Books and Other Fetish Objects
I GOT a real thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan
Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had
completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first,
oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. First I was required to study a microfilm
version. There followed a certain amount of appropriate pomp. The notebook was
lifted from a blue cloth drop-spine box and laid on a special padded stand. I
was struck by how impossibly tiny it was — 58 leaves bound in vellum, just 2
3/4 inches wide, half the size I would have guessed from the enlarged microfilm
images. There was his name, “Isacus Newton,” proudly inscribed by the
17-year-old with his quill, and the date, 1659.
“He filled the pages with meticulous script, the letters and numerals
often less than one-sixteenth of an inch high,” I wrote in my book “Isaac
Newton” a few years later. “He began at both ends and worked toward the
middle.”
Apparently historians know the feeling well — the exhilaration that
comes from handling the venerable original. It’s a contact high. In this time
of digitization, it is said to be endangered. The Morgan Notebook of Isaac
Newton is online now (thanks to the Newton Project at the University of
Sussex). You can surf it.
The raw material of history appears to be heading for the cloud. What
once was hard is now easy. What was slow is now fast.
Is this a case of “be careful what you wish for”?
Last month the British Library announced a project with Google to
digitize 40 million pages of books, pamphlets and periodicals dating to the
French Revolution. The European Digital Library, Europeana.eu, well
surpassed its initial goal of 10 million “objects” last year, including a
Bulgarian parchment manuscript from
1221 and the Rok runestone from
Sweden, circa 800, which will save you trips to, respectively, the St. Cyril
and St. Methodius National Library in Sofia and a church in Ostergotland.
Reporting to the European Union in Brussels, the Comité des Sages
(sounds better than “Reflection Group”) urged in January that essentially everything
— all the out-of-copyright cultural heritage of all the member states — should
be digitized and made freely available online. It put the cost at approximately
$140 billion and called this vision “The New Renaissance.”
Inevitably comes the backlash. Where some see enrichment, others see
impoverishment. Tristram Hunt, an English historian and member of
Parliament, complained in The Observer this
month that “techno-enthusiasm” threatens to cheapen scholarship. “When
everything is downloadable, the mystery of history can be lost,” he wrote. “It
is only with MS in hand that the real meaning of the text becomes apparent: its
rhythms and cadences, the relationship of image to word, the passion of the
argument or cold logic of the case.”
I’m not buying this. I think it’s sentimentalism, and even fetishization.
It’s related to the fancy that what one loves about books is the grain of paper
and the scent of
glue.
Some of the qualms about digital research reflect a feeling that
anything obtained too easily loses its value. What we work for, we better
appreciate. If an amateur can be beamed to the top of Mount Everest, will the
view be as magnificent as for someone who has accomplished the climb? Maybe
not, because magnificence is subjective. But it’s the same view.
Another worry is the loss of serendipity — as Mr. Hunt says, “the
scholar’s eternal hope that something will catch his eye.” When you open a book
Newton once owned, which you can do (by appointment) in the library of Trinity
College, Cambridge, you may see notes he scribbled in the margins. But
marginalia are being digitized, too. And I find that online discovery leads to
unexpected twists and turns of research at least as often as the same time
spent in archives.
“New Renaissance” may be a bit of hype, but a profound transformation
lies ahead for the practice of history. Europeans seem to have taken the lead
in creating digital showcases; maybe they just have more history to work with
than Americans do. One brilliant new resource among many is the London
Lives project: 240,000
manuscript and printed pages dating to 1690, focusing on the poor, including
parish archives, records from workhouses and hospitals, and trial proceedings
from the Old Bailey.
Storehouses like these, open to anyone, will surely inspire new
scholarship. They enrich cyberspace, particularly because without them the
online perspective is so foreshortened, so locked into the present day. Not
that historians should retire to their computer terminals; the sights and
smells of history, where we can still find them, are to be cherished. But the
artifact is hardly a clear window onto the past; a window, yes, clouded and
smudged like all the rest.
It’s a mistake to deprecate digital images just because they are
suddenly everywhere, reproduced so effortlessly. We’re in the habit of
associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be
the sole owner of a Jackson Pollock or a Blue Mauritius but not
of a piece of information — not for long, anyway. Nor is obscurity a virtue. A
hidden parchment page enters the light when it molts into a digital simulacrum.
It was never the parchment that mattered.
Oddly, for collectors of antiquities, the pricing of informational
relics seems undiminished by cheap reproduction — maybe just the opposite. In a
Sotheby’s auction three years ago, Magna Carta fetched a record $21 million. To
be exact, the venerable item was a copy of Magna Carta, made 82 years after the
first version was written and sealed at Runnymede. Why is this tattered
parchment valuable? Magical thinking. It is a
talisman. The precious item is a trick of the eye. The real Magna Carta, the
great charter of human rights and liberty, is available free online, where it
is safely preserved. It cannot be lost or destroyed.
An object like this — a talisman — is like the coffin at a funeral. It
deserves to be honored, but the soul has moved on.
James Gleick is the author
of “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.”
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