Books

What is happening with books? University libraries now have sculptures made out of them in their opulent foyers. These are meant to signal that reading is an adventure, or fun, or something, but what they really announce is that reading, as it has been known for the past 500 years, is dead. Private citizens have rallied to photograph their own books and to post pictures of them on the internet. Some have suggested that this is a new sort of intellectual 'pornography'. I suspect the anxiety is dawning that if the books are not documented in this way, if they are not registered in the single great repository of all that exists, then their status will be merely antiquarian, home-decorative, or, for the more creative, perhaps, sculptural.

Anyone who has ever been invited past the threshold of my home or my office will be able to attest that I am an owner of books. At home or in the workplace, you cannot not notice them. Beyond their simple mass, what most people will also have noticed is that there is absolutely no principle of organization that dictates where they will be placed on the shelf. I make excuses. I tell them that when I moved in I had to hurry to get the books up off the floor, and that I've been meaning to get around to placing them in their natural order. But in fact I'm dissimulating. I have no idea what their proper order would be.

Or no, that's not quite right. I do know what their natural order would be, and this is it. Arranged in this way, with Strabo next to Losev next to Kripke next to Geulincx, I have brought about what Nicholas of Cusa would have called a perfect explicatio of the folds of my soul. The disorder of the bookshelves is an exact report upon what is going on in my head at all times. This is not to say that I have not managed to carve out a more narrow research specialization for myself, and to stick with it, but only that subjectively there is never any way for me to predict which author is going to impose himself upon my thinking next, just as there is no way to predict which book is going to be contiguous to any other. The thoughts come up like bad old tunes from the radio a generation ago. E. T. A. Hoffmann is like Lionel Ritchie: he barges in uninvited.

One of the enduring problems  with this arrangement has been the difficulty of determining which books belong in the office, and which at home. Now I am a philosopher, and I have therefore tried (I really have) to put all the philosophy books in the workplace, where the work of a philosopher is done, while leaving all the other books, on the things that interest me but do not pertain directly to the work of a philosopher, at home. I have failed utterly, for an enormous part of my holdings consists in books from the grey area, books that might conceivably at some point be of relevance to something I am doing as a philosopher, but that for one reason or another cannot be called philosophical texts stricto sensu: Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique des états et empires de la Lune; books on the history of craniology; French-Huron dictionaries from the 17th century; Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant Garde; Richard Rorty.

So I drag these books back and forth a few at a time, never quite sure where their final resting place will be. And now my wife and I are moving again (her books by contrast seem to be ordered according to true natural principles), giving me another chance to randomize the arrangement on the shelves. Just today I bundled up stacks of books with string, and was delighted to fondle the mementos of my youthful modernism --Krapp's Last Tape, Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk, etc.--, amazed to hold Der Zauberberg in my hands again, all 637 pages of it, and to think, I actually read this fucking thing.

The books look sad bundled up like that. They look like they are about to be sent off to the incinerator, which is probably what will happen to them sooner or later. The incinerator or some gaudy sculpture in my university's 'library'.

During my first year in grad school I had some crappy work-study job in the newspaper department in the basement of the library of the School of International and Public Affairs. It was my duty to bundle up all the old newspapers from all around the world with string, and to throw them into the dumpster after their expiration date (10 years, if I recall correctly). This was 1994, which means that I got to throw away newspapers from all over the world dating back to 1984. I threw away all the newspapers that announced that communism had been thrown onto 'the scrapheap of history'. It was around this time that I read Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal's novel about an elderly wastepaper worker in Prague. He loved his job, and I loved mine, too. I read all of those newspapers, many of them in languages I had never studied, and when I sent them to the dumpster I somehow felt that this was an expression of my love.

I love my books, too, even if with each passing year they are looking more and more like old newspaper. I should not have to say, by now, that this has something to do with the encroachment of the internet. This is not of course to say that books will disappear. But they will become, as has already been suggested by the new 'pornographers', a sort of fetish: intensely interesting to a quirky subculture, but wholly unnecessary for the advancement of learning.

Comments

[Scott McFatridge]

I have doubts that books will eventually become "wholly unnecessary for the advancement of learning". I might be extrapolating too much from my own experience, but I don't think that many people will ever want to read lengthy or demanding books from their computer - would you be willing to read the Critique of Pure Reason from your computer, for instance?

The tangibility of books is a benefit that many people still recognize, I think. Highlighting and annotating a PDF file simply isn't the same as marking up a book. Thus, I think that books will still have a role in the advancement of learning, albeit a diminished one.

[Cameron]

"By cajolery, threats, exhortation, and constant vigilance the librarians of today must guard their treasures against this danger which lurks in the distant corner where, amid his livid lights and chemical smells, the photographer has his lair."

Such was the reaction, in 1941, to the "devouring monster of the microfilm pressure table." (W. A. Jackson, Papers of the Biblio. Soc. of America 35) A similarly inflated rhetoric is not uncommon in bibliophilic discussions of Google Books, E-readers and the like. And indeed it's hard not to think of the Kindle as a sort of 'malin appareil', it's very name hinting that you may now ignite your library.

But many, if not all, worries about the book's loss of stature seem peripheral to the actual advancement of learning. E.g., if two people are discussing the First Critique the medium in which they read it, pace Marshall McLuhan, is immaterial. (One could argue that this holds for the language in which they read it too.) One couldn't seriously argue that a tool like EEBO hasn't been a boon for scholars, especially those outside the traditional centers of academia. The concern here, instead, is that without a proper training in bibliography our's and future generations might mistake EEBO's holdings for 'the' comprehensive bibliographic record.

Reading from a screen doesn't quash Lichtenberg's quip: "A book is a mirror. When an ass looks in, no apostle can look out."