Book collectors don’t like libraries.
You would have thought that we’d absolutely love the places and want to live in them but no, book collectors don’t like libraries because librarians don’t like books.
There are no stickers or stamps on these beauties. The first is from 1934 and very difficult to find.
It’s one of the main qualifications for the job. Have you ever watched one at work? As soon as they get their hands on a book they start beating it up, stamping it and punching holes in it and sticking things on it and wrestling the wrapper into sticky plastic. They write on it with their biros and markers and shove strips of magnetic plastic down the spine. Sometimes their allies rip the book from its proper home and lash it into some sort of extra strong binding made of plastic covered card. This happened a lot in the sixties and seventies, notoriously in places that should have known better, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum library and even at the British Library. All in the name of preservation, you understand.
Those angry scribbles and sly defacings are all books have to contend with at the moment but things are going to get a lot worse. Pretty soon librarians will be licking their lips, rolling up their sleeves and tooling themselves up for the ruck of their lives. Google and others are busy scanning every book they can get their hands on and turning it into a digital library. It’s going to be wonderful. Before long all the text will be searchable in ways we can’t even imagine now. Thousands of lost treasures will turn up. Text-analysis software will slip through the system finding unattributed works by famous authors and many works of genius will turn out to – ahem – closely resemble obscure works by unknown hacks. Gaps in biographies will be filled, forgotten discoveries rediscovered and our knowledge and understanding of literature, science and the arts will expand exponentially. Things will never be the same again; we will soon be unlearing details about authors, revising our opinions and rewriting the history books. Google will deliver a golden age of research and discovery that will keep academics busy for decades.
As for the librarians, well, they’ll be looking to their Governments for their grants and salaries, their stipends and expenses, their new wings and new binderies and new miles of shelving. And sooner rather than later those governments are going to look at that free billion-volume always-open pan-global fully-searchable library in the sky and say -
Well, as we’ve gone all democratic and blog like, perhaps you should have some input. Choose one:
A) ‘Absolutely, old chap. Books, eh? Couldn’t agree more. Got to keep ‘em looking neat. How much do you need?’
B) ‘Ah, those old paper books. They’re all on line now, yes? Every single one? Then why on earth am I paying you to – ?’
These two titles are American; the second is a 'paperback original', ie, a paperback first edition. The book was not published in hardback first.
If you can’t decide, here are are few other thoughts that might focus your mind. Firstly, there’s a slow motion economic disaster unfolding throughout the century. And secondly, this round of scanning is only the beginning. The quality and precision is only going to get better, and more thorough, and the question ‘Why am I paying you to keep the paper versions?’ is going to be increasingly hard to answer. Worse, the people making the decisions will not have our cultural memories of paper, our love of it. To our generation paper is stuff you respect at all costs. To those raised on screens it’s very muchly second best.
Before long questions like this will need to be answered. I suspect that within the next decade a minister is going to turn our books over to the librarians once and for all.
Hey ho. Bet you wish you’d never popped round now. But cheer up – these are knotty problems and I might be wrong. In fact I want to be wrong.
Many thanks for your comments, by the way. ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ is the one I’m pinning my hopes on. It’s a good point. Every new method of distribution leads to an increase in the appreciation of that media, not a decrease. Why should that not be true for reading, and books, and book collecting?
Business as usual next week – cheery stuff about beautiful old books. In fact I might well do a quick ’show and tell’ of some of the ones I’ve bought this year and explain what it was about them that caught my eye.
Because no matter what happens I will never, EVER, stop buying old books!
There is just one copy of the first book here. Don’t buy it – it’s overpriced and a dreadful read anyway.
‘Dewey Death’ by Charity Blackstock is a good read and there are many editions to choose from here
Book three is also dreadful and also hard to find, there are just two copies here.
That fabulous pulp is a cracker and a steal at less than a fiver, you can find copies here.