When I first saw this book in a book store last December, and began looking through the pages, my eyes welled up with tears at the sheer poetry of the images. It was as if doors opened into other levels of awareness. When I put the book down, I realized that I had been looking at it for over an hour, and that's when I knew I simply needed to own it. Since then, the detail and depth of the images have provided a refuge from the news in the world today. There is still beauty and peace. Thank you, Abe Morell.

Everything Abelardo Morell does is gorgeous but what makes him such a genius is the mudane things he works with. The only photographer I can compare him to is Josef Sudek.

Let's be honest. Anybody can go to a beautiful place like Yosemite or Big Sur, take a view camera and wait for nice light. Instant Ansel Adams; you can't miss unless you kick the tripod.

But how many people can make a heartbreakingly beautiful photograph from a crumpled ball of paper or some peeling paint? Get this book of books and you'll see what I mean.

Some of the photographs in Abelardo Morell's A Book of Books are of great books: A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms, Alice in Wonderland. And in placing these photographs together in this wonder-filled volume, Morell has created a great book of his own. For like all great books, this one makes you see the familiar in new ways; offers layers upon layers of meaning; and pushes you to make connections among objects and ideas that sometimes appear to have little, if anything, in common. At the same time, it is a glorious book to look at, to sink into, again and again. If you love books, you'll love this one.

Is this an ironic jab to electronic publishers... or a testiment to the power of the paperless printing industry?

I read the hardcover edition of this book, interestingly, from my university library. Baker makes a compelling case for why we need paper editions in library book collections. He also dissects the anti-paper hysteria of the 1970s and 1980s when librarians believed "experts" who asserted their collections were unreadable - or worse, crumbling into dust. Yet, the librarians and experts who bought into this fear had not any examples or experiences with books turning into dust. He suggests that the assault on paper was motivated for a desire to make shelving space.

So what did librarians do with their brittle book collections? They commissioned microfilm companies to make film copies of the books. Baker also discusses why this recording system is problematic for a variety of reasons from poor microfilm, incomplete editions, etc. His discussion of how the experience of reading the paper copies has been lost to the blurry, incomplete, black and white images and noisy rattles from the microfilm machine is particularly compelling.

He asserts that all electronic projects are inherently flawed and costly. He ultimately is unsure why this assault has happened: if the object was to make shelf space because of limited funds for building repairs, switching to microfilm has been and will be more costly and detrimental than expanding buildings. Though the fight against technology is somewhat futile, he believes it is paramount to retain a paper edition somewhere. Yet, most ironically, I have found that the book is available electronically. I wonder why Baker has chosen to do this? And what is the experience of the reader who reads via computer a book on the assault of paper?

What a great read. This book truly let's you into the psyche of Baker. Reads sort of like a bio in many ways. Definetly a must read for Baker fans.

This book provides a reasoned and erudite response from the professional librarian and archivist community to Nicholson Baker's "Double Fold". Think that Baker over-made his case against the CIA/library conspiracy to destroy our print heritage? You're right - he did. In the interests of writing a ripping good yarn, Baker played fast and loose with the facts. Remember, he's a novelist, not an investigative reporter.

Richard Cox brings years of professional archival practice and scholarship to bear on the fallacies of "Double Fold". Cox rationalizes the debate by asking profound questions about how society should decide what it preserves among competing wants with limited resources, the best methods for preservation, and what the implications for Baker's solution of "saving everything" will be in our electronic age.

Most interesting perhaps is Cox's review of Nicholson Baker's public statements on the TV and lecture circuit regarding his "Double Fold" crusade. Obviously, consistency is not one of Baker's hobgoblins. He seems to have made a career out of repeatedly contradicting what he wrote in "Double Fold". Of extreme value in Cox's response is his focus on how Baker has brought the previously private library science debate on what materials to preserve and how into the public realm. Although he disagrees with Baker's caricature of librarians, Cox argues that the public perceptions of librarianship and archival responsibilities should be of extreme concern to the profession.

Cox doesn't just do a hatchet job. He uses "Double Fold" with all its warts as part of his graduate courses for archivists. Cox believes that Baker has done the profession a favor by shaking it up a bit and bringing preservation issues into public debate. The only criticism I have of the book is that its arguments are at time redundant.

Nicholson Baker's semi-demented account of his Updike fascination begins from perhaps the slimmest premise a writer ever attempted to build a book upon. He admits that he hasn't even read most, or even half of Updike's work all the way through, and yet he can't help measuring his achievement against Updike's. Which, when you look at the imposing bulk of Updike's work against the handful of slender volumes that is Baker's, seems fair enough, at least if you think quantity is a virtue.

