The future of books and reading is a touchy subject. It’s contentious, it’s polarizing, and it gets personal. Ask one person their opinion and you’ll get a teary-eyed catalogue of their childhood library. Ask another, and you’ll get an overly enthusiastic harangue about the new Nook.
But in the larger scale of things the future of books has, and will continue to be, a touchy subject in the most literal of meanings. Books are physical; they are solid objects we can interact with. But if you can’t touch a digital text, is it truly there? Are digital editions real, if you can just boil them down to a bit of code and the flash of a screen?
I say yes. They are no less “real” than books are. Like books, digital texts are housed in forms, whether it is an iPad or a Nook or an online archive you access on your PC. They require a physical form to function.
At the same time, books are no less “alive” than digital texts. They change too, albeit at a slower rate, through new editions, imprints, and print runs.
But questions remain: what are these new media, and how does our identity as a print culture figure into it?
In the summer of 2012 I was fortunate enough to take David Whitesell’s Rare Book School course, titled Introduction to the Principles of Bibliographical Description (we call it Des Bib for short). If you haven’t heard, RBS is kind of like summer camp for book nerds. Librarians, grad students, digital humanists, and many others come together during the hot Charlottesville summers to study bibliography in the bowels of Alderman. Students examine rare bindings, study the history of media, and yes: we touch a lot of rare books.
In this particular Des Bib course we handled hundreds of these objects, investigating how they were assembled — their “formats”. On one particular afternoon we were given the task of thumbing through a group of books to determine their formats. I was sitting at a table with a rare book librarian from the midwest, a bookseller from Oregon, and a grad student from U.Va. The librarian was regaling us with stories about her job:
“So the patron walked in, plopped this battered book in front of me, and he said all proud, ‘I would like to donate this to your library’. It was a second edition, 1920s, real nice in theory, but I couldn’t take it. It was dog-eared and dirty and someone forgot their gum on page 34. Our conservator would have a fit. So I said to him, ‘look, I’m sorry, but it’s not in good enough condition. We can’t take it. Bring it home and give it to your kids, keep it as a family heirloom.’ So he did. We just can’t take something just because it’s old…”
What interests me about her anecdote is her insistence that an old, battered edition has no place in an academic library. That may be true. There’s only but so much shelf space in an archive, and academic libraries are beginning to swell to capacity. And a gummy, second-rate copy of Woolf probably wouldn’t do so well in the old dog-and-pony show for investors. It probably wasn’t fit for a rare book library after all.
But I would push against the idea that battered old books like these don’t have a place in the academic library. Walk into Alderman and you’ll find editions of George Eliot from the 1870s. You could read her prose exactly as her contemporaries did. Then go to Special Collections and look at Shakespeare quarto. Look at the book in, and as, history.
It seems to me that touching these objects is important. It’s not enough to see a picture of a rare book. To understand it, you need to handle it, and figure out what it has to say as an artifact.
At the same time, it isn’t enough to just look at the one book. Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” didn’t stop at the first printing. During his lifetime it went through several editions. By now, it has multiplied exponentially in printed as well as digital iterations.
All media is expressive, and all media houses the traces of its makers. It seems to me that any sort of interaction with a text will yield a story, whether it be by Nook or dog-eared paperback.
Annie Rowlenson is a fourth-year College student majoring in English and music.
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