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The Digital Leap and Digital Loss
By Greg Powers, Approval Buyer
Although I spend most of my time as a Buyer at YBP Library Services poring over catalogues and book announcements, trying to gauge how many copies of the latest apocalyptic economics title to order and trading amused e-mails with my fellow Buyers about odd book titles, I can sometimes be found correcting metadata errors in eBook records, haranguing publishers about the importance of sending us their eBook information well before publication, or asking one of our eBook aggregators when their next XML title load file is due. It’s at those moments, when I'm gazing at the airy, electronic future of the printed word, that I sometimes marvel at the historical continuum my career represents.
You see, for most of my professional life I have been involved in rare books, either working for other book dealers ("antiquarians" as the more precious of the lot prefer to be known) or, for a dozen years, running my own rare book business. When I have to change an ISBN and re-link a PDF file to its correct record in GOBI, I remember the day I purchased two leaves from Johann Gutenberg's Catholicon, printed in 1460; or when a publisher tells me they’re waiting to secure digital rights to the images in a particular scientific text, I fondly recall the magnificent 1836 folio edition of McKenney and Hall’s Indian Tribes of North America I once sold, with its hand-colored lithograph portraits of Native Americans, most frequently seen now, alas, cut out and framed on print dealers’ walls. During those years I handled sixteenth-century editions of the Greek and Roman classics, seventeenth century English cookbooks, eighteenth-century French illustrated books, nineteenth-century travel narratives to Darkest Africa and exotic Asia, and twentieth-century literary first editions, among other things. And though I never had the chance to sell one, I did handle a good many early manuscripts. So I can claim to have been involved in most every form of book—the handwritten, the printed, and now the electronic.
But all the while I was helping individuals and libraries build their collections, I was also squirreling away a modest little collection of my own. Most of my customers were looking for the finest, most pristine copies they could find, but I was always on the lookout for books that bore evidence of their past and their former owners. The first such book that caught my attention many years ago was a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's book, The Worst Journey in the World, a wonderfully written first-person narrative of Captain Robert F. Scott's trip to the South Pole, which a previous owner had inscribed, "To James, from himself. Happy Birthday." I remember wondering if James was so lonely that he was the only person who would give him a gift? Was he a bachelor on his own solo global excursion, or a widowed father whose grown kids were too far away to help celebrate? Or was he simply a reader surrounded by the kind of friends who would never think to give him a book as a gift?
Another charming volume I acquired was a copy of John Ruskin's Sesame and Lillies in a lovely Art Nouveau binding, inscribed in 1925: "From Annie Whitman for being kind to her when she fell in the Strand theatre and hurt her leg." What sort of scene ensued after her fall? Did Annie tumble before the curtain lifted, and did she miss the play? Or did she fall on the way out, ignored by all the departing playgoers except for her dear friend?
And of course, one of my favorites - a volume worth a thousand words - is Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living, published somewhat alarmingly by the Eugenics Publishing Company in 1922 and inscribed, "Given to us by my Daddy on our wedding day, Phyl, April 27, 1935."
The imagined stories behind these inscriptions fascinate me, but not all the books in my collection were gifts. Some bear the imprint of owners who were not so fond of them, such as the paperback biography of Senator Joe McCarthy, obviously a supplementary text in some college course, whose previous owner drew a big frowning face on the half-title and added his sentiments: "Welcome to my Book! Sh-t!" Next to it on my shelf is a copy of The Monadnock Reader, a subsidized literary journal of the Monadnock Writer's group, in which a young woman named Suzanne wrote, "Purchased Toadstool Bookshop, June 16. Today a proud published poet." Surprisingly, pages 120 through 123, where her contribution was included, have been torn out. I guess she didn't care much for her fellow published poets and writers - she apparently kept the pages of her own work but discarded the rest of the volume.
Sometimes it’s not an inscription that tells the story, but the physical object itself. One such volume in my collection is a small paperback from the late nineteenth century. Its previous owner, Edward R. Woodle, an employee of the Illinois Central Rail Road in 1882 (as he noted on the title-page), fashioned a plain brown wrapper to protect the book and wrote the title on the front, "Harmony of The Gospels by Canon Farrar.” But if you open that cover you find that the book is actually The Complete Poker Player. Obviously Mr. Woodle was not so pious as he wanted the world to believe.
Another, more curious example, is a vintage Nancy Drew mystery in which someone drew small seagull-style doodles everywhere—every blank line at the end of a paragraph, every blank margin, every page without type is covered with seagull doodles. When I found this book I half expected to see an Asylum library bookplate in the front, but there is nothing but the doodles, so I'm left to wonder what Oliver Sacks would say about its former owner.
