Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009 - (Page 8)

ON CAMPUS lecture AUTHOR SAVES NEWSPAPERS FROM ‘ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD’ While researching his 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, author Nicholson Baker discovered that the British Library was auctioning off 6,000 bound volumes of classic American newspapers. “It’s one of those things when you’re a writer and you reach a moment in a writing project where you could write about the thing or actually become part of the story, actually help the thing to work out the way you want it to work out,” Baker recalled during a two-day visit to Lehigh’s campus in November. The tale of how Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano, came to brieﬂy own the massive archive that included Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, among others, indirectly led to Baker’s latest best-selling work of nonﬁction: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Over the course of 471 pages, the book chronicles the years leading up to the United States’ entry into World War II through a series of concisely worded vignettes, separated by white space, that were drawn from newspapers, diaries, public records, and other sources of the day. In the more than 20 tons of bound volumes that Baker and his wife later donated to Duke University, Baker unearthed surprising news accounts “hiding in plain sight.” He also culled through documents in the Library of Congress and borrowed some 300 books from the University of New Hampshire. Asked why he decided to bid for the newspapers, Baker, the author of seven novels and four works of nonﬁction, said, “I was in the position, oddly enough, of knowing this thing was priceless and also knowing that it was going to be auctioned off. I also knew what was going to happen when it was auctioned, because newspaper dealers cut out the comics and cut out the headlines of the historical days and the rest of it becomes quarry for the newspaper of the day you were born or the day that your grandfather was born. So it was going to become an elephant graveyard. It was going to be destroyed.” Baker wound up storing the newspapers in a mill in Rollinsford, N.H.—“about three 8 lehigh alumni bulletin tennis courts large”— until he finished culling through them for Human Smoke. Before packing the papers off to Duke, he and Margaret also used copies of New York World to create an art book called The World on Sunday. Baker took large-format photographs of pages from the historic newspapers and wrote Author Nicholson Baker discussed his work in Linderman Library with the introduction, while students from classes taught by professors John Pettegrew (left), and Seth Moglen. his wife wrote the text and places that take them seriously. for the book. “So even if the newspapers become someDespite his obvious passion for newspapers, thing entirely different, you obviously are Baker said the move from print to the Internet going to want to read something that’s called isn’t cause for despair. ‘news’ forever because it’s something that fits “Life changes. Things happen,” Baker said with the way we want to understand the philosophically. “Like the mills, the great world. Whether it’s on a screen or printed, nolooms and things. Obviously, they’re not in opbody knows.” eration any more. But they’re beautiful as —Jack Croft things to think about and there are museums heard@LEHIGH DAVID HOROWITZ “The way to suppress free speech in a democracy is to say that it creates a hostile environment for others.” PHOTOS BY DOUGLAS BENEDICT —David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and editor of the center’s conservative online news site, FrontPage Magazine. He also established Students for Academic Freedom to correct what he sees as a left-favoring imbalance in the American education system.

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Lehigh Bulletin - Winter 2009 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Teaming Up to Tackle Global Challenges Positively 4th Street A Sweet Job From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009

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