The prerogative veto which the British House of Lords possessed over the Commons had long outlived its day. A bill to voluntarily relinquish this prerogative sat before the Lords. A defiant Lord Selborne, facing his peers, addressed them as follows. "The question is, shall we perish in the dark, slain by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our enemies."

    The Lords chose to die in the dark, ingloriously, but probably wisely, in that a protracted and almost certainly pointless social upheaval was averted. Yet Selborne's question retains a haunting quality, a conviction perhaps that the same question, in different circumstances, might be granted a positive verdict by even so circumspect and timid a judge as history.

    Nicholson Baker, who is neither circumspect, nor timid, is man after Lord Selborne's heart. In Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Baker expands upon a subject, Library Science, which he had initially considered in an essay entitled Discards.

    Discards examined the physical destruction of card catalogs during the process of their replacement by computer databases. Baker negatively compared the new technology to the old in terms of cost, utility, and aesthetics. He performs the same procedure in Double Fold, this time regarding the destruction of newspaper archives and low circulating books in favor of microfilm, microfiche, and ultimately digitalization.

    Baker makes a series of claims. First, that it is less expensive to house books and newspapers than to convert them to electronic media. Second, that the decomposition of newsprint has been grossly overstated. Third, that the double folding of book and newspaper corners in order to check for brittleness and consequent disposal is a false test in that the brittleness of page corners does not bear on the soundness of the page as a whole. Fourth, that microfilm, besides being unbearable to use, has no more stability nor longevity than paper. Fifth, that key library administrators and government officials are inebriated with technology and have betrayed the repository function of key library collections by enacting an orgy of paper destruction.

    Baker writes with great passion and great skill. Those of us who love books, whose sentiments and tastes lean toward the arcane and the antiquarian, cannot help but be tempted to ignore Tolkien's warning that "the wise speak only of what they know," and embrace Baker's appeal to sentiment uncritically.

    Yet knowledge has a way of modifying sentiment. I was doing graduate research at Orono during the period when the card catalog was destroyed, and confidently predicted that disaster would shortly ensue. Ten minutes after being forced onto the database terminal I realized that I was flat wrong.