etc.

Nicholson Baker is a really nice guy.

You might remember him as the guy who wrote the book that Monica Lewinsky bought for Bill that resulted in the seizing of the book store’s sales records. But more importantly, Baker was responsible for Double Fold, the somewhat scathing indictment against the library practice of destroying newspapers (which he rightly considers an important part of national heritage) for the purpose of content preservation by microfilm. Understandably, Double Fold caused quite a stir in the library world and it wasn’t like he was telling librarians something they didn’t already know (that newspapers are valuable artifacts and information sources), but from a library’s standpoint, the logistical and practical concerns surrounding the preservation of newspapers in their original format makes the process cost-prohibitive.

I went into the reading last night having only heard a fraction of an interview with Baker on CBC Radio, so not knowing much about him (other than the fact that he’s not a librarian) I was fully expecting an aggressive, muckraking activist. It turns out that he’s this shy, mild-mannered gentle man, not at all the kind of person you would expect would have caused such a tizzy in the library world. He was interviewed after doing a short reading from his new book, A Box of Matches, at which point he mentioned that he is currently working on another library-related work of non-fiction, this one about a secret department in the Library of Congress that works for the US Air Force. I can hardly wait.

So after the reading was over, I got a chance to meet him and have him sign my copies of Double Fold and his new book. We were having a pleasant chat about the reading and Ian Brown, the interviewer, when I was overcome with the need to tell him that I was a librarian, only I didn’t elegantly work it into the conversation, I just sort of blurted it out right in the middle of an otherwise pleasant pause. Not pretty. But he handled this complete non sequitur graciously by first asking me where I worked and then by saying “I hope you took [Double Fold] in the manner in which it was intended and not as an incitement against your profession”, and by this point I’m feeling like a complete heel and thinking, here is this seriously nice man and I have put him on the defensive and made him feel the need to justify his work to me.

We rounded out our conversation amicably enough because at the heart of it I don’t disagree with his basic premise (nor do a lot of librarians from my understanding), but in my ideal world it would be the newspaper publishing companies who are dishing out the cash for superior newsprint so that the preservation of both form and content does not have to be such an onerous task for libraries. Baker ended our conversation by saying, “If I had it to do over again, I would be an archivist.” And a damn fine archivist he would be too.