Yet Baker writes so well, not just about the nuances of his quasi-Oedipal relation to Updike, but about Stuff Generally, that we keep reading. When he says that a particularly sarky remark of Samuel Johnson's "merited a shout and a thigh slap", the economy of that phrases reassures us about his own talent; likewise his description of a hamburger as "substantial, tiered, sweet and meaty" makes you want to go out and chow down straight away. This is not only about Updike - although it's very good on Updike - but chiefly about Baker, and his own determination to wring poetry out of the everyday.

Perhaps Baker's real direction, if the manic momentum of "U and I" is anything to go by, is more towards the torrential worry of a Thomas Bernhard than the Olympian repose of an Updike. I only began to read Updike years after I'd read this book, and I find him a bit of a let-down. But Baker has gone on to do some entertaining things with sex, some excellent essays and a kid's book. He has demons far more volatile than Updike's; I think he should let them roam a little more freely.

This eccentrically gripping book will remind you of every all-night college bull session you ever participated in. Baker's increasingly discursive rants about Updike reveal more about the present author than the Great Man, of course. Keep this book in mind the next time you read a really annoying review of an author you admire. It's just some poor slob trying to justify his existence. And that's the real point of this memoir, of course; we all make our own solipsistic uses of other people. If we are lucky, we grow out of it and get some objectivity. In the meantime laugh along with Baker AND DON'T TAKE LITERARY POLITICS SO SERIOUSLY!

Baker has a gift for writing very funny pieces about subjects that are usually dry and serious. Nominally about John Updike, U and I is mostly concerned with how young writers are influenced by the "tradition" of past writers. He's anxious, for instance, about "The Anxiety of Influence." Has Harold Bloom covered the same ground already? Baker doesn't know, because he hasn't read Bloom, and now refuses to do so, for fear that the book will "take me over, remove the urgency I feel about what I'm recording here." His vague ideas of Bloom's argument have come second hand. "Book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought." That doesn't stop him wildly speculating about what Bloom would say, and then sheepishly confessing to some of the books that have directly influenced his own work in progress, such as Exly's A Fan's Notes and Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot.

John Updike, in an interview that appeared in Salon, praised the book himself. "It has done me a favor, that book, because it's a book like few others. It's an act of homage, isn't it? He's a good writer, and he brings to that book all of his curious precision, that strange Bakeresque precision."

This is the fourth book by Baker I've read and it's closest in content to Vox. The Fermata is narrated by Arno Strine, a 35-year-old temp who has the ability to stop time and move around in an arrested moment. His chief use of this power is to undress various women in order to ogle or grope them. He also engages in various masturbatory experiments which involve placing his own typed up erotica where it'll be found by various women and then watching their reactions to it. The Fermata is graphic, lewd, and sometimes very funny. It is both sexually explicit and intelligent writing ' a very odd diversion of a book. I was getting bored with it about halfway through its 300 pages but then read a little more and with a bemused smirk settled on my face, finished it off. Nicholson Baker is nothing if not inventive. Even the euphemisms he comes up with to describe female genitalia are inventive, from "flowerbox" to "Georgia O'Keeffe." This is definitely the most sexually explicit book I've ever read. The next book I'm going to read is going to be something more "normal." This was twistin' my melon, man.

As a fan of Nicholson Baker right from the start ("The Mezzanine") I loved this book for all the usual reasons -- his keen observations, sharp prose, clever wordplay, etc. But what made this book special was the wonderful mixture of sex and humor. When was the last time you read a porn story that made you laugh out loud? This book made me wonder why sex is always taken so seriously. Yes, it's pretty raunchy stuff, so stay away if you're easily offended. For everyone else, "The Fermata" will be a revelation.

Baker's protagonist, Arno Strine, calls the pornographic stories he writes "rot", short for "erotica" but also suggesting a British term for "nonsense" or "baloney". This is clearly a description of the book itself -- not to be taken seriously, but enjoyable nonetheless. Most of the book is a series of unrelated fantasies. Every hetero male will recognize their essence -- man sees pretty woman at the office; man sees pretty woman sunbathing at the beach; man sees pretty woman driving on the highway; man is examined by pretty female doctor -- but Baker develops them in original and witty ways.

