SOURCE: Star, Alexander. “The Paper Pusher.” New Republic (28 May 2001): 38-41.

In the following review, Star compliments Double Fold, but finds flaws in Baker's narrow defense of print artifacts and his failure to consider content value as a criterion for preservation.

In the opening pages of The Mezzanine, his first novel, Nicholson Baker speculates that the world changed suddenly sometime around 1970. He is referring to the unfortunate moment when “all the major straw vendors switched from paper to plastic straws, and we entered that uncomfortable era of the floating straw.” How did this come about? Presumably the engineers had supposed that because a plastic straw weighed more than a paper straw, it, too, would rest on the bottom of a can. But the engineers were wrong. They had forgotten that paper straws were more porous than their plastic cousins, and therefore “soaked up a little of the Coke as...