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Re: Paper conspiracy



There's a short review of the book in: The Booklist, Chicago; Feb 15,
2001; Vol. 97, Iss. 12; pg. 1087, 1 pgs. (available in full text on
ProQUest). A short quote from the review: "Along the way he reveals
startling, suspect links between leading twentieth-century librarians
and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Baker's retelling of the Library of Congress' sorry
mass-deacidification program makes readers wonder if a
library-industrial complex exists paralleling the military version.
Over the course of his library investigations,
Baker evolved from dispassionate reporter to vocal advocate for
preservation of newspapers, culminating in
his establishment of his own corporation to buy and preserve
libraries' discarded newspaper folios. "

I think some people would say that rather than being a "vocal
advocate," he is a "shrill advocate"!

Here's a citation for a Library Journal article that addresses this
issue in response to Nicholson Baker's article in The New Yorker
(citation for New Yorker article in the quote below) which was
probably the basis for at least part of the book.


Nicholson Baker strikes again
Library Journal; New York; Sep 1, 2000; Marylaine Block;
Volume: 125
Issue: 14
Start Page: 176

Abstract:
UNTIL NOW, librarians have been free to discount what Nicholson Baker
had to say about
them. After all, when he attacked us for disposing of card catalogs,
he totally ignored all their
drawbacks and all the advantages of electronic catalogs.

[Full Text available on ProQuest; first paragraph follows.]

[Headnote]
By working together with other libraries, we could insure that
content is not lost

UNTIL NOW, librarians have been free to discount what Nicholson Baker
had to say about them. After all,
when he attacked us for disposing of card catalogs, he totally
ignored all their drawbacks and all the
advantages of electronic catalogs. And if he was on somewhat stronger
ground attacking libraries for
disposing of weeded books, he was so clearly ignoring the reality of
limited space most libraries face that it
was easy to write him off as just another outsider claiming to know
more about how to run libraries than
librarians do. But in his latest dispatch ("Deadline," The New
Yorker, 7/24/00, p. 42-bl), Baker has written an
accusation that we can discount or ignore only at our own peril.



Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(845) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

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