When I first began this new effort at sharing my love of searching out and searching in used bookstores, I wasn't entirely certain what each post would contain. But the upside of not setting too strong of sideboards on what I do write about here is that it gives me the liberty to share and give some dialog to the excellent piece below, shared with me by my Torrey neighbor Chip Ward. Chip, for those who don't know, is an avid reader and former director of that magnificent library in downtown Salt Lake City. I thank him for bringing such an excellent treatment to my attention.
It is, for me, a sad but likely reality that these used bookstores I love to prowl will virtually all be mostly gone long before I am too old to continue seeking them. That reality gives momentum to my efforts but does not change the fact that the digital world is causing the paper one I so love to be headed to extinction. But as disappointing as that my be for me personally, it is simply the new reality that is. It is not wrong but is rather, how the world has evolved in this increasingly digital age.
But before I release you to this wonderful piece, I would offer these thoughts. A computer screen or a digital reader will never create the "Ah ha!" moments I have when I score in a used book store. A Nook will never beckon me from my bookshelves like an old friend. If I pick up a Kindle, I will never open it and have a note placed in there by a previous owner or a news clipping of the time fall out like often happens with my many collected books. They will never have the tactile experience I have when reading one of my John Burroughs books from the early 20th century when I must lift up the onionskin to see the prints or black and white photos. The musty ancient smell that an old tome sometimes emits as I hold it close to my face will never come from a digital source.
Reading is far more than just the acquisition of information or the pleasure of well written prose. It is, for me, a multi-sensory experience and that will be sadly lost in this digital age. So without further ado, I give you The Digital Challenge, I: Loss & gain, or the fate of the book by Anthony Daniels. My thanks to him for such a heartfelt and eloquent writing. It is long but very worth the read.
Finding myself for three or four months
at a loose end on the island of Jersey, a tax haven in the English
Channel, I decided to go into the archives and write a short book about
three murders that took place there in as many months between December
1845 and February 1846, including that of the only policemen ever to
have been done to death on the island, George Le Cronier. He was stabbed
by the keeper of a brothel known as Mulberry Cottage, Madame Le Gendre,
who, a true professional, struck upwards rather than downwards with her
specially sharpened knife, exclaiming expressively as she did so, “
Là!” Le Cronier staggered outside and said to his fellow policeman, Henri-Manuel Luce, “
Oh mon garçon, je suis stabbé!”
(the language of most people of the natives of the island at that time
being a patois). He died a day later, and Madame Le Gendre was
transported to Van Diemen’s Land for life, outraging the righteous
residents of Jersey with the elegance of her dress as she left the
island, never to return.
Among the books I consulted in my researches in the library of the Société jersiaise was La lyre exilée,
a book of poems published in 1847 by a French exile to the island, L.
D. Hurel. All that I was able to find out about him (Hurel was a
pseudonym) was that he arrived several years before the most famous
French exile to Jersey, Victor Hugo; the reasons for his exile are
unknown.
La lyre exilée contained a funeral ode to Le
Cronier, as well as an ode to the abolition of the death penalty. Hurel
published the former ode separately just after the murder, when feelings
ran high on the island; according to the author, it sold out in two
editions of two thousand copies each, which means that one in twelve of
the population bought it.
Having left the island, and now writing the book, I discovered that my notes from La lyre exilée were
incomplete and I needed to consult it again. Where could I go to do so?
Books don’t come much more obscure: there were only twelve copies known
in the world. (It is what the sellers of antiquarian books call very
scarce, without ever letting on that people who are interested in it are
scarcer still.) To return to Jersey was out of the question; then I
discovered to my surprise, and initial pleasure, that the book had been
digitized. I could consult it without leaving my study, without even
shifting in my chair. I was briefly reconciled with and to the modern
world.
Soon, however, my pleasure gave way to a melancholy, an unease, and even a slight bitterness. If a book as obscure as La lyre exilée were
available online, did it not herald the extinction of the book itself,
an article rendered redundant like the goose quills of old or fine sand
to dry ink on paper?
