For years, we have been told there is a crisis in our libraries, that books and newspapers will soon be turning to dust, that we should microfilm virtually everything as soon as possible, while discarding many of the originals. Have we been told the truth? An emphatic no is the conclusion reached by best-selling novelist and acclaimed essayist Nicholson Baker in his certain to be controversial new book, Double Fold. Baker has done extensive research, interviewing many prominent librarians, as well as the buyers and sellers of unique library holdings. He admits that his study is not an impartial piece of reporting. While he does not misrepresent the views of others, we are always aware of his own position. For example, he asserts that librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper’s fragility, and they continue to lie about it. For over fifty years they have disparaged paper’s residual strength, while remaining ‘blind as lovers’ to the failings and infirmities of film. He says the main reason microfilm (and its rectangular, lower-resolution cousin, microfiche) has always fascinated library administrators is, of course, that it gives them a way to clear the shelves. Baker argues that key decisions on this subject made at the Library of Congress strongly influenced decision-makers at other libraries. In his words, such is the prestige of our biggest library that whatever its in-house theoreticians come to believe, libraries will soon believe as well. Baker documents how well-intentioned librarians and their boards worked with such government agencies as NASA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the microfilm industry to perpetuate the destroy to preserve approach. He explains in detail how seriously flawed tests failed to slow down the almost unanimous acceptance of the approach that led to the destruction of countless original books and newspapers. One such test, widely used, provides the title for his book. It is a simple experiment how kindergartners are taught to divide a piece of paper without scissors that determines the brittleness of books. Baker says it is often an instrument of deception, almost always of self-deception which creates a uniform class of condemnable objects ‘brittle material’ . . . whose population can be adjusted up or down to suit rhetorical needs simply by altering the number of repetitions demanded in the procedure. The author is careful to point out that not all librarians and libraries have been swept up in the movement toward microfilm and the discarding of originals. In particular, he notes, the only major research library in the country that still has no full-time or part-time preservation administrator is the Boston Public Library. They are also the only large library in the country that has kept all of its post-1870 bound newspaper collection. And he applauds the efforts of G. Thomas Tanselle, a Melville scholar, who has often recommended that we store somewhere all the casualties books, journals, or newspapers; bound, disbound, or never bound in the first place of mass microfilming or preservation photocopying. Baker is so passionately committed to preserving the original runs of significant newspapers that he established the American Newspaper Repository to buy some of them for public use. He writes, We’re at a bizarre moment in history, when you can have the real thing for considerably less than it would cost to buy a set of crummy black-and-white snapshots of it which you can’t read without the help of a machine. The author’s remarkable skill with language, linked with his obvious concern for the many aspects of his subject, enables him to share his curiosity and insight in a compelling way. Double Fold should appeal to anyone interested in our shared cultural heritage. It might also provoke some well-informed person who disagrees with Baker to write a book in response.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

harles Frazier’s Civil War period novel, Cold Mountain, was widely acclaimed, a bestseller and winner of the National Book Award. Asked when in the writing process he began “making things up,” the author replies, “I knew exactly at what point I began making things up. It was on page one.” Frazier asks, “Where . . . should we place the balance point between history and fiction? Might we wish to limit historical fiction to a retelling or repackaging of so-called actual past events? To what extent are we writers free to introduce well-known historical figures into our work and have them carry on conversations and commit acts we cannot verify?” Frazier and many other distinguished novelists debate these questions with prominent historians in Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), a fascinating exploration of the relationship between history and art. Barnard College historian Mark C. Carnes conceived and edited this stimulating volume as a follow-up to his well received earlier book, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1995). In addition to the discussions of works by such authors as Larry McMurtry, Barbara Kingsolver and Jane Smiley, there are excellent considerations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby.

Richard White, historian of the American West, thinks “a historian may very well be the worst possible reader . . . because, once in the fictional world, they become either terminally confused or begin editing information in ways that detract from the fiction.” But he points out that in The Living, “in making the character preoccupied with death and uplift and progress, Annie Dillard displays a sometimes near perfect nineteenth-century pitch.” Historian James McPherson expresses concern about “numerous minor errors” in Cloudsplitterbut respects novelist Russell Banks for making it clear that certain historical events have been “altered and rearranged.” Nearly all the novelists represented in this book felt the need to make some changes in the historical record. Novelists, after all, seek to convey universal truths and tend to believe that all people, regardless of when or where they live, are essentially the same.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

In witty, well-researched previous books, London author Robert Lacey infiltrated the closed societies of megabusiness (Ford: The Man and the Machine) and the underworld (Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life). Now, he has also found another choice subject: Sotheby’s auction house, which “has spent a profitable 250 years cultivating the paradox that rich people, at heart, are the neediest people of all.” The book opens with a bizarre prologue, recounting the glitz, greed, and glamour of Sotheby’s auction of the estate of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 5,914 items ranging from her cigarette lighter to her BMW. The ego-feeding frenzy was off and running with a nondescript wooden footstool, value estimated in the catalogue at $100 to $150.

