Book Brigade

Eternal Books

Though I share the Bibliophile Bullpen’s skepticism about Microsoft’s repeated claims that e-media will soon replace print media, the ancient historian in me has to take issue with her assertion that “PRINT is the longest lived media humanity has managed to create.”

Leaving aside media such as stones and metals too expensive for anything but monumental or ritual use, the honor for most durable written media must go to the clay tablet—the chief carrier of cuneiform script and the literatures of Mesopotamian and surrounding cultures for more than 2,000 years. Though easily broken, a fired ceramic tablet is otherwise virtually immune to the ravages of time. As a result, more documentation of daily life in second and first millennium B.C.E. Mesopotamia has survived than of most subsequent cultures who switched to using ink on parchment or papyrus, which were more convenient but much less durable.

In fact, changes in written media over the five-thousand-year history of writing have always tended towards greater impermanence. From clay tablets to parchment to papyrus (admittedly in use in Egypt as early as cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia) to rag paper to wood-pulp paper and now to electronic media, the materials have become easier to use but less and less permanent.

Nevertheless, complaints about electronic media’s impermanence and mutability points to an important aspect of the book’s iconic status: texts are supposed to preserve their contents for the future. They represent an author’s hopes for immortality, a nation’s desire for permanence, a religion’s claim to eternal truth. Conscious of our heritage from previous generations, we cherish old texts as relics that connect us to the past. Conscious of our own mortality, we hope that “our” books will live on indefinitely.

The traditional codex makes that realistically possible and verifiably true of many texts. Electronic media show no sign of being able to offer the same hope.

Bible Recycling

Susan Olasky in World Magazine asks:

What should you do with old or damaged Bibles you no longer need? Michigan-based Christian Resources International (CRI) suggests several ways to put them to use. Operation Bare Your Bookshelf allows you to send used Bibles in good condition to people who need them overseas.

CRI is responding to what seems to be a widely felt need, at least as evidenced by the remarkable number of websites providing advice on disposing of Bibles: Wikihow, Answerbag, Everything2, Yahoo, Allexperts, Ehow, and Catholic Forum. Since unlike Jewish, Muslim and Sikh traditions, Christian denominations for the most part have no prescribed teachings on Bible disposal, this wide-spread concern may be produced by the obvious, if usually implicit, analogy between Christianity's iconic book and other sacred objects and/or by the influence of prominent media stories about controversies over the treatment of scriptures of other religious traditions.

Kindle: Smoldering in the Uncanny Valley?

Brian Cassidy on Book Patrol wonders if the Kindle e-book reader is too good to be readily acceptible:

Perhaps some of the resistance among bookaholics to e-readers such as the Kindle was due in part to a kind of biblio-version of The Uncanny Valley:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. (Wikipedia)

Is the Kindle - in the words of this classic bit from 30 Rock - just a bit too much "Tom Hanks in Polar Express" and not enough "R2-D2"?

On this blog, we might rephrase this observation to wonder: will resistence to e-books increase, rather than decrease, the more they assume an iconic book's form? Our observations to date suggest that it will depend on the kind of book in question, and to what extent the e-application might be perceived as endangering its iconic status (or possibly even enhancing it).

iTouch in a Book

Charlie Sorrell on Wired explains and shows how to make an iPod Touch look and feel like "a real book." He explains his motive:

Imagine seeing an attractive girl (or boy) sitting outside a pavement café, drinking an espresso, smoking a Gauloise and reading a tatty paperback. It's a romantic image which is shattered when you swap the book for a PDA. I decided to disguise my iPod as a book, and if that wasn't pretentious enough, I put it in a modded Moleskine, the notebook of choice for fops and dandies the world over.

Chris Meade on if:book describes this as "Stationary fetishism and gadget love meet in perfect union." It could equally well be described as "Gadget fetishism meets stationary love." As always when it comes to books and technology, it's all in the eye of the beholder. The question is, are the eyes of most beholders changing as rapidly as the technology? The evidence for the continuing iconicity of books suggests not ...

Doctor Who Among the Books

Chris Meade on if:book points out that "Doctor Who, Britain's favourite time traveller, is trapped on a gigantic planet-sized library on BBC 1 this week. Electronic librarians oversee rows of very conventional looking dusty tomes and death lurks in the shadows. The Doctor has already told us how, despite all the advances in technology, future life forms still love nothing better than the smell and feel of a proper old book."

