UNBOUND
It’s occurred to me that I keep hearing the same alarm bells: “the tomato is doomed?” are the cries when there are developments in the genetic modification of foodstuffs (which I’m against). And “the book is dead?” is the wail that goes up around discussions of electronic publishing (which I’m for, but I’m against the complete extinction of books).
My business newspaper is named Yamazaki’s Notebook for the device used by Shinya Yamazaki, the existential sociologist from William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light / Idoru / All Tomorrow’s Parties). Gibson’s description of the notebook is tantalisingly oblique: it’s a screen-based device, with sound recording, translation, and transcription features. It seems to have what must be a slide-out or fold-away keyboard. Mostly Yamazaki talks to his notebook or writes on its screen with a stylus. There’s a heartbreakingly sweet description of a postcard “being blistered by rain” in a gutter, which leads me to think there’s a camera in the notebook. There’s a reference to some kind of advanced Japanese material covering it. But in my mind Yamazaki’s notebook has become the dream of everything I want a hybrid paper /electronic book to be: everything I worshipped about the Sony Walkman crossed with a Moleskine notebook. My bookbinding business works with real paper (non-tree and I’d like to be able to experiment with microbial cellulose pages) but I’m configuring electronic books, really simple ones based around electronic components that can be “printed” onto paper, or made from paper. My point of reference is the old disposable camera-in-a-cardboard-box. When I’m thinking of sound in books my point of reference isn’t Sony any more (or the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones) it’s the development of surprisingly hi-fi sound in record-your-own greeting cards with sound chips embedded in them that are being manufactured in Malaysia.
Today in The Sunday Times from London is a report of the Unbound Conference at the New York Public Library.
The world’s libraries are heading for the internet, says Bryan Appleyard. If this means we lose touch with real books and treat their content as ‘information’, civilisation is the loser. “The majority of information,” said Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, “lies outside the internet.” Redmer was speaking last week at Unbound, an invitation-only conference at the New York Public Library (NYPL). It was a groovy, bleeding-edge-of-the-internet kind of affair. There was Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a book about the new business economics of the net. There was Arianna Huffington, grand panjandrum of both the blogosphere and smart east coast society. But this wasn’t just another jolly. There were also publishers and Google execs, two groups of people who might one day soon be fighting for their professional lives before the Supreme Court. For Unbound was another move in a strange, complex and frequently obscure war tht is being fought over the digitisation of the great libraries of the world. The details of this war may seem baffling, but there is nothing baffling about what is at stake. Intellectual property — intangibles like ideas, knowledge and information — is, in the globalised world, the most valuable of all assets.
The area of copyright and digital rights is outside my sphere of knowledge. My book-binding projects are for people who’ve created and own the rights to what they’re publishing, or the books are for private use (blank notebooks or archives). The writing published by Yamazaki’s Notebook is under a Creative Commons licence, and I’m using the “fair quote” ratios for quoting from books and making an effort to contact anyone whose work I’m quoting to seek formal permission.
What’s difficult to bear is how much is never transferred every time a new technological format takes hold. Up until the development of the computer, innovations in book materials and binding techniques didn’t matter at all. The Gospel of Thomas on papyrus remains as readable as when it was etched in Biblical times.
I love libraries, and I love the New York Public Library above all others. It’s a glorious place to be to read and write (although the bookshop no longer sells legal pads embossed with New York Public Library at the top of each page, which I used to favour for my correspondence). I’m mesmerised by the reverent junk shop quality of the manuscripts division, seeing bits of John Donne’s poems scratched onto the back of laundry lists, and great novels begun on sheets of hotel stationery. But it isn’t just flotsam and jetsam. These bits of paper (and also sound recordings, home movies, drawings, etc.) are the impressions of the life of any time. A New York Times article I clipped in 2005 talked about the usefulness of the menu collection at the New York Public Library.
