For your consideration: a thoughtful, concise editorial notebook from Verlyn Klinkenborg of the Times trying to parse through the nature of reading books on e-readers, and what may be lost. It's something we have all thought about, but I think it bears further discussion. Like him, I'm divided on the issue, more so than I have been in the past. In my polemic high school journalist days, I would have said that taking away a physical book and replacing it with electronic text is excising one brick from the temple of literacy, and other such wounded, sorrowful expressions. However, could e-readers make books more affordable? Could they help us share beloved passages more quickly? Could they reduce our use of trees? Could they help create a more democratic, competitive market for writers? Some of the answers are clearer than others.
Yet for my own part, physical books have acted not just as monuments to the achievement of reading a book, but as a concrete way of organizing the landscapes, characters, and stories of a particular reading experience. As Klinkenborg says, the book's physicality is a "constant reminder," peculiarly alive, mysteriously like the presence of a friend. Not to mention that I have great appreciation for the art of typography and layout, the particular makeup--even, if we were to be rather Victorian for a moment, the physiognomy--of a book that make it memorable and contribute to the book's personality along with the author's words. The decision of the layout editors and jacket designers are meaningful, and comparable to the director's arrangement of artwork in a museum or the approach to a piece of music chosen by an orchestra conductor.
If you showed me a page of semi-recycled paper with Garamond typeface and chapter names with dagger-like serifs, I would know without having to read the words that I was looking at a Harry Potter paperback. If I saw a tall glossy page with Caslon body text and wacky Art-Deco headlines, I would know I was seeing a page from the New Yorker. At least in our current culture of literacy, a connection of touch as well as thought that binds the reader to the text. For a dose of literary piety, look up copies of the galleys and proofs passed between Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker to see the amount of work that goes into the typesetting even for a single poem. (I don't provide a link partly because I can't find one, and partly because I want you to engage the blessed difficulty of books and libraries.)
Seeing the Book of Kells this summer in Dublin was a powerful new point in my understanding of books. The library of Trinity College only displays one spread each from the two folios of the Book of Kells, but any page is a calligraphy performance and a display of the miniaturist art of illumination. In addition, the monks that copied the Gospels into these books would sometimes, when visited by a thought, write down a small poem about their lives in the margin, further personalizing the book and creating some of our first examples of written vernacular poetry. Within this highly energized culture of printing from our past, single letters became stained-glass windows.
I have not been awed by or befriended texts I have read online. Indeed, I have struggled to maintain even a mere civil acquaintanceship. Reading Henry James' novella Daisy Miller and Edith Wharton's not-so-short-stories online dried my eyes out and gave me headaches. I was inclined to blame the authors for this suffering, to damn them for their massive paragraphs and lack of pagination, even though the printed copies the authors intended would have solved those problems. I do not have an iPad or e-reader, but I have seen how their darkened screens and attractive typefaces make the experience easier on the eyes. Yet there is no invitation to dog-ear, to bend the spine to favorite passages, to jot colloquies with the author or characters into the margins, to make the book irretrievably yours as a printed book offers. Still and all, maybe we will see the day when the craft of electronic printing matures enough to rival the craft of printed texts.
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