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Vandals in the Stacks?: A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries (Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science) by Richard J. Cox
Libraries and archives have violated their public trust, argues Nicholson Baker in his controversial book Double Fold, by destroying traditional books, newspapers, and other paper-based collections. Baker's powerful and persuasive book is wrong and misleading, and Cox critiques it point by point, questioning his research, his assumptions, and his arguments about why and how newspapers, books, and other collections are selected and maintained.Double Fold, which reads like a history of libraries and archives, is not a history at all, but a journalistic account that is often based on fanciful and far-flung assertions and weak data. The present book provides an opportunity to understand how libraries and archives view their societal mandate, the nature of their preservation and documentary functions, and the complex choices and decisions that librarians and archivists face. Libraries and archives are not simple warehouses for the storage of objects to be occasionally called upon by a scholar, but they play vital roles in determining and shaping a society's knowledge and documentation.
Hardcover
First published August 30, 2002
86 people want to read
About the author
Richard J. Cox
28 books3 followersRichard J. Cox is a professor and faculty member of the School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 21, 2021
Nicholson Baker could hardly have wished for a poorer response to Double Fold. "Vandals in the Stacks?" is ostensibly a reply to Baker's book, but very little of it is actually spent refuting Double Fold's theses (though Baker himself is mentioned almost in every paragraph). Instead, Cox goes off on all sorts of different tangents (including an entire chapter of his own professional autobiography), whose only point seems to be that these are complex issues which Baker hadn't considered in Double Fold. Of course he hadn't, since they're completely irrelevant to the topic of Baker's book. "Vandals in the Stacks?" is fairly short at 200 pages, but it's so dull and devoid of content that reading it is a real chore.
To the extent that "Vandals in the Stacks?" is actually a refutation of Double Fold, Cox's main point, which he repeats almost like a mantra on every page, is that libraries simply cannot keep copies of every single publication. According to Cox, it's literally impossible, absurd, inconceivable, to ask US libraries to keep even a single copy of each historical US newspaper, since there are so many newpapers that the country is not big enough to store them and if you brought them all into one place, the pile of bound volumes would sink into the earth and blot out the sun.
To this, my answer is, "are you f*****g kidding me??" Cox already actually provides a brief refutation to his argument himself when he mentions in passing that Austrian libraries have very little microfilm and mostly store newspapers in the original edition. It would have done Cox well to refer to the world outside North America for more than one sentence in the entire book (though Baker is unfortunately quite US-centric as well). The truth is that European libraries are generally managing the "impossible" task of storing all the domestic newspaper production on paper quite well. Slovenia is the example I'm most familiar with, so I checked a bunch of different 19th and early 20th century Slovenian newspapers and magazines at the online bibliographical database ("COBISS"). Every single publication I checked is preserved in the entire print run in at least two libraries, and in an incomplete print run in at least five more libraries in the country. Somehow, a country of 2 million, with a GDP per capita little over half of that of the US, has achieved something that the Library of Congress found inconceivable. (By contrast, the New York "World", one of the biggest American newspapers at the turn of the 20th century, had been discarded, and usually trashed, by every single US library, until in 1999 Nicholson Baker managed to save the last complete print run stored in any institution in the world.)
I guess "Vandals in the Stacks?" is one of those "it can only happen in America" things. Instead of fighting the mindset which can find enough money for thousands of nuclear missiles and fighter jets, but not enough for a few warehouses to store newspapers, Cox embraces and defends it unquestioningly. Of course, he could simply argue that libraries would love to store one print run of each newspaper, but the government refuses to provide the necessary funding (though he doesn't argue this). My response to this line of argument is: read Baker's book. Double Fold provides numerous examples of librarians coaxing millions of dollars from Congress and private foundation for half-baked projects like microfilming and deacidification which probably ended up doing more harm than good. Getting sufficient funding for a proper newspaper repository would have required a fraction of the energy and the lobbying which librarians invested into microfilming. If US libraries are trashing extremely rare books and newspapers, it's not because they can't keep them - it's because they have decided well in advance that they simply don't want to.
To the extent that "Vandals in the Stacks?" is actually a refutation of Double Fold, Cox's main point, which he repeats almost like a mantra on every page, is that libraries simply cannot keep copies of every single publication. According to Cox, it's literally impossible, absurd, inconceivable, to ask US libraries to keep even a single copy of each historical US newspaper, since there are so many newpapers that the country is not big enough to store them and if you brought them all into one place, the pile of bound volumes would sink into the earth and blot out the sun.
To this, my answer is, "are you f*****g kidding me??" Cox already actually provides a brief refutation to his argument himself when he mentions in passing that Austrian libraries have very little microfilm and mostly store newspapers in the original edition. It would have done Cox well to refer to the world outside North America for more than one sentence in the entire book (though Baker is unfortunately quite US-centric as well). The truth is that European libraries are generally managing the "impossible" task of storing all the domestic newspaper production on paper quite well. Slovenia is the example I'm most familiar with, so I checked a bunch of different 19th and early 20th century Slovenian newspapers and magazines at the online bibliographical database ("COBISS"). Every single publication I checked is preserved in the entire print run in at least two libraries, and in an incomplete print run in at least five more libraries in the country. Somehow, a country of 2 million, with a GDP per capita little over half of that of the US, has achieved something that the Library of Congress found inconceivable. (By contrast, the New York "World", one of the biggest American newspapers at the turn of the 20th century, had been discarded, and usually trashed, by every single US library, until in 1999 Nicholson Baker managed to save the last complete print run stored in any institution in the world.)
I guess "Vandals in the Stacks?" is one of those "it can only happen in America" things. Instead of fighting the mindset which can find enough money for thousands of nuclear missiles and fighter jets, but not enough for a few warehouses to store newspapers, Cox embraces and defends it unquestioningly. Of course, he could simply argue that libraries would love to store one print run of each newspaper, but the government refuses to provide the necessary funding (though he doesn't argue this). My response to this line of argument is: read Baker's book. Double Fold provides numerous examples of librarians coaxing millions of dollars from Congress and private foundation for half-baked projects like microfilming and deacidification which probably ended up doing more harm than good. Getting sufficient funding for a proper newspaper repository would have required a fraction of the energy and the lobbying which librarians invested into microfilming. If US libraries are trashing extremely rare books and newspapers, it's not because they can't keep them - it's because they have decided well in advance that they simply don't want to.
November 22, 2007
A crucial companion to Double Fold by Nicholson Baker. You can't read this without having read the other first, and although DF was intended to stand by itself, its many flaws are exposed here.
October 12, 2011
Egads! Books and articles in my field are so poorly written.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews