposed importing mummies in bulk to the United States as part of a scheme to make cheaper newspaper stock from the linen wrappings. Only one newspaper ever used the linen in significant amounts, but Bak
er speculated that for a time mummy wrappings were an ingredient cooked into the stew of many newspapers, including the New York Times.
But mummy paper didn’t last. Around 1870 an even cheaper paper product came along: ground-wood pulp paper, one of those glorious innovations that didn’t really need any further adjusting. It was inexpensive and it came from a benign, sustainable resource. Hence the golden age of newspapers and later the egalitarian paperback. A cynical mind might see these developments as steps on a slippery slope: Cheaper paper leads to cheaper thoughts. But Baker didn’t.
As he saw it, the problem didn’t begin until just after World War II. His deep historical soundings pinged back to the surface the outlines of modern library philosophy: Cheaper paper meant many more books and newspapers being published, all of which needed to be archived and stored, and that meant not only bulging catalogs, but bulging buildings and budgets as well. What to do? There were two choices: miniaturize or digitize. Or three really, as what Double Fold emphatically proposed was that the best choice was to leave it all alone: build a few more buildings and hire a few more people, which was the cheapest option anyway.
But that’s not what happened. Double Fold is really a double narrative, a tragicomedy of errors that reads like a bad joke (the history of miniaturization) followed by its worse topper (the history of digitization). Sure, microfilm and electronic scanning were a big initial investment, but didn’t they offer a permanent solution? No, they didn’t. But before you even got to that problem, you encountered a perfect doublethought of midcentury library science philosophy: the only way to pay for the upfront costs of miniaturization and digitization was to reduce the future costs of ongoing book ownership by dumping books. Some plans looked forward to libraries eliminating as much as 95 percent of their holdings—in order to preserve their holdings.
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