A World Passing Away

One of my early memories is wandering around the Haverford Township Library. In those dark, dusty stacks, I found and read a biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Sun Yat-Sen, and Ed Jablonski's then recent history of the B-17. My grandfather Swartz had a bookshelf behind his easy chair, where I found and read Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny." I can remember it as if it were yesterday, but it's been a half-century.

And it's not as if there weren't books at my parent's house, there were plenty. Part of their allowance to me was a book a month. By the time I was 10, I had a complete set of the Hardy Boys, and had moved on to natural histories. They were great, but not enough. I read.

And then, as I oriented myself in life, there were and are the great stacks of Wells, Altgeld, Eckhart, Regenstein, and Crerar, and their seldom visited archives, in which I found the copies of Mathematische Annalen that contained Richard von Mises's original, flawed definition of randomness.

But life doesn't end at thirty. My wife and I recently downsized, moving from the five bedroom house in which we raised our kids to the two bedroom condo we hope to spend the next twenty years or so. I've had to cut down to 75 linear feet of shelf space, about 60% of what we had in the old house, not counting the boxes in the basement that date from my undergraduate years. It's been a hard cull, and it's not entirely done. Almost all of the paperbacks are gone, along with most of the cookbooks. Goodbye, Bernard Cornwell; goodbye, W.E.B. Griffin; goodbye, Frugal Gourmet. I knew you well. Thank you.

Harder culls lie are ahead.

In my office at work, I have about 100 linear feet of shelf space, and these aren't trade books. They're Elsevier, North Holland, Springer-Verlag, including many hard cover mathematical texts set by hand in the era before Donald Knuth and computerized typesetting. Fifty dollars an inch, conservatively valued. It sounds crazy, but a couple hundred dollars a month over the course of more than thirty years of faculty life adds up. I set no records. There is not so much sticker shock as resignation. I expect to retire in a decade, give or take, and that 175 total linear feet will have to culled down to the 75 feet I have here. The rest will be divided into two parts, the marketable to be sold at O'Gara and Wilson Booksellers in the traditional UC faculty capitulation, the rest to be simply given away, stacked if need be on the radiators of Ryerson Hall for those who will have them.

But what of the next decade? Even if my acquisitions have slowed down from six inches a month to three, that's another three feet a year, another thirty feet over that last working decade. Or is it?

I think it is not. I love paper books. I love their heft, their feel. But I've been slowly moving from preferring digital editions only if they're cheap, to preferring digital editions. Old eyes prefer larger type, and old shoulders prefer a lighter backpack. And digital books don't face that hard, hard cull, which grows closer with each passing day.

I don't think that books are passing away, but I do think that paper books are passing away. Today's libraries are morgues, and today's librarians know it. They're preparing for a very different world. And with great reluctance, so I am. The world of bound, physical books is passing away. Look at it, love it, and ultimately, remember it, for our successors will not. Their world is still being borne.

Peace