Posts Tagged ‘books’
“All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books”*…
… But books (and their predecessors) are fragile, and need special archival care if they are to survive. That’s even truer, as Adrienne Bernhard explains in The Long Now Foundation‘s newsletter, of digital data and documents…
The Dead Sea scrolls, made of parchment and papyrus, are still readable nearly two millennia after their creation — yet the expected shelf life of a DVD is about 100 years. Several of Andy Warhol’s doodles, created and stored on a Commodore Amiga computer in the 01980s, were forever stranded there in an obsolete format. During a data-migration in 02019, millions of songs, videos and photos were lost when MySpace — once the Internet’s leading social network — fell prey to an irreversible data loss.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Obstacles to data preservation are generally divided into three broad categories: hardware longevity (e.g., a hard drive that degrades and eventually fails); format accessibility (a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk formatted with a filesystem that can’t be read by a new laptop); and comprehensibility (a document with a long-abandoned file type that can’t be interpreted by any modern machine). The problem is compounded by encryption (data designed to be inaccessible) and abundance (deciding what among the vast human archive of stored data is actually worth preserving).
The looming threat of the so-called “Digital Dark Age”, accelerated by the extraordinary growth of an invisible commodity — data — suggests we have fallen from a golden age of preservation in which everything of value was saved. In fact, countless records of previous historical eras have all but disappeared. The first Dark Ages, shorthand for the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and stretching into the Middle Ages (00500-01000 CE), weren’t actually characterized by intellectual and cultural emptiness but rather by a dearth of historical documentation produced during that era.
Even institutions built for the express purpose of information preservation have succumbed to the ravages of time, natural disaster or human conquest. The famous library of Alexandria, one of the most important repositories of knowledge in the ancient world, eventually faded into obscurity. Built in the fourth century B.C., the library flourished for some six centuries, an unparalleled center of intellectual pursuit. Alexandria’s archive was said to contain half a million papyrus scrolls — the largest collection of manuscripts in the ancient world — including works by Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Herodotus. By the fifth century A.D., however, the majority of its collections had been stolen or destroyed, and the library fell into disrepair.
Digital archives are no different. The durability of the web is far from guaranteed. Link rot, in which outdated links lead readers to dead content (or a cheeky dinosaur icon), sets in like a pestilence. Corporate data sets are often abandoned when a company folds, left to sit in proprietary formats that no one without the right combination of hardware, software, and encryption keys can access. Scientific data is a particularly thorny problem: unless it’s saved to a public repository accessible to other researchers, technical information essentially becomes unusable or lost. Beyond switching to analog alternatives, which have their own drawbacks, how might we secure our digital information so that it survives for generations? How can individuals, private corporations and public entities coordinate efforts to ensure that their data is saved in more resilient formats?…
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations? “Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age,” from @AdrienneEve and @longnow. Eminently worth reading in full.
C.F. also: “Very Long-Term Backup” by Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly).
* Thomas Carlyle
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As we ponder preservation, we might recall that the #1 song in the U.S. and the U.K. (among other territories) was the Beatles’ “Help!” (their fourth of six #1 singles in a row on the American charts).
“I think of reading a book as no less an experience than traveling or falling in love”*…
Via Why Is This Interesting, a reading list from the man who created The Library of Babel…
Jorge Luis Borges, the consummate reader & librarian of the infinite, left behind an unfinished gift in the form of his Biblioteca Personal, meant to be 100 selections of personally-prized literature. Each was to have a written prologue and the entries were a kaleidoscopic collection of remembrances, lyrical passages, and warm regards…
In 1985, Argentine publisher Hyspamerica asked Borges to create A Personal Library — which involved curating 100 great works of literature and writing introductions for each volume. Though he only got through 74 books [64 individual titles, 6 to be issued in two volumes] before he died of liver cancer in 1988, Borges’s selections are fascinating and deeply idiosyncratic. He listed adventure tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells alongside exotic holy books, 8th century Japanese poetry and the musing of Kierkegaard…
[Borges said] “I want this library to be as diverse as the unsatisfied curiosity that has led me, and continues to lead me, to explore so many languages and so many literatures”…
Borges’ personal book picks– remembrances and warm regards: “The Biblioteca Personal Edition,” from @WhyInteresting.
Download a PDF of Borges’ list here.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we browse, we might recall that today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of 2021, as a federal holiday.
