All,
What can we expect of him? He has a total disconnect between preservation
of information and preservation of artifact. And no concept of preservation of
the artifact. He kept those bound volumes of newsprint in a warehouse on pallets
(re Double Fold). And I may be misremembering, but I also believe the
warehouse was near a river. Let’s not even mention deacidification. So
keeping archival materials in his barn, and marking them with post it notes, doesn’t
surprise me.
-Sharing your concern,
Catherine Hatterman
Acquisitions Librarian
Nebraska Library Commission
1200 N St., Ste. 120
Lincoln, NE 68508
chatterm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Cybulski, Walter
(NIH/NLM) [E] [mailto:Cybulskw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 6:52 AM
To: padg@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [padg] Nicholson Baker update from today's NY TIMES
“Until just recently, when he began to cart them back,
they were all stacked
in Mr. Baker’s barn: piles of Churchill; of Herbert
Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters,
diaries.”
“The visitor fumbled and allowed
Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp.” [Unless I
am mistaken, that’s the NYT’s highbrow way of saying he dropped
them.]
“… Post-it notes he
had used as bookmarks …”
The
preservation community is shocked and saddened by this woeful tale of cultural
property abuse. Primary research materials stacked in barns!
Fumbled books! Post-it notes! Leave them alone! Leave
the poor artifacts alone I say!
-
Concerned in Bethesda
From: Barbara B. Eden
[mailto:beb1@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:31 PM
To: padg@xxxxxxx
Subject: [padg] Nicholson Baker update from today's NY TIMES
March 4, 2008
A Debunker on the Road to World War II
By CHARLES McGRATH
SOUTH BERWICK, Me. Nicholson
Baker no longer collects old newspapers. For the last decade or so he has
lived in an old farmhouse in this little southern Maine town, and he now
accepts that Maine winters and the quirks of his local news agent do not make
him a person ideally situated to assemble a complete archive of The New York
Times.
In 1999, pillaging his own savings, Mr. Baker purchased some 6,000 volumes of
bound newspapers from the British Library, which was trying to unload them.
Included were extensive runs of The Chicago Tribune, The New York Herald
Tribune and Joseph Pulitzer’s World. He stored this “majestic,
pulp-begotten ancestral stockpile,” as he called it, in a warehouse in
nearby Rollinsford, N.H., until 2004, when it moved to Duke
University.
“I went a little over the edge,” Mr. Baker said recently about some
of his newspaper-gathering efforts, and he added that being able to send his
bound volumes to Duke was “a blessing.”
“I don’t have to lie awake at night worrying about them,” he
said. “But it was also like sending your kid off to college a terrible
blow.”
To research his new book, “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II,
the End of Civilization,” which comes out next week from Simon &
Schuster, Mr. Baker read old newspapers online and on microfilm, and he also
borrowed hundreds of books from the library at the University
of New Hampshire, about 20 minutes away in Durham, which had granted him
professorial privileges. Until just recently, when he began to cart them back,
they were all stacked in Mr. Baker’s barn: piles of Churchill; of Herbert
Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters,
diaries.
“I felt a little guilty at first,” Mr. Baker said about borrowing so
many books. “But once you get past 100, the rest is easier.”
“Human Smoke” is an unusual book even for Mr. Baker, now 51, whose
career has unspooled in a way as unpredictable as one of his fastidiously
meandering sentences. For a while he was known as a sort of Proustian
miniaturist, an elegist of the quotidian, fascinated by, say, the weave and
design of a paper towel, the symmetry of an ice-cube tray, or the miracle of
Jiffy Pop. His first novel, “Mezzanine,” was about a man riding an
escalator on his way to buy a shoelace; his second, “Room
Temperature,” was about a father feeding a bottle to his 6-month-old
daughter.
Then Mr. Baker acquired a reputation for literary erotica; a copy of his novel
“Vox,” about phone sex, was one of Monica
Lewinsky’s gifts to Bill
Clinton. He also wrote a novel, “A Box of Matches,” about a man
who gets up in the dark every morning, lights a fire and broods about things
like toe-holes in socks and self-service gas pumps. While researching a books
of essays about, among other things, the fingernail clipper and the movie
projector, he discovered that many libraries were purging their shelves of old
books and newspapers, and he became so concerned about rescuing them that he
wrote “Double Fold,” an impassioned exposé.
