There is in our town a fine institution of continuing
education or “senior academy” called the Evergreen Forum. Each year it offers in conjunction with
the Senior Center a large number of courses impressive in their range and
scope. I have taught a few courses in this program in
the past, and in the spring I am scheduled to teach another—this one on
eighteenth-century occultism and other matters raised in The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. I have met many engaging people among the Evergreen
seminarians, including Harry Pinch, whose wife has been over the years one of the
Forum’s principal movers and shakers.
Harry
asked me a couple of weeks ago whether I was receptive to suggestions for
weekly blog topics. I’ll take the opportunity to announce publicly that the
answer to that question is affirmative.
My aim is “general interest”—a category perhaps not always or entirely
coincident with my default religious and political opinions. Harry had been struck by an essay by David Streitfeld
entitled “Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind,” published in the New York Times “Technology” section in
early December. Harry wondered
whether this stimulating piece might offer some grist for the bloguiste’s mill. And of course it does. Its subject very generally is the fascinating
commerce between the printed book and the e-book. Yes, I know--but this really is an excellent essay, and you
should read it in its entirety, as I am engaging with only a few of its
implications.
Everybody
knows that electronic technology can revolutionize the reading experience. What Streitfeld is struck by is the
reluctance of the book industry to let it do so. You don’t need to turn pages in an electronic book. However, makers of reading machines are
going to extraordinary lengths to try to recreate the “feel” of turning a
page. Although the idea of an
autographed or inscribed copy of an e-book ought to seem absurd on the face of
it, canny Amazonians are inventing one.
I guess that if you can make an electronic cigarette, you can make an
electronic anything.
But why?
Although
literacy commands a legitimate private sphere (personal letters, diaries, etc.)
the great historical impulse in graphic communication is directed toward the
public sphere. I have lots of
reasons to be interested in “publication”, broadly understood. I am a reader and a writer, the owner
of a library, an expert on medieval manuscripts, an amateur historian of
printing, and an actual letterpress printer. I conclude that all major developments in the history of
publication have been driven by one or more of four considerations: the
authoritative accuracy of the published text; the durability of the publishing
medium; the number of copies that can be produced; and the cost of the
publishing process. The first
consideration—accuracy of text—may take you by surprise; but many early
printers considered the new option of authorial correction of proof sheets
quite as important as the capacity for the multiplication of copies. From the analytical point of view an
electronic text satisfies all four desiderata as well or better than all
previous modes of publication. Yet
many of us resist. But why?
Part
of the answer—an important part—lies in universal habits of cultural
conservatism. “Most things that
exist in the world,” said the great cultural anthropologist E. B. Tylor, “exist
for the reason that they once existed.”
Contrary to popular academic belief the argument that “we have always
done things that way” is among the most powerful one can muster. We have always made books by the
mechanical application of ink to paper—so long as “always” means perhaps a tenth
part of the long history of publication and so long as we restrict ourselves to
our own neck of the cultural woods.
It
is no easy thing, however, cleanly to separate the essential from the
decorative. That is a major point
of Streitfeld’s essay. The
particular thought that captured Harry Pinch’s attention was this: “We pursued
distractions and called them enhancements.” My late colleague and friend,
Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, became famous for his concept of the
“paradigm shift,” a rearrangement of the mental furniture so thorough-going as
in effect to supplant an old “reality” and establish a new one. Such, for instance, was the triumph of
the Copernican astronomy over the Ptolemaic.
But
few shifts were so dramatic or so complete. The perfection of durable writing surely qualifies, and
perhaps, but only perhaps, so does the invention of movable types. But Gutenberg’s technology, however
incrementally improved, remained essentially the same for half a
millennium. Now letterpress has been
trumped by offset lithography, the process used to produce every book that
most people alive today have ever read.
The
matter is perhaps semantic, but I cannot consider the advent of lithography as
a paradigm shift, any more than I can so regard the shift from scroll (words
laid out in a single long roll) to codex (words laid out in sequentially bound
discrete sheets). That shift,
incidentally, has been reversed on your computer screen. There is very little theological difference between a Torah
procession in a Jewish liturgy and the gospel procession in a Christian
liturgy; but you will see fossilized in the contrast two historical moments in
the history of writing and reading.
So
what is “the future of the book”?
There will not be a single future, but many. It is possible to read writing produced in a myriad of forms:
spray-painted on the sides of subway cars, traced by a finger on a steamed-up
mirror, puffed into the cold air by a sky-writing airplane. Some poor souls will doubtless come to
think of a “book” as a fugitive sequence of pixels on a hand-held screen. But how can there be a real book without the tactile ghosts of the
type on the backside of a sheet of laid paper, or the smooth feel and smell of
old calf? And how can you really
read it except with the aid of green-shaded glass lamps on a polished old
library table?