Decorating with Books

Michael Lieberman of BookPatrol brings to our attention Book Decor, "specializing in designer leather-bound books." Under the heading, "Decorating a Home Library," decorative book dealer Leni Leith explains:

Our Danish printed, European imported books are sold specifically with interior design in mind. Many people feel that it's silly to purchase books for pure decorative value. While we certainly understand this, we also savor the opportunity to change the mind of such individuals! Our books are so beautiful on the outside that their interior ceases to be important. What's more, they are available for purchase by the foot as well as the yard. In other words, no more spending hours in used bookstores looking for space fillers. At Book Décor, this process takes a matter of seconds!

Lieberman points out that Book Decor is not the first to aim at this market: the Strand bookstore in New York has sold decorator collections of books by the foot for years.

New Testaments Burned in Israel

Several news outlets are reporting on an incident in Israel in which New Testaments were burned about two weeks ago. According to CNN's coverage, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda collected them and when he was not present, someone set them on fire:

News accounts in Israel have quoted Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, as saying he organized students who burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. The deputy mayor gave interviews to Israeli radio and television stations after word of the incident surfaced about two weeks ago.

Soon he was talking with Russian, Italian and French television stations, "explaining to their highly offended audiences back home how he had not meant for the Bibles to be burned, and trying to undo the damage caused by the news (and photographs) of Jews burning New Testaments," The Jerusalem Post reported.

Aharon told CNN on Wednesday that he collected New Testaments and other "Messianic propaganda" that had been handed out in the city but that he did not plan or organize a burning. Instead, he said, three teenagers set fire to a pile of New Testaments while he was not present. Once he learned what was going on, he said, he stopped the burning.

[. . .]

About 200 New Testaments were burned, Aharon said, but he saved another 200.

His goal was to stop attempts to distribute Christian literature in the city, he said.

[. . .]

Myers said his complaint will ask the authorities to investigate possible violations of two Israeli laws. One forbids the destruction or desecration of any religious icon or item that a group holds sacred. Another bans people from speaking publicly in a way that offends or humiliates a certain religion.

Both laws are meant to prevent people from inciting religious violence, he said.

This incident (like the one involving a Qur'an this blog noted on May 17), the laws that pertain to it, and the responses to it continue to demonstrate that violence against books is understood by all parties involved as being comparable to violence against people and/or ideas and that violence against a book can quickly lead to other forms of conflict.

Word Art & Book Art

Michael Lieberman on BookPatrol points out:

The current issue of ArtAsiaPacific features an in depth look at artists who employ text in their work.

Articles include:

-A great piece on contemporary calligraphy in China, "Square Words, Round Paradigms" by Eric Wear.

-A look at Yoko Ono's embrace of online communities (Ono averages 200 new 'friends' on MySpace a day) by HG Masters.

-Gregory Galligan's looks at Islamic text-based art in his piece, "Architecture in Script: From Without Boundaries to Archive Fever," and includes Shirin Neshat whose iconic work appears above.

Also in this issue is Eliza Gluckman's profile of Sharmini Pereira and her publishing imprint, Raking Leaves, which focuses exclusively on artists using the printed book as the medium.

Museum of Scribes in Safed

A new museum will open this summer in Safed, Israel. Kiryat Hasofrim "Palace of the scribes" is intended, according to Chabad.org News,

to educate visitors about the Jewish scribal arts. Some 30 scribes will produce Torah scrolls, mezuzahs and tefillin in a factory on the premises.

... The centerpiece of the visitors center – aptly named Letters of Experience – will be a three-roomed exhibit that will take tourists on a whirlwind tour of the scribal arts, beginning with G-d’s creation of the world through the power of speech.

A movie will explain the spiritual significance and history of each of the Hebrew alphabet’s 22 letters, while a three-dimensional show will illustrate how animal hides and plants become the various parchments, boxes and inks used in the preparation of mezuzahs, tefillin and Torah scrolls.

“The idea that physical things can attain holiness is a central concept in Judaism,” explained Kaplan. “The exhibit will show how we take the world around us and make it holy.”
... The factory operations will be decidedly technologically-based, as well, with supervisors scanning every parchment and entering it into a computerized database, providing a quality-control mechanism previously unknown to the scribal community.