The novelty is that Arno is magically endowed with the intermittent power to stop time for everyone except himself. This being a sex fantasy, Arno does not use his power to rob banks, perform instantaneous surgery, embarrass corrupt officials, rescue people from burning buildings, etc. -- all he does is take off women's clothes and write about it. There isn't any plot to speak of, and not much character development. Arno himself is quite believable, but the women he strips, as is traditional for erotic literature, are just scenery. If this bothers you, then look elsewhere; but if you take it for what it is, you will likely be both titillated and entertained.

Remember Sniglets? They started on "Saturday Night Live" and eventually entered book form. They were invented words that described something there isn't a word for, but should be. For example, an "essoasso" is the guy who cuts through the gas station parking lot to avoid a red light.

I loved Sniglets as a kid in the 80s, and now that I've read "The Mezzanine" as an adult, I love it too. Nicholson Baker takes those little things we all think about, like vending machines, and discusses every corner and nook of them, often with copious footnotes that are pages long. It was like reading a transcript of my own trains of thought, but written in a scientific way that I could not even fathom - yet it was very easy to understand. Oh, and it's all uproariously funny.

Baker tries again in "Room Temperature," only it's more focused (on his baby girl). If you like "Mezzanine," give "Room" a try, but this is the real gem.

What's so phenomenal about Baker's debut is the combination of his outside awareness (allowing him to witness his nearly subliminal every day thoughts), and the infinitely fine detail with which he is able to describe them in writing. The result is a terrifically engrossing exploration of life's smallest and most self-intimate moments: the breaking of a shoelace (why one and not the other?), the drifting float of a plastic straw in a can of soda (why do plastic and paper straws act differently?), and so on.

Baker not only observes these every day thoughts running through his head, but provides fully fleshed musings on the pathways they ride through one's brain. It's an amazing technical feat that provides page after page of laughs and knowing nods. This isn't just a book of fiction with footnotes, it's a book of fiction with footnotes that essentially supplant the mainline text. In doing so, they make conscious some of the ideas that we usually consider only in the privacy of our own heads.

The undeniable appeal of "The Mezzanine" is almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't read it. Try it, sometime; tell someone "It's a 150 page book about what a guy thinks about as he goes up the escalator to his office." Not exactly an easy sell.

But it's a fantastic read. This is not just "some guy" who's sharing his interior monologue, it's a guy written by Nicholson Baker. That means he's funnier than you, smarter than you, and his meandering observations are bound to be entertaining. His neuroses are interesting, his thought processes bizarre (but no more bizarre than mine or yours).

So if the "plot" of the novel is "a guy goes up an escalator and sits down in his office," what is the novel about? It's about all of the tiny little thoughts that fly through our head, day in and day out. This is significant because these "unimportant" thoughts are our *lives.* All of these idle wonderings are what make us human and what makes each person an individual.

So walk a mile in Baker's head, and know him and yourself better.

A major disappointment after The Mezzanine. Baker goes to the well once too often by trying to recreate that excellent book here. That first book seemed to avoid crossing over into pretentiousness by giving us a self-deprecating narrator and by simply pouring on the wit and intelligent observations and forcing you to laugh. Here, pretentiousness and self-indulgence abound. The subject matter is just far too personal to connect with the reader and, simply, it seems that Nick didn't try as hard the second time around. If you enjoyed the pretentious and turgid essay "Lumber," then this might be for you, but if you were drawn to this book after reading more engaging Baker fare such as U and I, The Mezzanine or Vox, stay away.

I have read all of Mr.Bakers books, and with the exception of "The Everlasting Story..." (which indeed did seem to be everlasting) have read them with delight. Although he's often compared to Updike, I think he surpasses him due to his wit and his more creative sense of the strangeness of life. In "Room Temperature" we find the antidote, along with his other novels, to a modern world obsessed with speed, impersonal technology and the summational catchphrase "whatever". How wonderful it is to see an author bend his mind and spirit to the details of life with so much talent and fervor. And how wonderful to see that his books, plotless and demanding of full attention as they are, sell so well. It gives me hope for our civilization; it really does. On a sidenote - I am tired of critics and readers thinking he is cheapening his prose by writing on sexual topics. Sex is one of the most universal and fascinating and character-revealing subjects around; a great writer can make anything cerebral and holy, and a writer needs to go where his passions lie. Besides, do we really want every novel to be about rubber bands and bathroom hot air dryers?