If so, why should such an eventuality cause me to grieve?
After all, I had felt no particular sorrow at the disappearance of the
typewriter. (A film with a scene in a typing pool now strikes us as
irresistibly comic, as if all those typists were simpletons or country
bumpkins.) Nevertheless, I grew uneasy, like a man who had spent all his
life on arcane alchemical studies only to realize towards the end, when
it is too late to take up anything else, that scientific chemistry had
rendered all his endeavors nugatory: that he had, in fact, devoted his
earthly existence to the search for a chimera and frittered his time
away on a child’s illusion.
For books, whose disappearance the digitization of
La lyre exileé
seemed to presage, have played an immense part in my life. It would be
vain to suggest that I valued them only for their content, as a
rationalist might say that one ought; I valued them as physical objects
and have accumulated thousands of them. I am not a bibliophile in the
true sense, that is to say someone who finds excitement in a misprint on
page 278 which proves that the book, which he might or might not ever
read, is a true first edition. Nor am I a bibliomaniac in the true
sense, the kind of person who will eventually be found lying dead under a
pile of books that he has incontinently or indiscriminately collected
because of some psychological compulsion to accumulate. No, I am
something in between the two (as a physician put it when I was a
student, as he tried to explain to a patient that he had myeloma, which
was neither cancer nor leukaemia, “but something in between the two.”) I
prefer a good edition, physically as well as literarily speaking, to a
bad one; I buy more books than I read, though always with the intention
of reading them; I am not an aficionado of rarity for rarity’s sake,
though I have some rare things, upon which the eye of the avaricious
bookseller called in by my relict will immediately alight as he offers
her
yardage, $5 a yard of books.
For the moment, however, I derive a certain comfort from
looking over, and being surrounded by, my laden shelves. They are my
refuge from a world that I have found difficult to negotiate; if it had
not been for the necessity of earning my living in a more practical way,
I could easily, and perhaps happily, have turned into a complete
bookworm, or one of those creatures like the silverfish and the small,
fragile, scaly moths that spend their entire lives among obscure and
seldom disturbed volumes. I would have not read to live, but lived to
read.
The shelves are an elaborate hieroglyph of my life that
only I can read, and that will be destroyed after my death. Never having
been a scholar of anything in particular, my life has been a succession
of obsessions; as some murderers return to their crimes and become serial killers,
I am a man of serial monomanias, each lasting a few months at most, and
my books reflect this. A friend of mine, looking over them, said that
anyone trying to discern from my books who I was or what I did would
fail; for what has the history of Haiti to do with poisoning by arsenic,
or the history of thought in nineteenth-century Russia with that of
premature burial, plague, cholera, and the anti-vaccination agitation?
Surprising numbers of books on all these matters are to be found on my
shelves; and if I needed any reassurance of my own individuality, as the
increasing number of people having themselves tattooed or pierced
seemingly do, these shelves would supply it.
So important are books to me that when I go into
someone’s house, I find myself drawn to the bookshelves, if any; I try
to resist, but in the end succumb to the temptation. If all flesh is
grass, all mind is books: at any rate, such is my prejudice, though I
know it is not strictly true. What is absent from the shelves is as
important, of course, as the silence of the dog that did not bark in the
night.
My library, for the moment so solid and reliable, will
dissolve after my death as surely as will my body. Some people claim
that the knowledge that the atoms and molecules of which they are
composed will survive to be absorbed into the wider world consoles them
for the prospect of their death; and I, too, derived, until recently,
some consolation from the fact that I am not really the owner of my
books, but only the temporary guardian of them until they are passed on
to the guardianship of someone else. It is true that when, in earlier
years, I bought a book a quarter of a millennium old I looked at the
names of the previous owners inscribed on its cover or title page and
thought, “Now, at last, the book has found its true owner, its final
resting place—me,” and pitied the previous owners for their failure to
understand this, and for their ignorance of the book’s final destiny.
