A book tour that is more of a crusade by one of America's most popular and mercurial novelists begins this weekend. It is an impassioned plea for the preservation of books and newspapers, of paper and printed text rather than microfilm or computer disk.
Nicholson Baker is known for books dealing with time and memory but especially for Vox, a novel featuring phone sex that Monica Lewinsky famously gave to President Bill Clinton as a gift.
But now Baker unleashes his life's passion: a diatribe against the wholesale destruction of books and newspapers by the people and institutions assigned to be their guardians - librarians and libraries.
The book, Double Fold, has become a rallying cry for protest across the internet. Correspondents to such avowedly non-paper journals as Slate allege a 'paper holocaust' in America and across the world.
Signs within America's bibliophile establishment indicate Baker's book has not only sounded the alarm but won the debate. The Washington-based Council of Library and Information Resources issued a draft report this month rescinding decades of received wisdom by recommending a nationwide effort to save original copies of books and newspapers.
Baker argues that, over the past few decades, libraries have engaged in a 'slash and burn' purge of irreplaceable literary records and captured moments of history, pulping papers and books - usually transferring them to microfilm or computer disk - because of an erroneous obsession with saving space.
Librarians have also argued that the paper used in many books and all newspapers from about the year 1880 will disintegrate - without meticulous care - because the paper is made from 'wood pulp' containing acids that make it turn brittle and yellow.
Among the moments of destruction that detonated Baker's rage and propelled his book was the great sell-off and destruction, in 1999, of non-British newspapers by the Colindale branch of the British Library.
His book opens with an account of the Luftwaffe's bombing of Colindale which incinerated 'ten thousand volumes of Irish and English newspapers' - sparing, however, 'a very large foreign newspaper collection, including many historic American titles'.
'Bombs spared the American papers,' Baker writes, 'but recent managerial policy has not'. In October that year, the collection was decimated and only a small slice of it survived - that which Baker himself bought for storage in a property he keeps for the purpose near his home in Maine.
The other motivation for his anger was a decision by San Francisco library to consign most of its printed newspaper records to a rubbish dump - against which Baker took legal action. And so it is in San Francisco that the book tour begins, and from there that Baker spoke to The Observer last week.
It is a soulless library, with an atrium in which no book can be seen. 'I'm always interested in such places that are not what they claim,' says Baker, 'just as I am appalled by places in which books are a mere decoration. Estate agents have taken to placing them on coffee tables during property showings. I always pick them up, and usually they are nailed down.'
Baker speaks cogently about his intimacy with books and newspapers: 'I do feel there is something special about opening one of those old British Library volumes; there's enough paper there to disturb the air as it moves, and with it, you move through a day in the life of a city.'
Even in response to the ageing of paper, Baker adds: 'I love the fragility too, it's like the discoloured stone of a cathedral; it cries out that it is old, but bore witness.'
It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky who pioneered these sentiments, as revealed in revolutionary studies by the recently uncovered critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who found the great writer to have believed in newspapers as the best reconstructions of the 'polyphonic' nature of life itself.
But Baker charts a more recent history. In 1944 an influential librarian, Fremont Rider - who had worked at the US Office of Strategic Studies during the Second World War - posited what he called a 'natural law' of library growth, and the need to cull collections of information.
The narrative is a thriller in which the cult of micro-filming spreads within the CIA and thence to the archive industry. Many librarians singled out for targeting in what Baker calls a culture of 'destroying to preserve' turn out to have agency track records, or to have remained consultants to the CIA. One review of his book makes a chilling reference to the famous Vietnam adage: 'It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.'
In his book, Baker argues that paper holds up better than has been commonly assumed; that microfiche is an inadequate substitute; that the craving for space is fallacious - and that wholesale destruction in the name of space-saving is unnecessary in a vast land.
He has been challenged on the internet, largely on the Slate site, by correspondents who say he ignores the perishability of paper or exaggerates the 'secret' nature of the programme to pulp and destroy.
Baker retorts that tests have proved paper to be more durable than thought, and appeals to the market-sensibility among his critics by saying that in terms of cost, a book costs infinitely less - per cubic foot of storage space - than a microfilm to maintain in a library.
Baker has a message to the guardians of the paper heritage in Britain. 'The main thing I would like the British Library to do,' he says, 'is just to reassure people about what went where, so there can be no further doubt. I do actually think that you people have a more sensitive idea about how to preserve books than we do.'
