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Double Fold Or Double Take? Book Memory and the Administration of Knowledge Libri, 2002, vol. 52, pp. 28–35 Copyright Saur 2002 ______________________________________________ Printed in Germany · All rights reserved Libri ISSN 0024-2667 Double Fold or Double Take? Book Memory and the Administration of Knowledge TARA BRABAZON School of Media, Communication and Culture, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia, Australia The year 2001 will be known for many destructive and braries, librarians and the distinctions between information highly visible public tragedies. However within the librarian and knowledge. Yet the article also suggests that Baker did discourse, it will be remembered for the controversies en- not extend his case for preservation far enough: to the realm circling the publication of Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold. of popular memory, popular culture and digital ephemera. This article assesses the rationale, direction and scope of this Without attention to these matters, libraries will remain ne- book and resultant debate, showing what it reveals about li- glected cemeteries: the passionless cranium of the culture. Prologue cultural studies. To pay for his education, he is working at one of Western Australia’s University My garage spells of naphthalene. Because I hang libraries as the jack-the-lad lifter, stacker, shifter washing out to dry in the conjoined garage, my and gofer. One day, his mother informed me that frocks smell of naphthalene. Because the car lives this library was disposing of the entire collection there, my car smells of naphthalene. The origin of The West Australian, the longest surviving state- of – and rationale for – this piquant odour re- based newspaper. Her son was responsible for quires the telling of a story. putting these elegant volumes into the dumpster. The advantage of teaching hundreds of students However – if I desired – he would preserve a every year is that academics have the chance to range of the 1980s collection for me, after he [did meet thousands of family members and friends. not] put them in the dumpster. Within weeks, car- By the time an academic has lived in a city for ten loads of eighties magic started to stockpile in my years, it is impossible to attend an aerobics class lounge room, making it difficult to move around or go grocery shopping without meeting a former the house. Plus, delicate and remarkable tomes student, or the mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, son from the world wars, twenties and thirties were or daughter of a former student. added to the collection. The rest of The West Aus- My friends and students know that I am ob- tralian’s run – those that were not pilfered from sessed by both books and the 1980s. Books on the the dumpster – were simply destroyed. 1980s are special favourites. The son of one of my Now a new problem befell me, and everyone favourite cultural studies students – who attended who wanted to move through my home. How lectures with his mother during school holidays was I to store this material? I have a large house, and ‘sick days’ from high school – has also become and live alone. This may appear the solution to a friend and followed his mother’s footsteps into my problem. However, because of my prior col- Dr Tara Brabazon is Senior Lecturer, School of Media, Communication and Culture, Murdoch University, South Street, Mur- doch, Western Australia 6150. Australia. Web site: http://brabazon.net/ E-mail: [email protected] 28 Unauthenticated | 134.115.4.99 Download Date | 1/25/13 5:37 AM Double Fold or Double Take? lecting habits, the house is full of groaning book- learning broadly defined, and operates through shelves featuring past hits of postcolonial theory, two intertwined arguments. Firstly, Baker’s con- critical pedagogy, Marxist historiography, cultural troversy is monitored, revealing the profoundly studies, gender studies and Internet theory. The contradictory imperatives confronting librarians, appropriated West Australians had no place in my as either information professionals or knowledge house. The garage was a concern – would it pre- managers. The second part excavates notions of serve the materials? information access, sketching the potentials and The advantage of being in the first generation problems of digitisation for assembling popular of family members to attend university means memory. that I have parents who can accomplish useful, Nicholson Baker’s work has always offered quantifiable tasks, like building, renovating, challenges, being difficult to situate in fiction or painting and fixing things. So a shelf was con- non-fiction, and subverting overt, classifiable structed, airtight boxes bought and naphthalene genre-based categories. He is a fine writer, swim- peppered throughout the structure. My father’s ming through language and reflexivity with a cataloguing, while owing nothing to Anglo- precision and purpose only seen in paid political American Cataloguing Rules