But now I am more inclined to recall that I have owned the book for
thirty years; in another thirty years it will be owned, or looked after,
by someone else of whose identity I know nothing, and he will suffer
from precisely my delusion and that of all previous owners. (Not that
this prevents me from acquiring yet more books; and the Rev. Thomas
Dibdin, author of Bibliomania: The Causes and Cure of this Fatal Disease,
describes how a bibliomaniac who was already possessed of 50,000 books
sent out for more volumes from a bookseller’s catalogue on his very
deathbed, indeed at the very hour of his death. Was his death a happy or
a sad one? Do we envy him his continued passion or smile at his sorry
delusion? At any rate, his library was sold immediately afterwards at
auction for far less than he had paid for it. Bibliomania,
incidentally, underwent what was probably the largest and fastest
expansion between first and second editions in the history of
publishing; appearing first in 1807, it was 94 pages long; by the second
edition, two years later, it had expanded to 786 pages, the expansion
in itself a metonym for the bibliomaniac’s problem. A century and a
quarter later, Holbrook Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania, a wonderful and astonishingly erudite compendium of booklore, composed on the model of Burton’s Anatomy, was even longer. Also incidentally, bibliomania is another section in my library, a kind of meta-library, if you will.)
But the consolation that my library
will dissolve into its constituent parts in the great world of
second-hand books is not as great as it was even a few years ago.
Second-hand booksellers are closing their shops and transferring their
businesses online because 90 percent of their sales come from the
Internet and 90 percent of their overheads come from their shops. It is a
very simple business decision.
A bookseller, from whom I had been buying for nearly
forty years, and with whom I had grown old, told me, shortly before he
closed down his shop, that the nature of customers had changed over the
years. True browsers like me, who were content to spend two or three
hours among the dust to find something of whose existence they
previously had had no inkling, but which, by a process of elective
affinity, aroused their interest and even sparked a passion, were few
and were old. In so far as young people came into his shop at all, they
came to enquire whether he had such and such a book, usually required
reading for some course or other; and if he had not, they left
immediately, having no further interest in his stock. Their need for the
book in question must have been urgent, since it was available online
for delivery next day; they must have been late with an assignment. So
if youth were the future, the future, at least for second-hand
booksellers with shops, was bleak.
This was a genuine cultural change, my bookseller said,
and not just the complaint of a man who had grown old without seeing the
time pass. When he started out in the trade, young people browsed in
the way that only the old now did; and so he had been overtaken by a
change that owed nothing to him, as wheelwrights, coopers, or
blacksmiths had once been overtaken.
So who will take my books after my death? Into what wider world will they be absorbed?
Other booksellers have told me stories that I did not
find reassuring—though booksellers say of each other’s stories that they
are unreliable, for as a profession they are like anglers, with tales
of Gutenbergs and Caxtons and Elzevirs and Vesaliuses and First Folios
that got away (book-buyers are no different, of course, and I too have
my stories of books that I almost bought but for some reason failed to
do so).
These stories were of the wholesale abandonment or
destruction of rare and valuable books by public institutions, even of
those books willed by individuals to those public institutions. It was
not as if librarians were merely ambivalent or negligent of the books in
their charge, but as if they actually hated them, as workers in
chocolate factories come to hate chocolate. One bookseller in Wales told
me that he found seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books dumped in a
skip outside a supposed institution of learning. Another found the
librarians of a county library walking over the sixteenth-century books
that they had pulled from the shelves preparatory to throwing them away
in order to make space for more computer terminals. The process is
called deacquisitioning, a truly Orwellian term, as if demolition or bombing were called debuilding; and one of the justifications for the process is that records show that the deacquisitioned items
have not been consulted for years, for decades. A library is no longer a
repository of all that has been thought or written but a department
store where the readers determine by their borrowing habits what stock
should be held. If they want Dan Brown rather than the Summa Theologica, then that is what libraries should carry. The customer is king.
