Double Fold - Major Themes

Major Themes

Baker targets many established and revered institutions in Double Fold, including the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. He accuses these libraries, and many others, of neglecting to preserve the world's cultural heritage (through their policies of discarding original materials once they've been microfilmed) and of creating cumbersome barriers to scholarship and research (in the form of tough-to-read and often incomplete microfilm).

Other targets of Baker's ire include the highly-regarded Brittle Books Program, the United States Newspaper Program, the mass deacidification policy practiced by the Library of Congress, and the 1987 film Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record. (He calls the film "the most successful piece of library propaganda ever created." p. 184).

Baker's issue with microfilming is not so much with the process in and of itself ("there is nothing intrinsically wrong with microfilming...(it) can be extremely useful" p. 25) -- but with the disbinding (sometimes known as "guillotining") and discarding that often went hand-in-hand with the procedure. Baker laments the loss of thousands of volumes of significant 19th and 20th century newspapers: the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York World, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the New York Times, and many others. His other problems with microfilm include cost ("Compared to storing the originals in some big building, microfilming is wildly expensive" p. 26), the poor quality of some of the images ("edge-blurred, dark, gappy, with text cut off of some pages, faded to the point of illegibility on others" p. 14), and the sheer frustration of dealing with the technology ("microfilm is a brain-poaching, gorge-lifting trial to browse" p. 39).