Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a wonderful essay in yesterday’s NY Times about his paperback book collection. The title is “Yellowing Paper, Stiffening Glue and the Sudden Demise of a Library” (requires membership) and contains such notable phrases as, ‘nothing meters the passing of time like paperback books’ and ‘The books themselves are not really worth restoring, of course. Their texts may be of permanent value, but the physical objects are not.’
It reminded me of my thousand year project of what gets preserved and how. I have two or three hundred paperbacks and a few of them are yellowed and brittle. I should toss them but there’s ever a small voice that says, ‘you might want to read that one again. It’s a classic, after all’ and I put it back, gently, on the shelf.
I recommend Klinkenborg’s essay even if it costs you a bit to get at it. I felt as if I’d found a kindred spirit who laments that ‘Some days I suspect that the objects around me are aging faster than I am’ and closes with an opinion on digitizing that puts that process in a new light for me.
And as for you who will write in and say, “Aha! This only proves the value of digitizing books,” let me simply say that it is not possible to digitize a book. You can digitize its contents, photograph its binding, record every last scrap of penciled annotation it contains. And yet the book cannot be digitized any more than one could digitize the vague, inarticulate sense I have that I know where that quotation is, if only I could find the book it’s in.