But the books in my collection I deem most valuable are those that not only bear the imprint of a previous owner’s life, but also bear witness to having helped shaped that life. I once owned a two-volume set of John Milton’s Complete Poems which bore a presentation inscription to James Russell Lowell from his sister, a gift on his seventeenth birthday. Lowell had penned numerous notes and comments throughout, and the variability in his handwriting suggested that the notes had been made over the course of many years. I loved those books because Milton turned out to be a lifelong influence on Lowell. His first public lecture was on Milton, and one of his last pieces of writing was a long introduction contributed to an edition of Milton’s Areopagitica published by the Grolier Club in 1890, a year before his death. Those very volumes, given to him while he was a student at Harvard, were the catalyst for Lowell’s love of Milton.
But as valuable as those volumes were, I have another that is even more dear to me. The moderately effusive inscription, while it might spark the sort of curious musing I’ve exhibited above, would give no one any indication of the book’s importance to its owner - me. When I was a freshman in college, one of my dormmates gave me a mass market paperback of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. At the time I was still an unworldly young Texan from the suburbs whose reading tastes tended toward National Lampoon magazine and Conan the Barbarian. My friend’s inscription shamed me into reading the book, and I remember being stunned [spoiler alert: if you haven’t read it, skip ahead a few sentences] that the main character is killed in the end. Seeing a writer kill off his creation was my introduction to the possibilities of the novel and of literature, and I dove head-first into the field—more Hemingway, Borges, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Mencken, Dickens… I pursued a whole forest of literary giants, and it is because of that copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls that I eventually became a bookseller. It’s because of that book that I was working in a bookshop in downtown Boston the day a dazzling young art student was hired who subsequently became my wife. My friend’s inscription gave me a career and love; I can truly say that book changed my life.
All of which leads me to wonder, in this age of ePub and iPad, when pundits are predicting the death of the book and the rise of future digital generations, just what kind of traces we’ll leave behind in our reading material? I don’t believe that books will disappear, but the slow turn to digital reading seems to leave diminished opportunities for bits and pieces of the past to come trickling down to us.
Widening the lens even more, I begin to suspect that the more digital our culture becomes, the fewer artifacts there will be for future generations to discover and engage with. It’s one thing to study the First World War via an algorithmically-located list of titles sorted by relevance; it’s quite another to hold a collection of handwritten letters from a soldier to his wife in your hands, to read the fear and worry between the lines of quotidian news and expressions of love and longing, and to read that final form letter from Army headquarters to the wife. One can study the past endlessly, but such artifacts allow one to feel the past. Without such primary material, history becomes hearsay.
I can only hope that for our grandkids’ sakes someone is saving the e-mails from Iraq and Afghanistan, or printing and saving their Flickr albums and leaving the photos in a desk drawer somewhere. Serendipity can lead you to paw through that desk drawer; but is there room for serendipity if you have to search a web page by keyword or load a CD into your laptop, open your photo browser, and select the slide show option? Then again, anyone familiar with Photoshop has long ago lost their belief in the veracity of photographs.
If I'm vaguely skeptical about technology's ability to transmit what is, as Hemingway might have said, real and true and good, I also wonder about the longevity of our digital reading material. Today’s electronic format is tomorrow’s troublesome sarcophagus. The eight-track tape is frequently cited as an example of such obsolescence in the world of music, but one need not go even that far back in history to discover technology's attrition rate. I can't access many of the features on iTunes anymore because my Mac runs OS 10.3.9, an operating system the latest version of iTunes doesn't support - and my computer is too old to run the latest Mac OS, though it's less than ten years old. By contrast, I once owned a copy of Seneca’s Morals that bore ownership inscriptions from the same family from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries--the same copy of the book passed down over two hundred and fifty years - and I could still read it with no upgrades required. These days I wonder if the PDF will last two hundred and fifty months.
Judging by the accelerating pace of technology, I’m sure my fears will prove ungrounded in the long run. Perhaps the printed word will settle into an electronic format that remains essentially unchanged for the next hundred years, although the evolution of the Kindle and sudden appearance of the iPad, BLIO, et al. suggest otherwise. Someone will surely figure out how to leave personal markings electronically (undoubtedly via some login and password scheme) and share them on Facebook, and if we begin to miss the smell of old bookshops and leather bindings, there is sure to be an app for that soon. I'll be watching these developments with a great deal of interest and anticipation, but for now, I’ll think I’ll hang on to my seagull doodles.
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