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The following is excerpted from Vincent Giroud’s “A World without Books?” in The Edge of the Precipice, edited by Paul Socken.
When I joined the Yale library as curator of modern books and manuscripts in 1987, I was invited to participate in an orientation program designed to introduce new staff to the various branches of the University Library. At one of these meetings – it could have been the first – the university librarian, to impress upon us the importance and urgency of book conservation, showed us a book, printed on acid paper, which was in such terminal shape that it was literally crumbling under her fingers: between her thumb and first two fingers, she could take a pinch of it as if it had been salt. At the same meeting, one of the associate university librarians had brought with him a small display: a Babylonian roll, of which Yale has an outstanding collection, a book (in my dim memory an anonymous looking, cloth-bound library book), a microfilm, a microfiche, a floppy disk or computer diskette, and maybe one or two more items I cannot recall. He showed them to us in quick succession and told us: “What I want you to remember is that what matters here is not the form in which content is transmitted, but content itself. The medium through which content is transmitted has evolved throughout history and will continue to evolve. Books are just one medium among others.” The two messages appeared to feed and reinforce each other. The first was that books are perishable: like us mortals, they are dust and will turn to dust. The second was, at least by implication, that books, in themselves, do not matter. They are conveyors of a text and it is this text that matters.
The relevance of this personal recollection will become apparent in the course of this essay, but I could not help recalling that meeting of twenty-three years ago in the summer of 2010, when the New York Times reported that sales of Kindle books through the Amazon website had outnumbered hardcover sales and, a few weeks later, that the Barnes and Noble bookstore at Lincoln Center was about to close. Once again, the implication – clearly spelled out by the author of the first Times article – seemed to be that books were, slowly but irrevocably, on the way out and might someday become extinct.
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