Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

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In 1993, I decided to write some essays on trifling topics — movie projectors, fingernail clippers, punctuation, and the history of the word “lumber.” Deborah Garrison, then an editor at The New Yorker, called to ask if I wanted to review a soon-to-be published history of the world. Perhaps I should have written the review; instead, I suggested a brief, cheerful piece about the appeal of card catalogs. I began talking to librarians around the country, and I found out that card catalogs were being thrown out everywhere. I grew less cheerful, and the essay grew longer.

When it was published in 1994, I became known in the library world as a critic (and, to some, as a crank and a Luddite), and as a result, librarians at the San Francisco Public Library thought of me two years later when they wanted to tell someone what had happened in their institution: administrators had sent a few hundred thousand books to a landfill after they discovered that a new library building was too small to hold them. I gave a speech on this subject in the auditorium of the new building, and I published an article about it in The New Yorker. There was a local fuss, the head of the library eventually lost his job (over deficits, not book dumping), and I found myself described as a “library activist.”

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