Newspapers hot off the press will never set Nicholson Baker’s heart racing. But when they date back to the Eisenhower and Truman administrations, or better yet to the Roaring ’20s, his passion shows. “I love newspapers, but they have to be old. They have to feel like lost time,” the novelist and essayist said. Tens of tons of bound volumes of old newspapers are being sorted and shelved in a 19th-century mill in Rollinsford, N.H., along the Maine border, testimony to Baker’s passion to preserve the past.

The collection, which until recently had been on the shelves of the British Library, includes decades-long runs of America’s leading newspapers. There are The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, dozens of ethnic newspapers and what Baker regards as his archive’s crown jewel: Joseph Pulitzer’s lavishly illustrated New York daily, The World.

“All of these are extremely scarce. And some of them are the last surviving runs anywhere,” he said.

The circumstances that led Baker to organize the nonprofit American Newspaper Repository and become caretaker for the collection are spelled out in his book, “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper,” (Random House, $25.95), which came out this month.

Baker, 44, is perhaps best known for his erotic novels “Vox” and “The Fermata,” as well as “The Mezzanine,” the quirky thoughts of an office worker who rides an escalator during his lunch hour. “Vox” won Baker a mention in the Starr Report after Monica Lewinsky was found to have given the book to President Clinton.

Baker also has written articles for The New Yorker on subjects that range from the history of the fingernail clipper to the workings of a movie projector.

His treatise on library card catalogs and the fact that they were discarded in favor of online databases led him to explore the fate of newspaper archives.

“It sort of stood for the kind of indifference to artifacts and a lack of respect for the libraries’ own history,” Baker said.

In “Double Fold,” he targets America’s great research libraries’ destruction of their newspaper archives which were replaced with microfilmed copies that are often difficult to read and which lack the color and quality of the originals.

The microfilm itself, he said, isn’t permanent and deteriorates with age, while newspapers that are properly stored do not turn to dust and can, in fact, last far longer than most people believe.

Librarians, however, were bedazzled by the microfilm technology that emerged during the 1950s and saw it as a way to clear their shelves and free up space for new material, he said.

“Double Fold” takes its name from the brittleness test that librarians applied to old newspapers, folding a corner back and forth.

“It was a test meant to panic people,” Baker said. “It resulted in $100 million for microfilming that flowed out from the federal government.”

Baker has no quarrel with microfilming if only the original newspapers had been retained. But after they were microfilmed, librarians shipped the newspapers off for pulping or auctioned them to dealers who would save the most important clippings for the collectibles market and then sell individual newspapers as birthday gifts.

The author says the destruction wrought by some of the nation’s top library officials constitutes a breach of faith that must be exposed to public scrutiny.

“They tricked people who love libraries into believing that there was a crisis afoot, and used the money that they raised with this ‘crisis’ to destroy the things that we thought they were protecting,” he said.

A critic of Baker’s preservationist stance says the author is tapping into a romantic, antiquarian mystique that ignores the realities faced by librarians seeking to serve the public.

“If not for microfilming, people would not have access,” said Professor Richard J. Cox, who teaches archives and records management at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Science.

Baker, who first outlined his case last year in an article in “The New Yorker,” says the destruction of irreplaceable original newspapers represents a loss to researchers and future generations.

“There is something about our connection to the past that comes from holding the actual thing that was made at the time – the newspaper issue, or the book, or the Declaration of Independence,” he said. “They pull us back to that time.”

He finds the bound newspapers “curiously hypnotic. You open up a volume and you kind of sink down to one month of life in Chicago and New York City.”

When he learned that the British Library was quietly putting its foreign newspaper archives up for sale, Baker sought unsuccessfully to persuade administrators to reverse that decision. Ultimately, he recognized that the only way to save the collection was to buy it.

“If I didn’t fax in those bids that night, the day before the deadline, they were going to go to the dealer and they would be destroyed,” said Baker, recalling “the desperate feeling of having no other choice.”

To finance his bid, he drained a retirement account and cleared $50,000 after payment of early withdrawal penalties. His wife Margaret supported his decision and helps him administer the American Newspaper Repository, the organization that maintains the archive.

Baker, who secured grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, managed to persuade the dealer who had submitted the winning bid for The World and other choice archives to sell them to him – at a hefty premium.

Baker leased 6,000 square feet of space for his treasure trove in Rollinsford’s Great Mill, two miles from the 18th century farmhouse in South Berwick, Maine, where he lives with his wife and two children. The family moved there in 1998 from Berkeley, Calif.

Stored in other sections of the vast red-brick mill are potato chips, thermal underwear and medical equipment being bundled for shipment to the Third World. The archive will be open to researchers, who will be instructed in the technique for turning fragile pages.

Baker’s own research into the fate of old newspapers and his efforts to save the British Library collection has forced him to put other projects on hold for more than two years. He is now working on another novel.

Despite the personal expense and disruption to his life, he has no regrets.

Baker likens the destruction of old newspapers to the movement 40 years ago to raze the great Victorian-era buildings in America’s downtowns. He calls it “the urban renewal of the library stacks.”

For Baker, the archive he is assembling at the mill is a rare bright spot in a dark history of relentless destruction.

“How often do you get the chance to stand in front of Penn Station in 1962 – the real Penn Station – and by some fluke of fate be able to save it from being torn down?”