Preserving without protecting

Nicholson Baker

The words conservation and preservation don't quite mean the same thing, though their meanings are similar. Generally we use conservation when speaking of a limited resource, such as clean water or farmland, and preservation when speaking of something rare, such as art or antiques. But both words suggest protection, whatever it is that is being protected. In Double Fold, the book I reviewed here a couple of days ago, Nicholson Baker says librarians have very different meanings when they use these two words.

To librarians at many of the major libraries across the United States, he says, conservation "refers to the repair or restoration of the original object." The object in question is usually a book. Preservation, on the other hand, refers not to the protection of the book itself but rather the contents of the book. Thus, a librarian can speak of preserving a book by copying its contents onto microfilm, even though the act of doing so leads to the destruction of the physical book, however rare and valuable and irreplaceable it may be.

"Reversibility -- the potential to undo what you or your predecessors have done -- is a watchword of modern book conservation," Baker writes, "book preservation, by contrast, is often irreversible, because the book is gone." Microfilming usually requires taking a book apart and copying it page by page. Even if it may be possible to put the book back together in some form, it is not something  librarians are interested to doing, for the main objective of microfilming is to create more shelf space and save money (even though, Baker argues, microfilming is more costly than building additional storage space).

And so, rare books have been destroyed in the name of preservation. But isn't the essence of the book, its contents, preserved? Not when microfilm, both as a material and a technology, has such a limited lifespan, much less than the original books themselves.

I should explain the meaning of Baker's title, Double Fold. It refers to a common test librarians have used to demonstrate that paper is fragile and will fall apart. You simply bend over a corner of a page. How many folds can you do before the corner comes off? But folding almost anything weakens it. You can easily tear even new paper after folding it a couple of times. How well do you think microfilm would hold up under the double fold test?