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Re: Nicholson Baker



Greetings to all,

I am not an expert on Nicholson Baker's work, but I do know about his
passion for old newspaper.  If anyone has looked at his site entitled, the
American Newspaper Repository, you'll see that he only has certain years of
newspapers.  I had the opportunity to ask him, why didn't he have complete
runs of certain issues, and his lack of response indicates to me that only
wanted to keep good examples of each newspaper.  Last year he wrote an
article about how the British Museum was trashing large parts of their
newspaper collection.  I recently did a database search of the newspapers on
his website, and compared them to collections in OCLC and RLIN, and found
that out of the nearly 200 periodical titles he claimed to have, all of them
were incomplete, and all but about 20 titles were owned - in their original
format - by at least 5 major repositories.  Although I do agree with him on
a limited point of view that newspaper should be preserved in its original
format for some artifactual value, but being a microfilm preservationist, I
believe that if you preserve an artifact on archival quality microfilm, it
will last.

Harrison Wick
Preservation Microfilm
Indiana University
Bloomington.

-----Original Message-----
From: William Ross [mailto:wer@CISUNIX.UNH.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 9:53 PM
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Re: Nicholson Baker


Hello all,

Although I am not a big fan of Nicholson Baker's novels (I am not a prude,
but I do play one on TV -- truthfully, I am a non-fiction reader), I believe
Jennifer it correct. Baker does not have fangs, nor does he have an
annotated card catalog in his living room. He is not a Luddite. He leads a
suburban life, with kids at school, and like most writers, he prizes the
paper upon which his and other writers' works are written. He is using what
the "powers that be" regard as the most fleeting of formats (newsprint) as
an allegory for the preservation of all print materials. If he can salvage
and preserve old newspapers, then how can we casually reformat and
"deaccession" less vulnerable library/archival materials? I have read his
new book, and while I disagree with significant portions of it, I believe he
raises serious questions; ones which significant numbers of researchers and
lay people will be asking us in the next few months. I question some of his
conclusions, his casual use of quotes, and his sometimes bullying prose, but
he raises questions that cut to the core of library/archival preservation:
must we kill the patient in order to rid it of disease? Richard Cox has
provided us with an admirable and measured counterpoint to Baker's argument,
but if we do not all become acquainted with the timbre of the debate, our
laxity places us at some peril.

Bill Ross
Head, Milne Special Collections and Archives
University of New Hampshire Library

-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer Hecker
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Sent: 4/10/01 4:39 PM
Subject: Nicholson Baker

Howdy everyone-
  Just got around to reading the last few days of the list and noticed
that
nobody mentioned that Nicholson Baker is also a very fine novelist. Most
people have heard of one of his novels "Vox" which was given to
President
Clinton as a gift from his consort, Monica Lewinsky. The press made a
pretty
big deal about it because of the risque nature of the book (it is about
phone sex). He's also written "The Mezzanine" a slim volume full of
observations on life's minutae. The only other of his novels that I have
read (actually, I listened to the abridged book-on-tape version) is "The
Fermata" another risque piece which hinges upon a brilliant sci-fi
premise.
While I am a big fan of Baker's work, I must warn those who prefer to
avoid
literary titillation: these books are not for you (he gets pretty darn
racy).
  Also, I think that this kind of controversy is often (regrettably)
missing
from the library/archival literature. I've had some very interesting
conversations which were sparked by Baker's writings in this field. The
fact
that these articles ran in the lay magazines also served to raise a good
deal of awareness for the archival plight. I think this dude is really
doing
us a favor!


________________________________________
Jennifer R. Hecker
Masters Candidate in Archival Enterprise
University of Texas Graduate School of
Library and Information Science
PMB 292
2002-A Guadalupe
Austin, TX 78705
512.445.4373
geekarchivist@hotmail.com
________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________
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