As you search for mentions of ancestors in newspapers, most likely you won't be flipping through pages, but rather cranking through plastic sheets on a microfilm reader. But what if the film cuts off some important text? Or blackens out a photo of your ancestor? You might want to check the original newspaper to see what you're missing. Chances are, though, you're out of luck.

According to the new book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker (Random House, $25.95), "the annihilation of once accessible collections of major daily papers of the late 19th and 20th centuries is pretty close to total." Since the advent of microfilm in the 1930s, libraries have been photographing their massive newspaper collections to preserve them on microfilm, then selling off or throwing away the originals.

Why don't libraries hold onto these rare volumes of America's past? Baker says the combination of misinformation (the myth that newspaper crumbles and disintegrates after a few years) and lack of storage space has led to the mass destruction of American newspapers, both here and abroad. But anyone who has used microfilm would know it often blurs or cuts off words, blackens or distorts images, and is usually in black and white.

"When you replace a broadsheet newspaper with microfilm, you effectively kill stone dead much of what it meant at its time," a librarian in Cambridge, England, told Baker. Newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s are most slighted by the medium, because they are heavily and colorfully illustrated—nuances lost on film.

Upon learning of original newspapers' extinction, Baker started a one-man crusade to save papers for posterity. He created the non-profit American Newspaper Repository "to keep safe for future scholarship a collection of about 7,000 bound volumes of original American newspapers." To learn more or help Baker's effort, see www.gwi.net/~dnb/newsrep.html, write to American Newspaper Repository, Box 643, Rollinsford, NH, 03869, or send an e-mail to newsrep@gwi.net.