Nicholson Baker has announced that Duke University Libraries has agreed to house his American Newspaper Repository collection. To make a long story short, Baker saved a lot of old newspapers in their original runs by organizing a corporation and purchasing the newspapers from various libraries (most of the collection was from the British Library) that were allegedly getting ready to consign them to the Dumpster. He then wrote a book-length diatribe about the ordeal, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, that, among other things, claimed that vicious, short-sighted librarians were all but deliberately destroying the cultural heritage that newspapers embody. As the originator of the post about this story on LISNews wryly observed, “Maybe now old St. Nich will quit bashing librarians and stick to writing novels.”
