NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a piece this morning about Standford University’s Engineering Department’s library going book-less. You can find NPR’s piece here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395. As much as I can understand a modern university seeking to save expense and space, the concept of a “book-less library” seems a complete oxymoron and, indeed, moronic in concept. I strongly urge the creation of a new word or term for digital information centers that does not include the term “library”, since the very concept of “library” demands the presence of real books.
I cannot argue with the notion that, if modern students are more attuned to the world of digital information and are not using old fashioned libraries in the way their predecessors did, universities should find other ways to provide their needs for information required by the learning process. So whatever quarrel I am picking, I am not picking it with Stanford’s Engineering Department librarian. I accept the argument that university libraries need to be relevant. To argue that students should be made to read books when they principally understand laptops and the Internet would be to prove, once again, King Canute’s admonition of the powerlessness of kings.
Not that an argument cannot be made for old fashioned, book-driven scholarship, since I strongly believe that one can be made. As powerful as the Internet and its contents are today, they remain little more than a mere drop in the bucket of recorded human thought and it will be a long while before the Internet – or its successor – can claim to store the vast bulk of human scholarship. I strongly suspect that web-based scholarship focuses primarily upon current publications rather than the publications of antiquity, and to overlook that treasure trove is more than shortsighted; it is also poor scholarship. Not to understand current human thought in contrast to that of our forebears, is not to understand such things as history, economics, relevancy to environmental context, the rhythm of philosophy and reason, and a myriad other topics I might have mentioned if I had thought about the subject longer than the time it took to type this sentence.
In short, the Internet is still more soundbite than substance. Of course, the Internet’s content will continue to increase and there may well come a time when the foregoing statement is no longer true – but it remains true today. While I use the Internet possibly as frequently as Stanford’s engineering students, I understand its shortcomings, with my understanding coming from my years of intensive use of traditional libraries. I truly fear that the quality of our comprehension of things human will come to suffer if the Internet becomes the sole source of knowledge for future generations.
But this piece is no more intended as a rant against the Internet than it is intended as a complaint against modern libraries who go book-less in the face of change and challenged budgets. What this piece is really about is the pleasures of a library and the hope that those pleasures will not become forgotten.
First, I must admit to a bias in my thinking. My wife and I recently spent a goodly sum of money to remodel our home to add a studio and a library. Further to the truth, my wife’s studio (she is an artist by temperament) is more library than studio. For we both collect books: I collect fiction and mysteries and she collects children’s books, especially the illustrated variety. Books are an obsession in our home as my children will testify. Our shared obsession is not fully understood by our children, even if they may appreciate it on an intellectual level. I strongly suspect that my youngest son somewhat resents the library, since I confess openly that his former room disappeared in the library’s creation. I do regret that he no longer has the room to retreat to when he is visiting from his home in Eastern Washington, but I hope he understands that home is as much of a concept as a physical place and that our home would be incomplete without books. When one has as many books as we possess and wishes to maintain them properly, a library becomes a necessity and not a luxury.
In truth, our library is much more than a place to maintain books; it is also a sanctuary from real world dilemma and fervor, a place for ordered and considered thought, a source of respite and renewal, and, most simply, a source of enrichment and beauty. There is a peace that springs from amassed books, regardless of their content. I believe this peace arises from the fact that each book represents the culmination of an enormous amount of human effort, arising from the agonies of the writer in creating its content, the business demands upon its publisher in changing creativity into print, and the steadfast determination of its bookseller in the face of ever dwindling profits. In short, the fact of a book’s very existence is as much of a miraculous adventure as is the tale told by its contents. Libraries should honor both kinds of adventures.
I suppose that the owner of a library need not be a reader and might take substantial satisfaction in the fact of his or her possession of books alone, but I am not a believer in that type of book collecting. While I understand the ache to own something of value that is rare and beautiful, I could not revel in a library whose books I had not read as it would seem incomplete and sterile. The world contains many repositories of beautiful things, and there are as many of these repositories that are merely sterile places to visit as there are those that are citadels of joy and wonder. To me, a library of unread books collected only for their having is merely the same as owning a pile of stuff – admittedly, stuff that I might well want to acquire and convert, through reading, into a well-loved memory. A true library is full of memories of the kind that stem from reading and participating in the adventures between the covers; a true library honors its inventory of books as well as their contents.
When I walk into the portion of my library where I keep the books that I have read, I am walking into a well of memories. Each book speaks to me from its assigned place in its own special voice, a special voice that is compounded of equal parts artistic content and physical uniqueness. There is no cacophony, for this is not a Tower of Babel. As I enter and look around the room, each book reaches out in its own way and I either react, or fail to react, as circumstances dictate. I remember where and how I found each book (to me, the joy of book collecting is not as much in the having as it is in the hunt) as well as I remember its contents. Our library is an ever expanding thing – it will not be tomorrow what it is today as it will be made different, and more interesting, by the simple addition of one new book.
Said otherwise, I am a book collector and a reader – I collect what I want to read, and, in doing so, have frustrated many rare book dealers who want to understand my “focus” so that they might better serve my needs and their pocketbooks. Mind you, I have no objection whatsoever to their serving their pocketbooks because if they didn’t exist I could not find many of the books I am still seeking; rather, my objection is to their expectation that I must have a focus and that I should be developing a great collection rather than my own library of well-loved memories. While I understand the frustration I must cause them, I can honestly say that it is their problem and not mine to share.
I suppose it is true that I have never fully recovered from the impact of first seeing the library in the screen version of My Fair Lady. As much as I love the music from the show, Professor Higgins’ library impressed me the most. And so, at a later stage of life, my wife and I found that creating our own library was a necessity despite its cost to our treasury. It is a library unlike that of Professor Higgins in that the basic designs are not comparable and neither my wife nor I burst into song when present, but much alike in the sense of comfort and peace engendered by the simple fact of its existence.
And so it is that the concept of a “book-less library” seems moronic to me. I suppose that to some of our friends and acquaintances, our book collection seems little more than a dust trap and a waste of space and its new home nothing more than an outrageous expenditure by folks who have more to spend than good sense. To such detractors I can only reply: ”You do not understand the cry of the soul that is represented by each and every book – the cry of the author who penned it, the cry of those who bound and sold it, and the cry of those of us who have read and enjoyed it.”
Money spent on the fulfillment of the soul is, to my mind at least, money well spent. And while at some level I suppose I harbor minor resentments about those who implicitly, through body language or incredulous looks, criticize our decision to build our new, long awaited library, we rest content in the ease it grants to our souls.
Besides, it will eventually be our children’s job to dispose of all we have put together, and I wish them joy – not pain – in the endeavor.**
** An interesting article that was published a day after I published this regarding the differences in learning from books and digitally:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
