Russell Baker reviews Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano’s The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898-1911), touching on Baker’s beef with librarians along the way:
Baker himself is a warrior in the struggle against America’s throwaway culture, specializing in bookish matters. He has strongly criticized libraries for replacing their card-file indexes with electronic blips and for miniaturizing original documents and papers on inch-and-a-half-wide strips of microfilm. Microfilm enables them to clear shelves of a lot of cumbersome stuff after shrinking it to fit on plastic strips. Since librarians are among the world’s most civilized people (who else does such priceless work so cheerfully for such rotten pay?), most of them probably dislike the carnage as much as Baker does, but they are prisoners of a society that is running out of storage space. As every suburban homeowner knows, America’s astonishing plenty threatens to overflow every last crevice and cranny, every hallway and closet, attic and cellar, garage and crawl space, and finally overwhelm everyone too sentimental to pack grandmother’s wedding pictures off to the dump. America’s astonishing credit cards make us all victims of the sorcerer’s apprentice. No wonder libraries settle for lifeless little plastic photos.
Complete article from the New York Review of Books.
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