Joseph Campana’s piece, Rare Books, appeared on the Kenyon Review blog last week. The jumping off point for Campana was the New York Times article on the closing of the Heritage Book Shop, one of the premier antiquarian book shops in the world.
Campana recounts his first memories of encountering a rare book at his college library and how he is as “willing to make a fetish of rare books as the next person.” Yet he ends the article by professing to have more of a sense of “ambivalence, not wonder” toward rare books.
He then goes on to say that the rare books within Heritage’s walls should after all “be held by libraries where they might be more broadly available.” I’m not sure I agree.
Bookshops are one of the few places where one can get open access, they are places where anyone can walk into and see and handle books they only dreamed about. In many cases you have greater access to rare books at a bookshop than you do at the library. Yes, they might not be able to afford to buy the book but the experience of handling it is priceless.
Just yesterday someone came into the shop and asked if we had any editions of Machiavelli’s The Prince. I showed him the the copy we had, it was one of 10 copies printed in a full vellum binding in 1929. He knew and I knew he wasn’t going to buy the book (it is $1500) but he was able to spend some time with it in his hands and you could see in his eyes what a special experience it was for him. To a varying degree this opportunity exists at any used bookshop. One can walk in and happen upon a book or a piece of ephemera that is intimately tied to a book or subject that one is passionate about. This experience cannot be duplicated electronically.
As Campana notes, throughout much of history books have been a luxury item for the wealthy. It is only in the last 150 years or so that book ownership has permeated all tiers of society.
Michael Kearns points out in his essay, “The Material Melville” that appears in Reading Books:Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (University of Massachussets Press, 1996), the American book-buyer in the first half of the nineteenth century was motivated by a “desire to own a tangible piece of culture, [and] the wish to display possessions that represent economic achievement as well as cultural sophistication.” The book as a status symbol.
I also agree with Campana in that “books (old, new, borrowed or blue) should be most available to those who perhaps don’t know they need them.” The only way this is possible is by open access. The digitization of rare books is an essential democratic activity in that the text is potentially available to all who desire to see it. The rare book on the other hand is very much a commodity bound to the laws of capitalism. Technology has now made it possible for the textual history of our planet to be accessed by anyone with a computer and connectivity. It is this access to information that is the issue and is what we should all be fighting for. Google is in the process of digitizing enormous amounts of our literary and cultural heritage and it is they who will be the gatekeepers. They will determine who gets access. Some will get a snippet, some will get a preview and only the ones who pay up will get full access.
The closing of Heritage is not something one should be ambivalent about for it is the closing of one of the prime access points for rare books in the world.