24-578: The American Newspaper Repository is a charity whose purpose is to collect and preserve original copies of American newspapers. It was founded in 1999 by the author Nicholson Baker when he learnt that the British Library was disposing of its collection of historic American newspapers. He cashed in his retirement fund to successfully bid for the collection at auction . With support from the Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation ,
48-508: A letter to the editor bemoaning what he perceived as the inaccuracy of Baker's review. Here is Baker's rebuttal: Ken Auletta wrote a thought-provoking book, and I recorded several thoughts provoked. It’s a book review, not a bouillon cube. I don’t “imply” or “suggest” that the author agrees with the people he quotes. There is indeed an absence of warmth in this chronicle of Google as “dreaded disruptor,” but it’s an impartial chilliness, extending in all directions. In 2014, Baker spent 28 days as
72-437: A name for himself with the novels The Mezzanine (1988) and Room Temperature (1990). Both novels have for the most part a very limited time span. The Mezzanine occurs over the course of an escalator journey and Room Temperature happens while a father feeds his baby daughter. U and I: A True Story (1991) is a non-fiction study of how a reader engages with an author's work. It is partly about Baker's appreciation for
96-411: A pay-per-minute chat line. The book was Baker's first New York Times bestseller and Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to President Bill Clinton when they were having an affair. In Vox , Baker coined the word femalia . The Fermata (1994) also addresses erotic life and fantasy. The protagonist Arno Strine likes to stop time and take off women's clothes. The work proved controversial with critics. It
120-529: A substitute teacher in some Maine public schools as research for his 2016 book Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids . Baker tried to find out "what life in the classroom is really like." He also wrote about the experience for The New York Times Magazine . Baker wrote a cover story for New York Magazine in January 2021 investigating the COVID-19 lab leak theory and expressing his belief in
144-517: A total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox , The Fermata and House of Holes . Baker also writes non-fiction books. U and I: A True Story , about his relationship with John Updike , was published in 1991. He then wrote about the American library system in his 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper , for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and
168-500: A variety of everyday phenomena, such as how paper milk cartons replaced glass milk bottles, the miracle of perforation, and the buoyant nature of plastic straws; and of everyday objects such as vending machines, paper towel dispensers, and popcorn poppers. The novel was praised for its originality and linguistic virtuosity. Critics cited Baker's trademark style of highly descriptive, focused prose, his "fierce attention to detail," and his delight in portraying discrete slices of time within
192-641: Is an excellent archive of high quality rotogravure photographs which appeared in these periodicals. Other unusual formats include the first crosswords , needlepoint patterns, sheet music and full color reproductions of paintings of the period. Nicholson Baker Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness . Out of
216-590: Is composed of dialogue between two old high school friends, Jay and Ben, who discuss Jay's plans to assassinate President George W. Bush . Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008) is a history of World War II that questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid the war at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler's unforgiving actions. It consists largely of official government transcripts and other documents from
240-730: The Calw Hermann Hesse Prize for the German translation. A pacifist , he wrote Human Smoke (2008) about the buildup to World War II . Baker has published articles in Harper's Magazine , the London Review of Books and The New Yorker , among other periodicals. Baker created the American Newspaper Repository in 1999. He has also written about and edited Misplaced Pages . Nicholson Baker
264-505: The Duke University Libraries , in 2004. The contents include runs of over a hundred different periodicals from between 1852 and 2004 including: In total, there are about six thousand bound volumes and eleven thousand individual and bundled items. These include first printings of work by numerous famous authors such as H. L. Mencken , Mark Twain , Dorothy Parker , Robert Frost and Rudyard Kipling . The collection
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#1732786596907288-709: The repository was established in a building in Salmon Falls Mill Historic District in Rollinsford, New Hampshire . While serving as a director, Baker researched and wrote Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper about the way in which other library institutions were destroying rather than preserving such originals. The collection was transferred to the care of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, part of
