Double Fold
"Since the 1950s, our country's libraries have followed a policy of "destroying to preserve": They have methodically dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers, cut up hundreds of thousands of so-called brittle books, and replaced them with microfilmed copies - copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age. Half a century on, the results on this policy are jarringly apparent: There are no longer any complete editions remaining of most of America's great newspapers. The loss to historians and future generations in inestimable." "In this book, writer Nicholson Baker explains the marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it. Pleading the case for saving our newspapers and books so that they can continue to be read in their original forms, he tells how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public's trust by selling off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself, who discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper archive is to cash in his retirement savings and buy it - all twenty tons of it."--BOOK JACKET.
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4recommend
12mentions
10people
2014–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Read Double Fold. It will make you hate librarians.
- > Most librarians would agree with you that the current situation is terrible, and if you look at library literature they've generally felt that way from the beginning.
I know! I’m a former librarian who has worked with a lot of “big players” on the institutional and software side of things.
> They are highly constrained by copyright law.
Here’s where I disagree with you: they’re largely constrained by the kind of administrative bloat that has permeated all of academia, which has no technical expertise and prefers corporate solutions or managing large-scale, dead-end projects for resume padding. I was on the receiving end of this so many times I left the field.
> re: microfiche, it lasts much longer than digital scans -- if kept in good conditions it has a usable half-life on the scale of >100 years, while digital files need much more active maintenance to both prevent bit-rot and to ensure the file-type is still readable (eg countless file formats have been abandoned and are only currently accessible via emulators of older machines).
True on the digital files part, not so much on the microfiche/ film which proved in many cases to be of poor durability and prone to data loss. But my comment was more about how it’s adoption caused libraries to destroy huge parts of their collections with little recourse once microfiche/film proved to not live up to its marketing claims or in cases where it was poorly implemented. I recommend Nicholson Baker’s “Double Fold” for a good account of all of this.
- My father is a used bookdealer and one of his sources of inventory on occasion has been library discards. (Books with library markings that are sold online ought to be marked "ex-library", not just "used", so that the buyer isn't surprised by this.)
But it's amazing to see this level of automation and scale. My father was manually cataloguing everything and then selling ex-library books for at least a few dollars apiece (often more based on rarity). The dealers profiled here are able to do this on a scale orders of magnitude larger, and cheaper, than a small-scale bookdealer could do by hand -- at least without barcodes.
The barcodes, as mentioned in the article, are a huge deal in that they can change some kinds of cataloguing from minutes of labor to seconds of labor. But ISBNs themselves were only invented in the early 1970s and bar codes on books weren't common until the 1980s. Depending on what decade the books you're dealing with are from, the level of automation of cataloguing could also vary quite a lot.
One thing you'll also see (which antagonized my father quite a bit as a dealer but which can definitely be seen as a huge boon for readers) is that individual people will go to huge sales, like library sales, at the earliest possible moment with phone apps and try to scan thousands of books to find those that will sell at enough of a premium above the sale price to be worth buying. Traditional dealers with brick-and-mortar shops and/or specialized knowledge of some area have some rather negative terms for these competitors, who notably may not have a lot of personal knowledge of the books they're reselling, but do have a lot of dexterity and access to big online databases.
In general, online databases and subsequently mobile apps have done a lot to make the used book market much more competitive, and also much more accessible for smaller-scale participation by non-experts. That's often a hard thing for used book shops and a useful thing for readers.
Library discards or "deaccessionment" are still a sad thing to me, and I think to most librarians too, although they'll often point out that many volumes that are being deaccessioned haven't been checked out in years. A good thing for preservation is that the Internet Archive now acquires a lot of these volumes in various ways and scans them with the goal of getting them online.
There are absolutely books still being thrown in the trash all the time that would be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars to the right buyer, but they're also an incredibly tiny fraction of the books that are thrown away.
> how many books are "lost" because of some scanning fault
Scanning processes are getting better and better, so I also think this is a diminishing problem.
Nicholson Baker wrote a fascinating book called Double Fold in which he pointed out that paper books are typically much more durable than many people think¹, and that digitization and imaging projects have significant drawbacks and limitations. Librarians were quite annoyed with this book because it attacked them as negligent stewards of history. I don't think Baker's arguments have aged very well, as current scanning options are much better and have produced much more useful results than many of those he attacked.
¹ This is true -- Baker points out that our intuitions about fragile paper are mostly shaped by a few decades in the 20th century in which the use of high-acid paper became common for cheap mass-market books, and also for newspapers and magazines. Most older books were printed on lower-acid paper which often lasts for many centuries without major degradation. I have a number of books from the 1700s that are still in great shape and can be read by hand without damaging them (though most have been rebound, because the bindings are normally more fragile than the pages).
- Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, is a remarkable discussion of what's lost when libraries destroy bound newspapers when they are "replaced" by microfilm.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gate...
- Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
- Interesting story. I didn’t know about that. Looking it up, it appears to be well covered and one book Double Fold discusses it extensively. Thank you for sharing.
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