Obsolete Skills

As Scott Bryan Wilson discusses in his essay on book collecting, if you really want a book you’re almost certain to find it online:

Virtually any book I want is available at abe.com, if I have the cash, but that’s a last resort only to be used if I’ve scoured stores for a while and can’t find what I’m after, or if it’s a book I haven’t read and am desperate to read (and the book is out of print and unavailable in any other format). Abe robs me of the so-called thrill of the hunt.

I was thinking of that when I finished up Javier Marias Dark Back of Time last week. I mentioned on Friday that the book is partly a literary detective story, and part of the detection is actually getting your hands on the books in question. The book has more than one anecdote where Marias explains the kind of effort that can go into acquiring a difficult-to-find book, as well as how your understanding of everything can shift once you do finally get the book in hand. The following quotation excerpted from one such search is emblematic of what’s lost when the skills that Marias and his associates display here become obsolete:

My self-esteem at stake, I immediately alerted my booksellers G. Heywood Hill and Bell, Book & Radmal and Veronica Watts certainly, and a few others specializing in military matters, thought I didnt know that field very well; . . . I also said something to Roger Dobson, who is a true, indefatigable bloodhound, but whose streaks of magnificent good fortune alternate with periods of total loss of nose (and consequent bibliographic famine), so everything depended on whether my mission found him in one phase or the other. I told them how much I was willing to spend, which was quite a lot in relation to the probable cost of an utterly forgotten 1938 book on the Spanish Civil War . . .

What you can’t really see here is that Dark Back of Time is very much a book-lover’s book in that it not only evokes the tactile pleasures of books and shows a great respect for books as objects; it does that, and it also advances an argument for how objects in general, and specifically books, can acquire a coating of history that makes them much more than what they might otherwise be.

Here’s a quote that gives a sense of that:

With the passage or loss of time, old books are no longer text and binding but also what their former readers have left in them over the years, marks, comments, exclamations, profanities, photographs, dedications of ex libris, a letter, sheet of paper or signature, a waterspot, burn of stain or simply their names, as the books’ owners.

Just as Marias’ hunt for lost books invokes a community that he has built up over years of dedicating himself to buying and reading books, the very act of reading invokes a different community in a similar way; this is something you see a lot of in Dark Back of Time, which is nothing if not the stories of some of these communities. I’m excited for the potential that the digital offers for building analogous sorts of communities in cyberspace, but I also worry that in our enthusiasm for these digital communities (you should see how much the NEA loves websites nowadays) we forget about those other ones that were all we had as little as 15 years ago. Books like Dark Back of Time remind readers of the unique kinds of connections that print (and bricks and mortar) culture nurtures.

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