But “Human Smoke” is like these other books only in its attempt to
slow down time and look at things carefully. Mr. Baker himself and his
Nabokovian style are largely absent. The book is a collage of sorts, a series
of short, documentarylike moments from August 1892 to Dec. 31, 1941. Most of
them are punctuated by the refrain “It was ... ” followed by a
date.
He had intended to write a book about the Library
of Congress during World War II, Mr. Baker said, but then realized he
“didn’t understand the war itself it made no sense.” So he
began reading the newspapers of the 1930s and early ’40s, just as someone
living through those events would have, and the papers in turn led him to
books, and to contemporary letters and diaries especially.
“The papers gave me a sense of what it must have been like for people
back then,” he said. “The simultaneity of everything the sense of
being a little bit at sea.”
He added: “Over and over again I would take out the five most important
books on X subject, and then I’d go back to The New York Times, and by
God, the story that was written the day after was by far the best source. Those
reporters were writing with everything in the right perspective. Sometimes I
think historians are a little like sauté chefs: they cook everything up and
soften the edges.”
An early draft of “Human Smoke” was a sort of quest narrative, he
said a book about a Nicholson Baker-like figure trying to learn the truth
about World War II until his wife talked him out of it.
“My own little chirpings turned out to be completely irrelevant, and once
I took out the first-person pronoun, the book really started to move,” he
said. “What people actually said was far more interesting than anything I
could address, so I ended up being a juxtaposer, an arranger, an editor more
than a writer. The satisfaction is winding up with something a little messier
and less pat than what you thought.”
“Human Smoke” deliberately has no argument, but Churchill appears
as more of a warmonger than he is usually portrayed, and there is far more than
in most textbooks about pacifist opposition to the war in the United States and
Britain and to Britain’s pre-Blitz bombing campaign of German cities.
“I came to the Second World War with a typically inadequate American
education.” Mr. Baker said, “and I was surprised to discover that
Churchill had this crazy, late-night side. He was obviously thrilled to be in
the midst of this escalating war. This is a man who wanted Europe to starve
he wanted to starve it into a state of revolt.”
He added: “I’ve always had pacifist leanings, and so one of the
things I wanted to learn was how do you react to the Second World War if
you’re a pacifist. That war is always held up as the great
counterexample, the one that was justified. And I got hungrier and hungrier to
answer the question: Did the Allies’ response to Hitler
really help anyone who needed help? One of the things I discovered, for
example, was that the most impressive opponents of the war were also the people
most actively arguing that we had to help the refugees. There was a complete
overlap.”
Talking about starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the British blockade, Mr.
Baker became so worked up that he had to pause, take off his rimless glasses
and rub his eyes, and then he went on: “What are you going to do when
Europe is threatened by Hitler, this paranoid, dangerous person? My feelings
about the war change every day. But I also feel that there is a way of looking
at the war and the Holocaust that is truer and sadder and stranger than the
received version.”
On a wintry afternoon last month, Mr. Baker, with the help of a visitor,
reluctantly took back his first load of books. The volumes, including
biographies of Hoover and Vera Brittain, the English writer and pacifist, and
the letters of Helmuth James von Moltke, the German resistance fighter, filled
the entire back seat of the visitor’s rented Nissan Sentra. During the
ride to and from the University of New Hampshire, Mr. Baker sighed a couple of
times and said, “Oh, man.”
He is a tall, gangly man with long arms and was able to ferry the books 12 at a
time from the parking lot to the library. The visitor fumbled and allowed
Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp. At the counter Mr. Baker had to
leaf through a number of the books, removing torn slips and Post-it notes he
had used as bookmarks, and every now and then he paused to glance at a passage.
“The trouble with doing this is I’m seeing some stuff I wish I had
used,” he said.
Barbara B. Eden
Director
Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance
Cornell University Library
B15 Olin Library
Ithaca, NY 14853
email: beb1@xxxxxxxxxxx
phone: 607-255-5291
fax: 607-254-7493
http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation
Barbara B. Eden
Director
Department of Preservation and Collection Maintenance
Cornell University Library
B15 Olin Library
Ithaca, NY 14853
email: beb1@xxxxxxxxxxx
phone: 607-255-5291
fax: 607-254-7493
http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation
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