The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 59

Jackie Kennedy Harold Pinter The death of pop 'Clever and thoughtful, she turned into a whispering How his Proust screenplay Neil McCormick on the demise geisha whenever there was a powerful man around' was adapted for the stage of manufactured bands Book review by Kathryn Hughes Page 3 Feature Page 9 Feature Page 7 SATURDAY NOVEMBER 4 2000 The Daily Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk/review Save Nicholson When the British Library decided to dump a historic archive of American newspapers, the best-selling novelist Nicholson Baker was so horrified he decided to buy it for himself. He is now engaged in a one-man campaign to rescue 'the raw store of history' that microfilm and the internet promise to destroy By Susannah Herbert icholson Baker's naut favourite, Francisco stands copy Argo- San out of from the other newspapers he has saved because it is grey and grubby. He loves it and love is not too strong a word for its looks. Why do you think this is here?" he demands. "And why is it this strange colour?" Age? I venture.

The passage of time? "No!" he says, a tall, bearded, bespectacled prophet deciphering a sacred text. "It's smoke damage. Earthquake damage. This one must have been at the top of the stack in the Argonaut offices on the day of the great San Francisco quake and fire. Just look at the date April 14 1906.

It all fits. The others are clean, they don't have the damage but, this. ah, it's incredible. It is its own history. That's why you need to keep originals." His eyes narrow as his long fingers slide over the pages, as if for just one moment the crackle of flames a century ago could be heard in the cold New Hampshire textile mill where we meet and where his treasures are stored.

Baker, a softly-spoken 43- year-old novelist who has long been drawn to the overlooked and the commonplace he once wrote at length on the history of the nail-clipper took delivery this summer of 7,500 "brick-thick" volumes of unwanted newspapers, flogged off as surplus to requirements by the British Library. The consignment which cost $180,000 to buy and to ship is now stacked on 90- odd pallets in Baker's American Newspaper Repository, a non-profit organisation that he founded in a mad race against the clock last year, He reckons that his haul, more than 100 American periodical and newspaper titles, including runs dating back to the 1860s, features Picture: TOM DALLAL Nicholson Baker at his American Newspaper Repository. His 100-plus periodical and newspaper titles feature some of 'the most important historical documents that exist' the front page Picture: THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER REPOSITORY some of "the most important historical documents that speaking of his old New York Herald-Tribunes and his New York Times run in the same breath as the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. "These volumes are physical objects that represent history, the raw store of history that we have the chief, the main, the principal urban record of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, rarer than most that libraries keep in their rare book collections," says Baker, his words tumbling over themselves to be heard. In the age of microfilm and the internet, his beloved newspapers are also, he adds sadly, regarded by most librarians as Although the grand name suggests oak bookcases and leather American topped desks, the Newspaper Repository is a draughty room the size of a hockey pitch, which shares a roof Humpty Dumpty potato chips and a medical supplies charity.

The Repository has no shelves, no cabinets just a couple of folding chairs, a two-year lease and a founder- who, bizarrely, refuses to read a daily paper. 'A newspaper has to be at least ten years, old before I get interested," he says. "So it's I have some primitive love for newspapers, but I know from having done research that I have to be able to trust that, say, February 3 1934 is being held somewhere, because potentially, I may need it. And since nobody else was willing to do this, I did it. But I'm not pretending that I'm particularly good at being a librarian.

It's just that it had to He shrugs, helpless. To understand why it had to happen to Baker and not to anyone else, turn back 10 years, when Baker was making his name as the brilliant The COlorld, SUNDAY MAGAZINE IN WOMANS WORLD. MUNDAY, MAY 1858 or PRESS PUBLIC THO SURRENDER TO OUR FLAGSHIP, World (May, 1898) Uf and I Baker suddenly altered course. Vox, a longdistance dialogue between a man and a woman who try to bring each other to orgasm over the telephone, was a huge commercial success, launched on Valentine's Day 1992 with maximum razzmatazz. (It's still a big seller, boosted in 1998 by the revelation that Monica Lewinsky bought a copy during her liaison with President Clinton.) aker swiftly followed up narrated with by The an Fermata, unsavoury creep who uses his power to stop time an enduring Baker obsession to get inside the knickers of passing women and indulge his disconcertingly graphic fantasies.

Overnight, the pleasingly odd nerdy beardy miniaturist became America's best-known pornographer, a title that he has desire to discuss these days though he does say, in passing, that he could afford to bid for the newspapers largely because, "Vox did very agreeable symmetry to this: traditionally sex sells newspapers, but Baker proves it can buy them too. Baker started building a new identity library crusader just as the pornography hoo-hah was at its height in 1994, when he published a piece in the New Yorker on the hundreds of card-catalogues that were being thrown out by libraries frantic to computerise. Card-catalogues fitted neatly into Baker's whimsical affection for "little machines" such as the nail-clipper, the escalator, the movie-projector, but his whimsy soon gave way to rage against the "brute inforresponsible for a wholesale programme of destruction in American libraries. When Baker discovered that the San Francisco Public Library had gone one further secretly dumping 200,000 copies of old books in skips he crossed the line dividing reporter from campaigner, suing the Library under the Freedom of Information act to release details of its "hate crime against the (The Library's head was later forced to quit.) His one-man mission a fightback against the assault on paper' masterminded by technophiles in American libraries led him to the British Library, where he hoped to find some gold standard of librarianship to shame his compatriots. Instead, he stumbled upon the sale of the century: with the barest minimum of disclosure, the British Library was pruning the stacks of its foreign newspaper section at Colindale, claiming that microfilm copies and resources" made 60,000 volumes of originals redundant exactly the same argu- ments used by all the major US research libraries decades earlier.

Newspapers printed in Germany during Hitler's rise to power, French papers from the Occupation, preRevolution Russian papers had gone but Baker on a flight to already, London to take tea with Colindale's director, keeping up the pressure with emails, faxes and, finally, a bids. He acted just in time to save the gems of the American collection, which was destined to be bought and cut up by dealers for souvenir editions, since no US libraries were interested. A Library, it did not care that its complete run of say, Joseph Pulitzer's bestselling New York paper, The World, was rarer than a first folio of Shakespeare, nor did it acknowledge that the microfilm facsimiles that it had bought from America at great expense were riddled with flaws seriously narrowed the options open to future historians. The World, for example, is printed in glorious colour, with fantastically opulent hand-lettering and illustrations none of which can be picked up in the murky black-and-white of microfilm. do understand that if you have a reproduction of a painting, there's no reason to destroy the original.

But it's harder to convince them, if, say, there's a beautiful Xerox copy of something, a document or a book, that it doesn't constitute a sufficient replacement of the explains Baker, trembling with indignation. "The argument that you need to keep originals continued on page 9 for the British ROYAL OPERA HOUSE GARDEN 15 16 23 28 November at 7.30pm 61-7 11 December at 7.30pm 9 December at 1pm ONDINE Frederick Ashton Box Office Information 020 7304 4000 Rarer than Shakespeare: The young author of two muchpraised short novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, one a heavily footnoted interior monologue narrated by an office-worker in his lunch break, the other the musings of a father bottle-feeding his infant daughter. Both books pushed realism so far that it touched on surrealism, and both freezeframed the present moment, compensating for their plotlessness by chronicling in loving detail the minutiae of late life the the light falls on the handrail of a moving escalator, the design flaws of drinking-straws that, annoyingly, float instead of standing upright. Then after a non-fiction homage to John Updike,.