IVP - Addenda & Errata - The Historical Thickness of Books

The Historical Thickness of Books

Thinking about booky houses on the one hand and Amazon's Kindle on the other prompted me to dust off my copy of Sven Birkert's The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994). Here is a thought for the day from Birkert, where he is considering the "flattening of historical perspective" that might result from the electronic book:

The depth of field that is our sense of the past is not only a linguistic construct, but is in some essential way represented by the book and the physical accumulation of books in library spaces. In the contemplation of the single volume, or mass of volumes, we form a picture of time past as a growing deposit of sediment; we capture a sense of its depth and dimensionality. Moreover, we meet the past as much in the presentation of words in books of specific vintage as we do in any isolated fact or statistic. The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible.

If we take the etymological tack, history (cognate with "story") is affiliated in complex ways with its texts. Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imagination continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. (Guttenberg Ellegies, p. 129)

Birkert's book is controversial, but the fiber of my being sides with his argument. If you suspect that books in print, and the reading of them in print, is more important than we might ordinarily realize, you'll enjoy reading Birkert. Writing in 1994, he is not yet seeing the startling growth of the web. If someone out there can point to his more recent thinking along these lines, I'd appreciate it.