Another justification for deacquisitioning is the
need for space, not only for computer terminals, but also for books
themselves. Despite lamentations over the decline in reading as a habit
among the young, more books than ever continue to be published in every
conceivable field. A library containing every book published in Great
Britain in just a single year would now be larger than the largest
library in the world a few centuries ago; except for institutions such
as the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque
nationale, very severe and even ruthless selection is obviously
necessary. But I do not think this fully explains the ancient books in
the skip, which after all could have been sold, any more than the need
for living space explains the mania for the demolition of old buildings.
Be all this as it may, it is indisputable that the
half-millennial hegemony of the printed page in intellectual life is now
coming to an end. Newspaper circulations, for example, are in
precipitous decline everywhere in the developed world; in so far as they
survive it is because those who grew up reading them still like the
physical object between their hands. Nothing is so weak as the force of
habit when the habits of succeeding generations change.
Repeated surveys show that children
spend less time reading than did previous generations. They instead
devote many hours of their waking lives to electronic screens of one
kind or another: not long ago some American researchers presented their
results at a conference I attended that showed that American children
now spend seven hours a day,
on average, in front of a screen,
whether it be television, computer, or telephone. They asked children at
randomly generated times to use the video facility of their phones to
film what they were doing at the time; and this showed that many of the
children had several screens around them illuminated at the same time.
Would this minestrone of simultaneous electronic stimulation permanently
affect their ability or willingness to concentrate on one thing, to the
detriment of real intellectual attainment? The researchers did not know
the answer to this; certainly, those who spent more time in front of
screens did worse academically, though whether this was cause or effect
they were unable to say. A child who spends sixteen hours in front of
screens is unlikely to differ from a child who spends only an hour in
front of them only in this respect.
People of the book, such as I, not only believe that the
replacement of the page by the screen will alter human character, thin
it out, empty it of depth, but secretly hope this happens. A deterioration in human character consequent upon the demise of the book will be, for the inveterate reader, an apologia pro vita sua.
For we who have spent so much of our lives with, and even for books
secretly derived a sense of moral superiority from having done so. This
is obvious from the fact that no one says “Young people nowadays do not
read” in a tone other than of lament or, more usually, moral
condemnation. A person who does not read—and for us reading means
books—is a mental barbarian, a man who, wittingly or unwittingly,
confines himself to his own experience, necessarily an infinitesimal
proportion of all possible experiences. He is not only a barbarian, but
an egotist.
We who pride ourselves in reading much and widely forget
that the printed page serves us in a similar fashion as the drug serves
an addict. After a short time away from it we grow agitated and begin to
pine, by which time anything will do: a bus timetable, a telephone
directory, an operating manual for a washing machine. “They say that
life’s the thing,” said Logan Pearsall Smith, a littérateur of
distinction but now almost forgotten, “but I prefer reading.” For how
many of us—avid readers, that is—has the printed page been a means of
avoidance of the sheer messiness, the intractability, of life, to no
other purpose than the avoidance itself? It is for us what the telenovela is
for the inhabitant of the Latin American barrio, a distraction and a
consolation. We gorge on the printed page to distract ourselves from
ourselves: the great business of Doctor Johnson’s life, according to
Boswell and Johnson himself. Or we read to establish a sense of
superiority, or at least to ward off a sense of inferiority: “What, you
haven’t read Ulysses?”
Once, staying overnight at an airport hotel in Los
Angeles, I found myself without a book. How this happened I can no
longer recall; it was most unusual, for by far the most useful lesson
that life has taught me, and one that I almost always heed, is never to
go anywhere without a book. (In Africa, I have found that reading a book
is an excellent way of overcoming officials’ obstructionism. They
obstruct in order to extract a bribe to remove the obstruction; but once
they see you settled down for the long term, as it were, with a fat
book, Moby-Dick, say, they eventually recognize defeat. Indeed, I owe it to African officialdom that I have read Moby-Dick; I might otherwise never have got through it.)
