-Caveat Lector- For those who are bibliophiles, there's a great article (goes on for about ten pages) here: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010426016R A little bit: }}>Begin REVIEW April 26, 2001 The Great Book Massacre ROBERT DARNTON Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker 370 pages, $25.95 (hardcover) published by Random House (order book) 1. When journalists discuss their craft, they invoke contradictory clichés: "Today's newspaper is the first draft of history," and "Nothing is more dead than yesterday's newspaper." Both in a way are true. News feeds history with facts, yet most of it is forgotten. Suppose newspapers disappeared from libraries: Would history vanish from the collective memory? That is the disaster that Nicholson Baker denounces in his latest book, a J'accuse pointed at the library profession. ~~snip~~ 7. The destruction was brutal. Microfilming can be done without harming volumes, by placing them in cradles and adjusting the camera to the appropriate angle. However, that procedure takes time, and preservationists have been in such a hurry to save books and newspapers from their misdiagnosed deaths that they have killed them by "guillotining"-that is, by slicing them down their spines so that the unbound pages could be photographed rapidly lying flat. Once dismembered, most of them were pulped. The experts at the Library of Congress and the Council on Library Resources have also guillotined books in order to experiment with techniques for deacidifying paper. Their most spectacular experiments involved a substance known as DEZ, or diethyl zinc. Potentially, DEZ could destroy acidity by creating an "alkaline buffer" in the fibers of the paper, but it has an unfortunate side effect: it bursts into flames on contact with air and explodes if exposed to water. Although it works better in bombs and missiles than in books, the library's experimenters used it as the key ingredient in a facility intended to deacidify a million books a year. In fact, as Baker remarks, they designed "a large fuel-air bomb that happened to contain books." Sure enough, it exploded in trial runs conducted by NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1985 and 1986. Further experiments produced further disasters, until, thousands of books and millions of dollars later, the program was abandoned. ~~ Page change ~~ Meanwhile, however, the preservationists devised other experiments, including a million-dollar project to force rats to inhale zinc oxide dust in order to prove that deacidified books could be sniffed without harm. Together with the microfilmers, deaccessioners, and demolition crews, they razored, guillotined, chainsawed, pickled, gassed, baked, burned, and dissolved vast quantities of printed matter. Baker may overdo the anthropomorphic verbs and slant the technical descriptions in a way that makes librarians look like mad scientists. But he produces enough hard evidence to make a book lover's skin crawl. End<{{ T' A<>E<>R Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the "democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded subjects. [[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard, Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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