Room Temperature is certainly about a father and his child, but there is so much more. In typical Baker style, he examines minutia with elucidating commentary. This, in itself, is worth reading the novel; however, the quality that makes it transcend happens to be his ability to unite the entire book with its central theme: Breath. From the comma, to the mobile in his child's room, to tuba lessons, breath pervades - breath as its metaphor to remember to cherish every moment.

I have never seen a novel so effortlessly and imperceptibly weave a central idea throughout a book. Read this novel for both it compelling insight but also for the extraordinary literary technique.

Baker makes a wide variety of excellent points, but I just can't jump on his bandwagon. This book is half well-researched expose of destructive library practice, half ill-natured mockery of people who are only trying their best to innovatively preserve books and newspapers. It's a thought-provoking read, but not necessarily a convincing one.

Ultimately I felt that while Baker presented a compelling picture of a problem, he failed to offer a real solution. He says that newspapers can be stored in warehouses and that it will not be overly expensive, but even reasonably priced solutions have to be paid for, and Baker acknowledges repeatedly that it is much more difficult to get funding for warehouse space than for gee-whiz electronic preservation methods.

My second major problem with "Double Fold" was Baker's lack of respect for any kind of science or technology. Baker exposes plenty of bad science in his book; the "double fold" test, various attempts at the mass deacidification of books and he seems to interpret this as meaning that science can offer no solutions to library problems, when in fact better science could provide better ways of assessing book health, preserving those books that are in danger of decay, and yes, perhaps even providing digital or electronic records of existing books and periodicals. Baker seems to have contempt not just for the shoddy way in which micropreservation has been done, but for the concept as a whole, and that's where he lost me.

Baker raises some extremely interesting points in regards to libraries and the disposal of books and newspapers. This is an important and necessary read for anyone in the field of librarianship. I do think that there are some problems with this book however. Baker clearly began this book with an agenda--an admirable one in my view--but one that has prevented him from accurately portraying the story. He repeatedly refuses to acknowledge the very real and very pressing space problems that every library in America is now facing. Space is at a premium and libraries cannot continue unabated growth. Baker argues that it is cheaper to build storage facilities than to microfilm books and newspapers. Perhaps, but it is immeasurably cheaper to purchase a newspaper on microfilm than to build and maintain storage that is deperately needed for many other resources. Further, microforming and digitaization provide greater access to resources. I agree that discarding the original of microformed or digitized texts is bordering on criminal and idiotic, but libraries have realistically been left with no option. Money is scare and money is needed to hold on to thousands and thousands of volumes.

Baker delights in depicting librarians as nefarious ogres who delight in destroying books and newspapers in favor of microforms and digitization. This is an unfair and inaccurate depiction. Most librarians regret the destruction of books--for many, including myself, it can be a painful decision to discard a book--but unless governments and universities are willing to spend the money to store these items and maintain that storage area, there really is no practical alternative. Every librarian I know would prefer to have a hard copy of every book and newspaper they use, but this just is not possible. Baker's eloquent diatribe needs to be directed at governing bodies not at librarians. I think he will find that most librarians side with him in theory, but decades of practice and chronic underfunding demand librarians adopt a realistic, if depressing, approach. If he and his readers truly want to make a change and contribute to the role of libraries as preservers of paper, they would do well to pressure their local government to adeqately fund libraries. Until the funding and societal value of libraries increase, librarians will be forced to continue making heartbreaking choices as a result of limited financial resources.

Nicholson Baker's _Double Fold_ is an extended screed on the destruction of old books and newspapers by research libraries, and their inadequate replacement by microfilm and microfiche and digital copies. The book is not temperate in tone at all, which at times is a disadvantage. Baker at times advances his arguments unfairly. (For instance he complains in one case that a chemical used in a deacidification experiment was also used in bombs. So what? There are a number of other example of slippery rhetoric on his part.) Still, he makes his main points very well, and the story he has to tell is rather distressing.

Baker's interest in this subject was piqued when he learned that the British Library was selling off its extensive collection of old American newspapers. He found that for many newspapers no copies may exist but on microfilm, or at any rate that physical copies are harder and harder to find. The primary justification for this was that the papers, especially those printed since about 1870, were doomed to decay into unreadability, because of the low-quality, high-acid, wood pulp paper on which they are printed. (The secondary justification, somewhat more sensible perhaps, was simply a need for more space.) Baker found in particular that American libraries rarely have extensive runs of old papers anymore, opting instead for subscribing to microfilmed copies. Baker makes a good point that microfilm is simply not a good reproduction of the papers, particularly the color illustrations. He makes even better points that the process of reduction to microfilm has been rife with errors: skipped pages, pages photographed so poorly that they cannot be read, many missing issues. Furthermore, the tendency is for only one edition to be microfilmed and then shared among libraries, leading to what he calls the "Ace Comb Effect". If you have only one comb, copied many times, you will be missing the same teeth on each copy. If you have several combs, you may be missing teeth on each copy, but between them all, you will probably have all the teeth. Moreover, in the case of newspapers, there were multiple editions printed each day, sometimes quite radically different, particularly those published as out-of-town editions.