The auctioneer, the firm’s statuesque blond president and CEO, Dede Brooks, sold the item for a total of $33,500. On the underside was a label in Jackie’s handwriting: “Footstool JBK bedroom in White House for Caroline to climb onto window seat.” Other prices made even less sense: $574,500 for the dead President’s small walnut cigar box, $387,500 for his golfing irons, $772,500 for the woods (bought by Arnold Schwarzenegger), and Jackie’s $100 necklace of fake pearls for $211,500. She customarily wore replicas of her best jewelry, Lacey writes, “considering this a huge joke.” Just as mind-boggling is the epilogue describing the sale of the effects of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with Woody Allen, Whoopie Goldberg, and Barbara Walters among those seeking objects with the letter “W” surmounted on a coronet. Loudest applause went to a young Asian-American couple who paid $29,900 for a small ribbon-tied box inscribed by the Duchess: “A piece of our wedding cake.” The next day Seinfeld called for permission to use the incident on the show. Jerry would buy the piece of cake at Sotheby’s, put it in the fridge, and a famished Elaine would come home late, looking for a snack. You can guess the rest.

The bulk of the book is an intriguing history of Sotheby’s from its first auction, held in 1744, through recent times when the Japanese drove art prices through the roof and some of their corporations into bankruptcy. Locked for centuries in a rivalry with Christie’s, Sotheby’s expansion into America wins the day. The book is also a cultural history of England, with its ingrained distinction of class and gender. In 1916, the company employed its company’s first females, insisting they dress plainly so as not to distract male customers. When the American entrepreneur Alfred Taubman bought control of Sotheby’s in 1983, he walked into a meeting where Dede Brooks, the present CEO, was the only female, and asked her for a cup of coffee. “ÔWith pleasure,’ she replied, handing him a sheaf of documents. ÔAnd could you photocopy these for me?'” Robert Lacey interviewed hundreds of people before writing this remarkable book, collecting amusing stories, especially about the longtime CEO Peter Wilson, a friend of Ian Fleming and reportedly a model for James Bond. This is a lively tale, richly entertaining and full of surprises.

Reviewed by Benjamin Griffith.

75 years of painting the town read The journalist Richard Rovere once said of Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, that his fundamental contribution to journalism was his fight for the dignity of the printed word.

Read in the context of our own day, when the relentless trivialization of journalism has the dignity of the printed word pretty much down for the count, Rovere’s statement rings with bitter piquancy. All the more so when you consider that the fight wasn’t nearly so desperate in Ross’s time: that brief window when an erudite little Ôcomic paper,’ as Thomas Kunkel said in his biography of Ross five years ago, could be a major cultural force in a way that is unthinkable now. That brief window has long been closed, which is one of the assessments made by Ben Yagoda in About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (Scribner, $27.50, 0684816059), one of a small flurry of books being published to mark this month’s 75th anniversary of the magazine. I have a shelf of books about the New Yorker, from James Thurber’s The Years with Ross of 1958 to Ved Mehta’s paean to William Shawn, Ross’s successor, of 40 years later, and About Town is one I am happy to add to it. It is probably longer than it needs to be, but New Yorker fans eager to absorb every fact, and every opinion about every fact, of the magazine’s history will not find length a defect.

Most of the books on that shelf are biographies or autobiographies or reminiscences. Yagoda has produced something different: a critical and cultural history that looks at the magazine’s content, how it originated and how it evolved, and at the role the magazine has played in American cultural life for three-quarters of a century. His book is the first to be based in large part on the New Yorker archives recently made available by the New York Public Library, which are amazingly voluminous. Imagine coming across a 1949 letter written to the editors by a totally obscure 17-year-old named John Updike.

Like Kunkel and others who have written about the New Yorker, Yagoda gives chief credit for its success in its first two decades to that improbable genius, Ross, and his finicky concern for the clarity of the printed word. Ross’s genius also lay in choosing excellent founding writers and editors, particularly that triumvirate of Thurber, E.B White, and Katherine Angell (later White’s wife). Other blocks in the foundation, according to Yagoda, were that nebulous concept, sophistication ; the focus on New York; the concern with shifting class lines; and, perhaps most important, the cartoons and other art.

In great detail, About Town describes the development of such elements as the Profile and the New Yorker short story and how they have changed. As to the latter, there is somewhat of a paradox. Though Yagoda rightly points out that the magazine’s intense reluctance to stretch has restricted its short-story range, the cumulative effect is of an illustrious fiction record overall.

The author believes the magazine had its golden age in the decade preceding Pearl Harbor a time in its history when it was poised gracefully between the formless and sometimes brittle levity that came before and the unquestionably meritorious, occasionally splendid, but frequently solemn, ponderous, self-important, or dull magazine that stretched from the Second World War on up to the 1980s. He also sees another brief golden age in the 1970s, when it got over solemnizing about the Vietnam War.

So, though he doesn’t use Kunkel’s notion of a brief window of cultural influence that I cited above, Yagoda clearly agrees with it. Aside from a short epilogue taking the magazine up to the present, he ends the book proper in 1987, when Shawn was let go. With that act, the slowly closing window banged shut, and the magazine’s story as a unique and influential institution in our culture ended.

In the first 62 years of its existence, the New Yorker had two visionary editors and was a thing unto itself. In the last 13 it has had three interchangeable editors and grows ever more indistinguishable from Vanity Fair and the rest of that glossy, celebrity-hunting crowd. To those of us who remain fans it is still the best of the lot, but think what that says about how sorry the lot has become. To be fair, think what it says about cultures getting the institutions they deserve.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.