National Post, Canada
Philip Marchand December 30, 2010
Recently, I walked into the reading room of the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, and found not a soul there besides the librarian. “It used to be packed,” the librarian said wistfully. Now the room, with its shelves of printed journals, had the forlorn atmosphere of a ladieswear shop where every item is just a little bit out of fashion, and a sales clerk stands at attention all day, waiting for non-existent customers. Meanwhile, throughout the rest of the library, students were staring at the screens of their laptops. What happened to books? What happened to print?
One answer, of course, is that books and periodicals have simply mutated. Same text, different format. The Kindle, which can store 3,500 e-books, we are told, is the new home library, vaporizing tons of paper. And why should anyone mourn — except for those who go on about the beautiful tactility of ink and paper and who seem peculiarly attached to the book as a physical object?
I’m one of them, as it happens. A few weeks ago I reviewed a short story collection by the American writer Ann Beattie. I liked the stories but I was also mesmerized by the book’s cover, a solid sheet of bright orange red, upon which the name of the author and the title were printed with trim, elegant white lettering. That beautiful red entwined itself in my neural pathways along with the memory of her prose, like a delicate flavouring.
Even more significant are the few books in my possession that are first editions. The design of these editions — and particularly the author photos — says a great deal. There is, for example, a photograph of Ken Kesey on the back of a first edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He gazes upward, as if glimpsing something in the clouds — unaware that this book will wbe the best thing he ever does, and the rest of his life will be an increasingly futile search for something or other. There is a photograph of Marshall McLuhan on the flap of The Mechanical Bride, looking like a matinee idol with his trim moustache. No tweedy academic we have here, but a world beater.
Of course, these images can be reproduced any number of ways, but they lose their magic when disconnected from the object, the book, as it first appeared to the author himself. The magic reminds us that writing does not swirl around in cyberspace until finally materializing in a Kindle, but is something created during a certain period of an individual’s life, at a specific stage in history.
That the Kindle has uses, no one doubts. For someone going to the cottage for a long stretch, it’s handy to bring a Kindle instead of a dozen books. Professional readers, such as agents, editors of publishing houses and so on, don’t have to go home lugging 40 pounds of paper. The technical features of the device can, it is true, inspire an odd outlook in its users — novelist Douglas Coupland told me that he asked his agent how far he had gotten in a book he was reading on his Kindle, and the agent said, “Eleven percent.” But that’s not important. What may be of great importance is if university professors and their students start to rely on the Kindle as an inexpensive provider of texts, some of which can be very costly in printed form. Then we shall start to see the long-heralded triumph of the e-book.
Read more: http://arts.nationalpost.com
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