Reduced in my Los Angeles room to a choice between
television and the yellow pages—no doubt now also on the verge of
extinction—I chose the yellow pages, and there discovered just how
unusual my obsession with books was. I looked up bookstores, and found
no more than half a page. Teeth-whitening dentists, on the other hand,
who promised a completely renewed existence to their clients, a
confident smile being the secret of success, and success of happiness,
took up more than twenty pages. Not poets, then, but teeth-whitening
dentists, are now the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
An intellectual might be defined as
someone who elaborates justifications for his own tastes and
preferences, as metaphysics was once defined as the finding of bad
reasons for what we all believe on instinct. And so the reader of books
soon finds reasons for the supposed superiority of the printed page over
the screen of the electronic device: for nothing stimulates the brain
quite like the need for rationalization. The dullest of minds, I have
found, works at the speed of light when a rationalization is needed.
The page of a book is aesthetically pleasing as a screen
is not: except that many pages of many books are not aesthetically
pleasing. It is easier to retrace one’s steps in a book than on a
screen: but only for those who are not as technologically adept as the
young now are. It is easier to annotate a page of a book than a page of a
screen: but the same objection applies. It is easier to concentrate
long and seriously on a book than on a screen: but there is no intrinsic
reason to the medium why this should be so, any more than there is, pace the
late Neil Postman, why television should be given over to vulgarity and
trivia. We bibliophiles are reduced to finding bad reasons for what we
believe on instinct.
I asked one of my publishers (a man in a small way of
business, as all my publishers are) whether he thought the book would
survive. He, after all, was more interested in the question than most,
and self-interest—among businessmen, not among academics—is a powerful
stimulus to the search for truth. He said that he thought that it would,
though such genres as pulp fiction and airport novels would soon be
entirely digitized. Books of greater or exceptional content, or with
high aesthetic value, would continue to be published. I immediately felt
relieved, and told him that in these matters he was my guru: his
prognostications assumed in my mind the status of fact. But he warned me
against placing my faith in him, for most of his predictions had turned
out to be exactly the opposite of what happened. “Then you shall be my urug, my mirror-image guru,” I said.
I saw at once that the concept of an urug was a
useful one, for many are the experts in various fields—economics, for
example—who are valuable as guides to reality, provided that you take
them as urugs and not as gurus. The problem lies in deciding which is which.
Whether the book survives or not, I am firmly of the opinion that it ought to
survive, and nothing will convince me otherwise. The heart has its
beliefs that evidence knows not of. For me, to browse in a bookshop,
especially a second-hand one, will forever be superior to browsing on
the internet precisely because chance plays a much larger part in it.
There are few greater delights than entirely by chance to come across
something not only fascinating in itself, but that establishes a quite
unexpected connection with something else. The imagination is stimulated
in a way that the more logical connections of the Internet cannot
match; the Internet will make people literal-minded.
There are stages on a trade’s road to
extinction, and the second-hand book trade is no exception. It is now
overwhelmingly conducted online, and small towns of my acquaintance that
used to have several such bookshops now have none. The métier of the
book-searcher is no longer in existence, and the immense arcane
knowledge that book-searchers once had is now quite useless. Instead
there are sites that claim to have 100,000,000 volumes for sale, and
this, of course, is an inestimable boon to those who need, or want, a
certain book urgently. At the touch of a few keys, a book that once
would have taken a lifetime to find will be delivered to your door
tomorrow or the next day.
But every gain is also a loss. The pleasure of a book
delivered in this fashion (though it exists, of course) is not as great,
not as intense, as that of one found by chance, unexpectedly. Perhaps
there is a wider lesson here: you cannot have it all, you cannot
reconcile all possible sources of pleasure. You cannot have the joys of
serendipity and those of the convenience of immediate access to
everything. Furthermore, it seems that you cannot choose between them as
technology advances. To adapt Marx’s dictum about history slightly, Man
makes his own pleasures, but not just as he pleases. To refuse to use
the new technology in the hope of preserving old pleasures will not work
because to do so would be no more authentic or honest than Marie
Antoinette playing shepherdess. The regret is genuine; the refusal is
not.
