The Odd Book

A new year, a new decade, and the twenty-first century is fully underway. What has crept up on me this year is a new sense of the digital age’s full weight. There’s been enough of this sort of reflection about, surely. If my case is any different, it is because it is not about the tremulous future of the book. Sure, I am struck by the relatively frequent Kindle sightings I find myself making as I walk back up the aisle on one flight after another. But those Kindles are only leading to more reading of books, to judge by recent reports in the New York Times.

What I want to consider is far more of a physical sense that is changing the nature, for me, of the printed book. It is as if my body has become attuned, well ahead of my mind, to changes in the material culture of my way of working. So I find myself suddenly aware, in a way that I have not experienced before, the weight of a book that I have picked up. It can seem unduly heavy. Compared to what? I cannot remember thinking of books as having a particular weight. Books were thick or thin, certainly. Yet their weight was, well, immaterial. 

Sure, to travel meant to decide what and how many books to take along. It was liberating to learn at a young age that books picked up while travelling could be mailed home. But now I find myself conscious of the weight in a different way, as if to wonder if such weight is justified, whether the book be 300 or 600 pages. This sense of heaviness must be, I realize on a moment’s reflection, in comparison to the very bearable lightness of being that possesses the digital texts that I am increasingly consulting and reading online. This is the weightlessness of Lexis and Westlaw, in the legal profession, and the millions of journal articles in academic work. But beyond that is emerging the shadow of some 10 million books that Google is moving toward making available. The weight of this knowledge amounts to no more than the laptop in my bag, at something less than an Olivetti portable typewriter.

If I am not yet reading books on my computer or a Kindle, I can still see how the book has been transformed by this new media. It can seem like an ecological and sentimental extravagance to sit making notes in the margin of a book, when I will later sit at the computer doing the hard work of working out a response, checking the originals of the quotes cited in the book. Now this ability to so readily zero in on a quote or an idea, against the weight of pages that might otherwise be thumbed through, is not what’s new. That was already what readers of early books used indexes and concordances to do. What’s new is mainly the scale and speed of searching across so many books, if no less importantly a matter of potentially so many more readers able to search those many works. 

It is worth recalling that worries over a descent into superficial forms of reading have come up before. Ann Goldgar, in her un-kindled, non-googled, Impolite Learning, describes how the eighteenth century, called at the time “the century of the journal,” was marked by complaints about the very shallowness, laziness, and loss of learning fostered by the book abridgements and reviews that appeared in these new periodicals . Others noted how, to the contrary, readers and books thrived in such an age, buoyed by the periodical’s non-stop talk of what was being published by whom. 

We, too, have then to see how the scholarly book, at least, is no more than a symbol of knowledge worked out, with great care, in some detail. And that such a concept and human potential is not necessarily placed at risk by changes in the book’s material forms that have served it so well over the last nearly six centuries. This past year, I have been struck by the closing of favorite bookshops and by the momentarily strange feel of familiar books. But that is more about comforting habits of mind than about why we continue to pick up books in the first place. 

Going forward into this new decade, we have the chance both to enjoy this late self-conscious age of print and to no less avidly pursue the larger purpose behind all this getting and spending of books, as if what mattered was the ideas, realizations and insights, and what we can make of them. That I am given pause as I sit with book and pencil in hand (before turning to work on the computer) is worth a moment’s reflection on what is changing and what is no less before us.