Bibliorgasm

I was sorting through random assorted brochures and pictures from trips taken in the past two years and came across one that called out for further research and reminiscing: a brochure from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.

The what? Only the museum that I dragged several family members up from Belgium to see, inspired by a blog post at Curious Expeditions that would make any book lover's heart leap for joy. Which blog, by the way, I highly recommend you explore if you haven't already. If you rolled your eyes at my inclusion of family in the nerd trip, rest assured: they enjoyed it.

Anyway, this museum resides in an old Dutch printing house and chronicles the history of that house, and of printing in the Netherlands, for the first several hundreds of years of its history. Included among its treasures is Christoffel Plantin's Biblia Polyglotta--a bible printed in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin. The house became a center of humanist thought (and of course, the distribution thereof) in the sixteenth century; Plantin took upon himself the task of printing a great deal of current humanistic and especially scientific literature. Of course, he was not simply a starry-eyed idealist. The house owed its success to a lack of ideological rigidity that led him to print Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and humanist texts all at once. The Biblia Polyglotta may have been both beautiful and the product of sincere scholarly effort--but it also mollified the Catholic king. Interestingly, the business was also far ahead of its time in its creation of a union and provision of health benefits.

And it had a lovely library. Behold:



Or, imagine heated humanistic debates taking place here:

Wonderful. And inside are hundreds of books. Old books. Beautiful prints, a progression from the most primitive type to lavish color illustrations and their plates. Machines, buckets of letters, the type foundry. They even printed music:

That one didn't turn out so well, but you get the idea. Also geography books:


Plantin's willingness to back almost any sort of Renaissance project was astonishing. Needless to say, it's a beautiful place, and peaceful--as you might imagine, a print museum in Antwerp is fairly "off the beaten path." The moral of this story is: seek out those nerdy side museums. They're worth it. Print museums in particular are surprisingly prolific and contain oft-forgotten but fascinating bits of the history of human knowledge. Next up: some old but fascinating maps uncovered at an antiques shop in rural Missouri (if I can find them again). Stay tuned.

Extra Credit: A Case for Books

My summer reading got derailed before it began. On my recent trip to St Louis, I decided to spend my free mornings reading at the U City Public Library (like a real person, not a student...right?), and discovered A Case for Books: Past, Present, Future by Robert Darnton.



Darnton is a little bit who I want to be when I grow up. Current director of the Harvard University Library, he spent his career teaching European history, studying books and book culture of the French Enlightenment, and running from one library trusteeship to the next. He also has been at the leading edge of electronic book publishing and the application of academic standards thereto while pioneering research in the study of the book. Yeah.

Despite all of this time spend in the thick of academia, however, he also is a surprisingly accessible writer. A Case for Books is a collection of essays concerning the future of print, the current state of libraries and electronic publishing, and love of the historical and physical object of the book. Some of the essays focus primarily on the state of things from the academic perspective--i.e. scholars' need for continued acquisitions of physical books, the difficulty of scholarly publishing and the major causes of those difficulties. Others, however, concern themselves more broadly with the problem with making information available to the widest public possible, doing so in a responsible fashion, and how to make digital copies viable in a long-term capacity. The final section dwells on the sentiments of an inveterate book-lover, and is perhaps the most immediately accessible for those looking to find lively and informative writing on the object of the book itself.

However, some of the more technical and current-issue essays were more engaging than I anticipated. One issue that I found especially surprising was the controversy surrounding libraries' subscriptions to academic journals. Apparently costs of such journals has been spiraling out of control in the last few decades, forcing libraries to devote more and more of their budgets to maintaining these subscriptions rather than to new book acquisitions--as much as 50% of the budget, in some cases. Scholars and students have little notion of these financial burdens because they can access these publications for free--at the cost of thousands of dollars per journal to the libraries--and consider this access to be vital to remaining abreast of developments in their field. Needless to say, this puts libraries in an awkward position. University libraries may seem more obviously the center of this kind of crisis, but Darnton also points out the issue of public access--if costs are prohibitively expensive, then non-scholars simply may not have access to specialized research, or public libraries will have if anything greater financial woes.

