SOURCE: Baker, Nicholson, and Andrew Richard Albanese. “Double-Edged: Is Nicholson Baker a Friend of Libraries?” Library Journal 126, no. 10 (1 June 2001): 103-04.

In the following interview, Baker discusses his arguments for book and newspaper preservation, as put forth in Double Fold, and the controversy among librarians in response to his condemnation of library policies that promote the destruction of print collections.

Since its publication in April 2001, Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper has generated a hailstorm of controversy in the library community. It is somewhat ironic then that Baker, sitting in a New Hampshire warehouse among the more than 60 pallets of newspapers he recently rescued from destruction at the hands of the British Library, says he is beginning to feel a little like a librarian.

In spite of his damaging indictment that librarians invented a crisis of brittle paper to justify the destruction of huge numbers...