and Library of Con- announcements. His topics are rarely significant gress Subject Headings, is appropriate for the oasis or important: his gaze is drawn to the banal, the of the eighties that now frames the garage. It was negligible and the overlooked. He discovers always going to be difficult for me to get married, beauty, pattern and purpose in the microcosmic as I have completely filled all the wardrobes of minutia of the age. This fickleness is very attrac- the aforementioned house with my clothes, leav- tive in our era of bland textbooks and predictable ing little space for spousal sartorial elegance. prose. His words massage the inelegancies of the Now with the garage full of newspapers, it can age. From Vox’s phone sex marathon to Fermata’s (just) accommodate my car, with no space for a office worker protagonist who can suspend time second. Oh dear, what a pity. No matter: I love and undress women, Baker demonstrates what these newspapers more than I could love a man Laura Miller (2001) has termed “a passionate en- anyway. thusiasm for the neglected flotsam and jetsam of This is not an ideal situation, for my social life every day life.” Double Fold is therefore unusual, as well as the newspapers. But I smile every time creating a controversy far beyond an attention to I walk into the garage and smell the naphthalene. toe nail clippers. I hold something special – a vast collection of Nicholson Baker is an activist by accident. He 1980s West Australian. As a shrine to big hair, was infuriated by the actions of the San Francisco Bond and Black Monday, it conveys a textured Public Library placing hundreds of thousands of reading of the past not possible through micro- books into landfill. The rationale for this destruc- film. The information is on those reels, but there tion varies from the chemical (the acidic infirmity is something magical about feeling the paper, of paper) through to issues of the physical space being branded by newsprint and – yes – inhaling occupied by the collection. Baker argues that that naphthalene. throughout microfilming history newspapers and then books have been destroyed through the Assault and battery guillotining of their spines to quicken the filming process. This ‘destroying to preserve’ ethos has This paper investigates the major library contro- been a trait of successive the Librarians of Con- versy of recent years: the debates encircling the gress, particularly the incumbent, James Bil- publication of Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: li- lington: braries and the assault on paper. It has been a timely clash. Too often libraries are a forgotten part of the educational experience, being sidelined as an There’s always a trade-off. The happiness and satisfaction inelegant appendage, rather than the throbbing, of seeing the whole thing in the original is a short-lived privilege for today’s audience. It’s likely to be, in the real bubbling cranium of schools, universities and civic world, at the expense of the variety and richness of what life. My work directly confronts and questions future generations will be able to see in the microfilm ver- the role and place of libraries in education and sion (Billington in Baker 2001, 36). 29 Unauthenticated | 134.115.4.99 Download Date | 1/25/13 5:37 AM Tara Brabazon The language of economic rationalism – of effi- memory for an inherently memory-less society” ciency, productivity and the real world – necessi- (Billington in Conaway 2000, 206). He obviously tates the reduction of primary source materials to saw no contradiction in his policies. questions of content. Microfilm is unable to cap- Microfilming has altered the way in which his- ture colour printing or greyscale photography. tory is researched and written. To read a news- The dismantling of library collections, par- paper is to gain a breadth and texture of daily ticularly original bound newspapers and ‘brittle events. As Malcolm Jones affirms, “when it comes books’ to create microform editions is a destruc- to books and especially newspapers, nothing tion of both print and paper history. It also ig- beats the original. Historians know this. Librari- nores the weaknesses of microfilm, with the poly- ans, who are the curators of physical objects, ester-based films permeable by fungal attack and ought to” (2001, 57). The subtle development of silver-halide flaws. Baker argues, through the in- ideas and attitudes is difficult to track. To read famous double fold test, [1] that the degradation microfilm is to look up only a specific citation or of books has been overstated. A more accurate page as there is little pleasure to be discovered in judgment of value would be a focus on legibility. the blinking parchness of the research process. Significantly though, Double Fold is not a damn- Indeed, in an Ontario Archive, a microfilm reader ing treaty against digitisation. Actually, Baker ar- had an airsickness bag appended to it (Baker gues that such a process has value for access and 2001, 40).
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