312-679: The House of Holes through such techniques as tumbling through a clothes dryer or through a drinking straw. Baker is a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, eliminating card catalogs, and destroying old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm . In 1997, Baker received
336-495: The July 24, 2000, issue of The New Yorker , under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." The exhaustively researched work (there are 63 pages of endnotes and 18 pages of references in the paperback edition) details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and 1990s. The 2004 novel Checkpoint
360-500: The San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts. In 1999, Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository , to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries. In 2001, he published Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper about preservation, newspapers, and the American library system. An excerpt first appeared in
384-596: The UK on April 10, 2008. The Anthologist (2009) is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet, who is attempting to write an introduction to a poetry anthology. Distracted by problems in his life, he is unable to begin writing, and instead ruminates on poets and poetry throughout history. Also in 2009, Baker reviewed Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World as We Know It in the New York Times. Auletta responded by sending
408-571: The end of the book, there is a multi-page footnote on the subject of footnotes themselves. The Mezzanine is essentially plotless, a stream-of-consciousness fiction that examines in detail the lunch-hour activities of young office worker Howie, whose simple lunch (popcorn, hot dog, cookie and milk) and purchase of a new pair of shoelaces are contrasted with his reading of a paperback edition of Marcus Aurelius 's Meditations . Baker's digressive novel, partly composed of extensive footnotes of up to several pages in length, follows Howie's contemplations of
432-411: The frame of mundane existence. The Mezzanine created the genre of digressive, annotational metafiction for which Baker is best known, and of which he may be the boldest representative. The academic website eNotes.com remarks that "Like Proust , [Baker] makes the personal significant." New Yorker writer Laura Miller praised Baker's "dazzling descriptive powers married to a passionate enthusiasm for
456-491: The novel, however, is taken up with the thoughts that run through a person's mind in any given few moments, and the ideas that might result if they were given the time to think these thoughts through to their conclusions. The Mezzanine tells this story through the extensive use of footnotes—some of them comprising the bulk of the page—as the narrator travels through his own mind and past. The footnotes are quite detailed and sometimes diverge into multiple levels of abstraction. Near
480-436: The theory’s plausibility. The Mezzanine The Mezzanine (1988) is the first novel by American writer Nicholson Baker . It narrates what goes through a man's mind during a modern lunch break. On the surface, the novel deals with a man's lunchtime trip up an escalator in the mezzanine of the office building where he works (a building based on Baker's recollections of Rochester's Midtown Plaza ). The substance of
504-539: The time. He suggests that the pacifists were correct in their views. In March 2008, Baker reviewed John Broughton's Misplaced Pages: The Missing Manual in the New York Review of Books . In the review, Baker described Misplaced Pages's beginnings, its culture, and his own editing activities under the username "Wageless". His article "How I fell in love with Misplaced Pages" was published in The Guardian newspaper in
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#1732786596907528-637: The work of John Updike and partly a self-exploration. Rather than giving a traditional literary analysis, Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point. All of the Updike quotations used are presented as coming from memory alone, and many are inaccurate, with correct versions and Baker's (later) commentary on the inaccuracies. Critics group together Vox , The Fermata and House of Holes since they are all erotic novels. Vox (1992) consists of an episode of phone sex between two young single people on
552-554: Was also a bestseller . House of Holes (2011) is about a fantastical place where all sexual perversions and fetishes are permitted. It is a collection of stories, more or less connected to each other. The novellas are erotic in the sense of Giovanni Boccaccio 's Decameron . The titular House of Holes is a fantasy sex resort in which people can engage in absurd sexual practices, such as groin transference and sex with trees. Akin to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , people enter
576-647: Was born in 1957 in New York City . He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in English from Haverford College . Baker describes himself as an atheist, although he occasionally visits Quaker meetings. Baker says he has "always had pacifist leanings." Baker met his wife, Margaret Brentano, in college; they live in Maine and have two grown children. Baker established
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