Baker further documents that a similar process is going on with old books. Book paper is generally higher quality than newsprint, so there is perhaps less of an impetus for conversion to microfilm, but the storage pressures are similar, and there is still a scare industry suggesting that old books are "crumbling to dust". And the same problems exist with microfilm, including besides those mentioned above the unergonomic quality of the reading process, the likelihood that microfilm itself will be as temporary if not more so than paper, and the generally destructive nature of the microfilming process.

The book points out that the research documenting the decay of old books and newspapers has been very poorly conducted. In fact, old paper isn't "crumbling to dust", and it is much less likely even to be approaching unreadability than has been reported. Some of the scare tactics Baker documents being used by the pro-Microfilm forces are disgusting.

It's an interesting, passionately argued, book. If at times I feel the passion and sarcasm of Baker's presentation undermines his purpose, for the most part, as far as I can evaluate, his points are well made. Microfilm is basically a disaster, at best a short term supplement to physical copies. Digitization is better by far, but should not be done destructively, and should, again, be a supplement and not a replacement for physical copies. Certainly this book is an eye-opening report.

I'm a big fan of Baker having read all his previous books. I do appreciate some of the day to day instances that make up our lives (I even laughed a lot while I read them -- the piece on peeing standing up at night is quite funny) and love Baker's writing, but overall I found this a rather trite literary exercise in making small details central. Again, Baker manages to be witty and clever in spots, but as a novel, albeit a short one, this one falls short of his other books. Maybe it was the ranchy plots of Fermata and Vox that made those short novels more interesting than this one? In any case, you'll feel that you're reading Baker's real life thoughts as he lights the fire every morning at roughly 4am and that's less interesting that you might think. On the bright side, it won't take anyone more than an hour or so to read this novella, so you can't get too angry at the author for taking up your valuable time.

There are 33 matches in a box, hence the 33 chapters in this book. Every morning (each chapter), Emmett, a medical textbook editor (with a pet duck), lights a match to start a fire in the fireplace. Each chapter starts with a 'Good morning', and then minute observations on minutiae of life from an ordinary man.

Nicholson Baker's prose is effortless and light. He's probably one of the most elegant prose stylists writing today, and he clearly has written a gem with this one. His comic sensibility is sneaky and fun, and I found myself laughing out loud in public places while thinking about passages from this book.

The contemplation of details of life and the tangential fantasies that spring from mundane activities lead to subtle and touching refletions on life itself. This book is, above all, about what makes life worth baring. And the book's ultimate accomplishment is that it bares the beauty of life without resorting to building a dramatic resolution or an epiphany, but rather shows life as is, quietly and truthfully. One of the most pleasurable reads of this past few years.

I had never read anything of Nicholson Baker's before this book, primarily because I remembered reading a review of his earliest book, Mezzanine, in which, as I recall, the whole book takes place in the mind of someone while they're riding an escalator. I thought to myself that, after almost forty years of listening to stream-of-consciousness as a psychiatrist, I didn't need to read it, too. And so Baker was on my To Be Avoided list. But something about this book called out to me and I got it. I'm grateful that I did.

The book has no plot - it is simply the thoughts of a middle-aged man moving about his house in the dark very early each morning as he makes a fire and then sits in front of it before anyone else in the family is awake. And since I tend to potter around my house in the dark, very early, thinking my own thoughts, that appealed to me. What I didn't expect was that Baker's character, Emmett - who is, of course, Mr Baker himself - was thinking MY thoughts, or very often so. I had so much 'shock of recognition' here that it was eerie.

His character's thoughts are not the neurotic sort made famous - and slightly repellent - by Proust or Joyce. They are the thoughts of a basically normal, healthy middle-aged family man. Beyond that, Baker's ability to notice usually unnoticed and unremarked things, and then describe them not only accurately but in evocative language has now made it necessary for me to go back and read everything he's written. I look forward to it.

Scott Morrison