In 1899, the New York Public Library received a query from a Miss Frank E. Buttolph, who wanted to know if it would add restaurant menus to its growing collections. The answer was yes, and Miss Buttolph, then 49, began spending 25 years visiting restaurants in the city and writing hoteliers and other correspondents abroad, eventually amassing more than 25,000. They have periodically been dusted off and put on display, providing visitors with a view of the changing tastes and spending habits of everyone from Park Avenue power brokers to South Street stevedores. Now, those menus, and thousands of others in collections around the country, are being sifted by oceanographers seeking hints of changes in fish and shellfish populations and popularity before good records were kept. ”A menu was a piece of ephemera, it wasn’t meant to be saved, but thankfully some people collected them,” said Glenn A. Jones, an oceanographer at the Galveston campus of Texas A&M University and a leader of the research. Only by knowing how bountiful the ocean was can one determine the potential for restoring important marine fisheries, he said. Before fisheries agencies routinely collected data on landings and prices, he added, there was not a lot of information to go on. Menus also are one of the only tools for tracking shifting consumer demand for various species.
The life around the library is just as important. Charles Addams sketched my definition of happiness; the cartoon where Morticia and Gomez Addams, with Pugsley and Wednesday, are standing sweetly, dreamily, the very definition of family togetherness, by a picture window while a blizzard rages outside. Morticia says serenly, “Just the kind of day that makes you feel glad to be alive.” Charles Addams took great care with the architectural details in his drawings and did a lot of his research at the New York Public Library. When he died some of his original cartoons were donated to the Library and line the walls of a couple of passageways upstairs. His wake was held there, too.
About 250 of his friends gathered for the party yesterday at the New York Public Library. Candles twinkled in the Cecile Barthos Forum, which was set up to resemble the genteel cocktail parties Mr. Addams enjoyed at his home in Sagaponack, L.I., where he lived when he was not in Manhattan. Food was served, a Dixieland band played and people danced. Mrs. Addams wore white for the memorial; she wore black when she married Mr. Addams eight years ago in a pet cemetery on Long Island.
New York Times. November 19, 1988
Maira Kalman has illustrated a version of E.B. White and Strunk’s The Elements of Style, Nico Muhly adapted it as an opera and it was staged at the New York Public Library.
Photograph of The Elements of Style performance by Emily Davidow.
Mr. Muhly, 24, is a talented and audacious graduate of the Juilliard School who has worked with Philip Glass and Bjork. His Strunk and White songs are eloquently scored for soprano, tenor, viola, banjo and percussion. They also include parts for Ms. Kalman’s friends and family, who will make ”little gentle noises” through amplified kitchen utensils (vintage eggbeaters and meat grinders) and a set of dice shaken in a bowl. But even with this lineup, the humor of the piece lies more in its straight-faced seriousness. The vocal writing is cast in a distinctly early-music style, the textures as pure and pared down as Strunk and White liked their sentences. There are frequent moments of disarming beauty, as if Mr. Muhly were tempting the listener to forget the jokes and simply listen. At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the elevated catwalk of the library’s reading room and sang mellifluously of punctuation and orthography. ”Do not use a hyphen between words that can better be written as one word: ‘water-fowl, waterfowl,”’ he intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: ”The steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words eventually become one.” … ”I decided early on that there was going to be this melancholy,” Mr. Muhly said. ”It’s already so absurdist, I didn’t want too much laughing during the music.”
New York Times. October 19.2005
Maira Kalman’s dear dog poet Max, who dresses like Chico Marx and has the pure golden heart of Harpo Marx, visited Paris and saw poetry everywhere, literally. “As I left the museum, I saw a scene that made my heart stand still,” Max said. “A man had written poems all over the sidewalk and the buildings and the cars and the trees. As the cars left, parts of his poems went whizzing around the city, and as the leaves fell from the trees, words fluttered down to the ground.” I think of this as a metaphor for appreciating life in the city. I believe that these poems (or an eye for the sweet sad details that become poetic) are as much a structure of the city as its buildings. I have a hunch that when these details are written onto scraps of paper, or published in books, they become anchors, holding information to a place, and when all information is digitised and hovers and isn’t brought to ground anywhere in particular, maybe stories will lose some of their weight and resonance. Would George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn go to the New York Public Library (as they did in Breakfast at Tiffanys) to look up his book’s listing on Amazon.com? Would the Ghostbusters go running through the basement stacks in pursuit of an otherworldly computer virus? In a wholly digital world would the Pirate Lemur want to visit the lions, Patience and Fortitude?
Patience or Fortitude, New York Public Library Lion with the Pirate Lemur.
