Hold On: The Privilege of Keeping Old Things Safe

Speaker: Nicholson Baker, Author; Recorded March 15, 2012 - In 2001, writer Nicholson Baker published Double Fold , a book about libraries, paper science, and lost history. In it he documented his efforts to save a large collection of beautiful and exceptionally rare newspaper volumes, which were being scrapped in favor of microfilmed replacements. Baker’s forceful case served as a seeming coda to the era of print, and presaged issues and arguments that organizations like MHS face in the digital age. Why, we are asked, do we need to keep all this ephemeral stuff now that it can be digitized? Baker revisits the intellectual underpinnings of his newspaper crusade, shares tales of research recently done in the MHS library, and reminds us of the essentialness of real, physical things.