Did you have any idea that this was going on? I certainly did not. Darnton is probably happy, however, at recent developments in California: the state's university librarians and scholars have agreed to stand up to a recent inflation in an influential journal's subscription cost and, hopefully, will have enough clout to make a point. The story can be read here.

Another major worry of Darnton's is that we may be jumping the gun on seeing digitization as a viable replacement for physical books. At first I thought that this part might be a little hysterical, but then again, I saw a recent discussion in the New York Times titled "Do School Libraries Need Books?" Current high schoolers think that using actual books for research is retrograde. Hm. Although we tend to believe that basically any information can now be found online, the truth is that digitization simply hasn't and can't both catch up and keep up with all that has been published to date. Furthermore, technology is notorious for changing faster than institutions can keep up with it, as outdated computers, printers, and televisions in any number of schools can attest. We already know that digital information can deteriorate and that the information storage systems of fifteen years ago are basically archaic today; what makes us think that present digitization is really less maintenance and more lasting than books? This is not to say that digital projects should be abandoned, but rather that we should think first before discarding digitized books (which has happened in enormous quantities already). If anything, digitization efforts should be supported as a means of making more information available to more people--but not to the exclusion of good old paper-and-ink books.

These are simplified versions of the issues that arise in The Case for Books, but they seem very timely and worth consideration for any aspiring scholar, an enthusiast for libraries, or for those who are simply unsure about whether they want all reading material to go in the direction of the Kindle. The book may be, in parts, a little dense for casual reading, but Darnton is nevertheless an engaging writer whose topical chapters are certainly worth a glance if you have any sort of concern about publishing and information access in the coming years.

Once Upon a Time

Few, if any, serious readers emerge into literacy reading the "classics." Although many can point to a transformative moment sometime in adolescence when a "great" book--Steinbeck, say, or Austen--suddenly caused in them a voracious appetite for the most enduring works of the past, they can hardly say that they had read nothing before that. Maybe it was Goosebumps, or the Boxcar Children series; I remember my younger brother working his way through the Magic Tree House books as enthusiastically as I have seen college students devour Woolf. Did you read and thoroughly enjoy anything as a child that you now consider to be ridiculous or a little embarrassing, maybe returning for a second or third read? I certainly did.

An essay in one of my summer reading books inspired me to peruse the family bookshelves for the books I enjoyed most as a young child, regardless of "merit," and lo, there they were on the bottom shelf:


What are those, you ask? A Childcraft encyclopedia set from 1966: fifteen volumes on "how the world works" broken up into themes like "Stories and Fables," "Scientists and Inventors," and "What People Do." I think what drew me to them originally was the slightly musty smell, the lavish (and often funny) retro illustrations, and the sense, in some, that I was smarter than whoever wrote some of the articles. For example, I had a good chuckle over the pages that predicted human flight with jet packs in the near future:


Superior as I felt while reading about technological advances, however, I pored over the fairy tales and stories of famous people even though sometimes they looked like this (titled "How They Bring Back the Village of Cream Puffs When the Wind Blows It Away"):



Or this:


Isn't that a little terrifying for a young children's book? The encyclopedia also included some very informative articles such as this spread on how raised bread was invented:



Complete with disgruntled, mustachioed medieval knight! And the development of anthropometry, the first criminal identification system, by Alphonse Bertillon (really, I don't know how they chose these):


Needless to say, I was not interested in breaking the law after reading that one. Finally, the set included some lovely articles on the great technological advances of human history...including the one that made it possible (cue dawning recognition in child's mind)!

