Digital BW, The Print

Last spring Nicholson Baker published *Libraries and the Assault on 
Paper*, in which he raises Cain over the destruction of newspapers 
and other printed ephemera at the hands of librarians and others 
entrusted with their care. He had made his case first with an article 
in the *New Yorker*, and the two items made for quite a scandal. Any 
of the editorial reviews carried on the Amazon site will give you a 
sense of his argument.

At any rate, one of the few bright spots in his catalog of horrors
was the discovery that newspapers, even the oldest of those printed
on 
pulp, had stabilized to a astonishing degree. The professionals, 
assured for years that this was an impossibility, were clearing their 
shelves of the originals, which Baker found were in fact bearing up 
far better than the microfilm and microfiche alleged to have rescued 
the data from the inevitable corruption to which cheap paper 
supposedly doomed it.

Anyway, it makes for a good, if hair-raising story, well-worth a 
read.The point of course is that, to paraphrase Mr.Dooley, acid 
content is a hideous monster. On the other hand, not so fast. 

Apparently in the nick of time, Baker founded an institute dedicated 
to the rescue of runs of old newspapers (one of the reviewers gives 
its name, as I remember) A phone call might just put your mind at
ease 
when you next sigh over the elegant surface and fine whiteness of
that 
damned sour EAM.

Bob Bollini