Una’s Lectures

Nicholson Baker, Una’s Lecturer 2001-2002

“Bombs and Bibliographies: The Secret Life of the Library of Congress” || April 15, 2002

Novelist and nonfiction writer Nicholson Baker told an interviewer in 1994 that he originally wanted to become a composer and studied at the Eastman School of Music. “I spent hours at the piano trying to write piano sonatas,” he continued. “Eventually it became clear that I would have to pick a different art.”

Baker graduated from Haverford College and went on to write five novels, including The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, and The Everlasting Story of Nory. He has also published a meditation on his relationship with John Updike, U and I (1991), a collection of essays entitled The Size of Thoughts (1996), and in 2001, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Double Fold won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction in March, 2002. In this influential—and controversial—study, Baker argues that the preservation of the intellectual and cultural record of a society are matters of crucial concern, and that librarians, even those deeply concerned with the preservation of that record, erred in replacing newspapers with microfilm. The latter, thought to conserve valuable space on library shelves, is, in Baker’s view, far from an adequate substitute for paper: it is not permanent, it contains gaps, and it is difficult to read. Baker is concerned with the factors that determine decision-making about the preservation of the historical record, and he is concerned with loss. These are the issues that inform the lectures that he has titled Shelving History.

Baker’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. He lives in South Berwick, Maine, where he founded in 1999 the American Newspaper Repository, a “unique collection of original newspapers that would otherwise have been destroyed or dispersed.”

Other Events with Nicholson Baker

“The Lost Art of the Newspaper” || April 17, 2002

with Baker, David Henkin (Department of History) and Carla Hesse (Department of History).