Some of the articles would seem hopelessly out of date to the modern reader; others perhaps less than PC. Certainly parents today would probably be horrified to see their child reading something like this, if they're the kind of parents who want their children to read "good" books. My mom thought they were funny, but never imagined that anyone would get anything out of them. Nevertheless, I spent hours reading and re-reading these volumes, outdated and ridiculous though they were. And really, where else would I have learned about Cyrus McCormick?

There's something to be said for trying to reclaim that sort of excitement for reading, the experience of sitting down with a book that has somehow attracted your attention, without considering what it contributes to your overall self-education or whether the name on the cover is recognizable. Several times in the past few years I've spent days hacking away at a book that I felt some cultural obligation to read while letting more enticing, if less illustrious, books go unread. Why? Of course, I don't mean to declare that all literature is of equal intellectual rigor or stylistic refinement and that challenging books should be dropped. If the next thing you feel genuinely compelled to read happens to be a "classic," then by all means go ahead. But we all could benefit from stopping for a moment to remember that time somewhere in the past when our tastes might have been somewhat less discriminating but our enthusiasm was endless. Can you still lose yourself to a book without thinking first about how it fits into your grand scheme of Things I Should Read Before I Die? I know I have trouble doing that, but I think my summer reading list has inspired me to abandon it for a while and go off in search of something new.

Summer Reading

Since I won't be going to Germany for some time yet, I thought I might start my year of studying books, periodicals, and all things print by indulging in some lighter reading. There is a surprising number of books regarding the love, purchase, collection, storage, and reading of books, many of which are by all reports (er, Amazon reviews) quite delightful. In celebration of my temporary freedom from academic restraints, I'd like to try to make some headway in reading through a few of them:

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books ~ Nicholas Brisbanes

"Unpacking my Library" ~ Walter Benjamin

A History of Reading ~ Alberto Manguel

The Anatomy of Bibliomania ~Holbrook Jackson

Ex Libris ~ Anne Fadiman

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop ~ Lewis Buzbee

Over the course of the summer, I'll post short reviews of these to supplement any bookish adventures I may have while still at home. If any jokes occurred to you at the including of Benjamin on my "light summer reading list," keep them to yourself. Thank you.

One book I have read in this vein is Henry Petrowski's The Book on the Bookshelf. Although he sometimes waxes a little too poetical about his inspiration for the book, most of the chapters are fascinating bordering on making you want to turn to strangers nearby as you read and exclaim "Did you know...?" Well, okay, I had that reaction, but I also have a reputation for oversharing facts. Nevertheless, the history of the bookshelf is actually a history of its accommodation to the design of written word from scrolls to the codex to the modern book. Although we now often regard bookshelves as decoration, or an aesthetically pleasing presence in the home, they were for much of their history purely functional and sadly inadequate for the needs of the day. For example, did you know that until the eighteenth century books were shelved with the spines facing in? A relic of the medieval oversized, bejeweled book chained to the desk. Nevertheless, that system made as much sense to those who used it as our alphabetization and spine-titles do to us today. The history of the bookshelf is not only a history of an evolving technology, however. It is also a chronicle of the initial preciousness, increasing availability, and gradual commodification of knowledge...and, because it's written from the perspective of an an engineer, there are plenty of pictures.

The history of the bookshelf and the books upon it doesn't need to be recounted here, but if you have strong feelings about the "proper" way to shelve your books, or even if you pile them in stacks on the floor because there's just no place to put them, this short volume makes for an entertaining and often surprising read.

A quick introduction

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”

Well said, Horace Mann. After packing up and moving out of my apartment following graduation, the heavy boxes of books that I had acquired over the last four years reminded me of how literally (and quite accidentally, and back-breakingly) I tend to live by this maxim.

Next year will only exaggerate my bad book-hoarding and -loving habits: I will be moving to Munich in the fall to begin a year of study in the discipline of book history. This blog will attempt to document my year of living with books, exploring not only a love for the printed word but also what it means to try to be a modern humanist–intellectually curious, socially conscious, reasonably aware of reality--in pursuit of printed history.