The Smell of Books

I can't see myself getting an Amazon Kindle. I like sitting on the couch with a book and a cup of tea, thumbing through the pages, smelling the paper and the ink.

Mark Oehlert's response to Tom Crawford on the Kindle reminded me of a New Yorker article from last month, in which Anthony Grafton concludes that paper books are an anthropological record of their times and of the people reading it. The article is mostly about Google Book Search, the massive project to "build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world." Which I think sounds like a good thing.

But Grafton points out some of the more subtle things that are lost when books are digitized.

FUTURE READING: Digitization and its discontents; Anthony Grafton; November 5, 2007; The New Yorker.

And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks. Historians of the book—a new and growing tribe—read books as scouts read trails. Bindings, usually custom-made in the early centuries of printing, can tell you who owned them and what level of society they belonged to. Marginal annotations, which abounded in the centuries when readers usually went through books with pen in hand, identify the often surprising messages that individuals have found as they read. Many original writers and thinkers—Martin Luther, John Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—have filled their books with notes that are indispensable to understanding their thought. Thousands of forgotten men and women have covered Bibles and prayer books, recipe collections, and political pamphlets with pointing hands, underlining, and notes that give insights into which books mattered, and why. If you want to capture how a book was packaged and what it has meant to the readers who have unwrapped it, you have to look at all the copies you can find, from original manuscripts to cheap reprints. The databases include multiple copies of some titles. But they will never provide all the copies of, say, “The Wealth of Nations” and the early responses it provoked.

Photo Credit: Books by algiamil on stock.exchng