“We’re all pilgrims on the same journey but some pilgrims have better road maps”*…
Tis the season for road trips. These days, we tend to navigate via Google Maps; but for centuries, travelers relied on road atlases. From the Bodleian Library‘s Map Room, a wonderful example from the 18th century…
As a general rule we do not fold our atlases in half. It would be bad for them, and probably quite difficult. This is a rare example of an atlas that was designed to be folded in half.
It’s an early road atlas to be carried while traveling. When the soft, rather tattered brown leather covers are opened, it reveals that a previous owner has made some notes of place names and distances in the inside of the cover.
The book itself could be folded or rolled, making it smaller and more portable. It is Thomas Kitchin’s Post-chaise companion, and dates from 1767. It has clearly grown accustomed to being folded in half, as can be seen from the weights required to hold it open for photography:
The very earliest road atlases date from the seventeenth century. Previously travellers relied on road books, lists of names that would enable them to ask the way from one town to the next. Arguably the first road atlas was produced by Matthew Simmons in the 1630s, with triangular distance tables (like those sometimes found in modern road atlases) and very tiny maps. The big innovation was John Ogilby’s Britannia in 1675, which used strip maps to show the major roads throughout Great Britain in unprecedented detail; this design continued to be copied for over a century, as can be seen here. Britannia was however a large volume, too bulky to transport easily.
Perhaps surprisingly, it was around fifty years after the publication of Britannia before smaller, more portable versions were produced, and then rival versions by three different publishers appeared around the same time in the 1720s; one of these, by Emanuel Bowen, was reissued in multiple editions into the 1760s. Thomas Kitchin, who produced this work, had been apprenticed to Bowen, and had married Bowen’s daughter before setting up as an independent mapmaker, embarking on a long, prolific and successful career, and being appointed Hydrographer to George III.
Although many road atlases of this period survive, the binding is what makes this one unusual. Its appearance caused a certain amount of excitement in the Map Room as some of us had heard of road atlases being made to this design, but had never seen one before. Unsurprisingly the soft backed versions are less likely to have survived, being less robust and more heavily used than the hardbacks. The fact that this one has the notes relating to a previous owner’s journeys makes it additionally interesting…
A traveler’s companion: “On the road,” at @bodleianlibs.
* Nelson DeMille
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As we plan a route, we might ponder a very specific path, recalling that today– and every June 16– is Bloomsday, a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, during which the events of his novel Ulysses (a modern classic set on this date in 1904) are relived: Leopold Bloom goes about Dublin, James Joyce’s immortalization of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, the woman who would eventually become his wife.
The first Bloomsday was observed on the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, in 1954, when John Ryan (artist, critic, publican and founder of Envoy magazine) and the novelist Brian O’Nolan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route. They were joined by Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce (a dentist who, as Joyce’s cousin, represented the family interest), and AJ Leventhal (a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin).
“Memory is more indelible than ink”*…
At least for some of us it is– for instance, Solomon Shereshevsky, a Soviet journalist and mnemonist, widely-regarded as the “man with the greatest memory ever” (and the subject of neuropsychologist Alexander Luria‘s 1968 case study The Mind of a Mnemonist). From Wikipedia…
He met Luria after an anecdotal event in which he was scolded for not taking any notes while attending a work meeting in the mid-1920s. To the astonishment of everyone there (and to his own astonishment in realizing that others could apparently not do so), he could recall the speech word for word. Throughout his life, Shereshevsky was tasked with memorizing complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices, and even poems in foreign languages that he had never spoken before, all of which he would memorize with meticulous accuracy in a matter of minutes.
On the basis of his studies, Luria diagnosed in Shereshevsky an extremely strong version of synaesthesia, fivefold synaesthesia, in which the stimulation of one of his senses produced a reaction in every other. For example, if Shereshevsky heard a musical tone played he would immediately see a colour, touch would trigger a taste sensation, and so on for each of the senses…
His memory was so powerful that he could still recall decades-old events and experiences in perfect minute detail. After he discovered his own abilities, he performed as a mnemonist; but this created confusion in his mind. He went as far as writing things down on paper and burning it, so that he could see the words in cinders, in a desperate attempt to forget them. Some later mnemonists have speculated that this could have been a mentalist’s technique for writing things down to later commit to long-term memory…
Unforgettable: “Solomon Shereshevsky,” from @Wikipedia.
* Anita Loos
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As we muse on memory, we might recall that it was on this date in 1900 that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow, it was an immediate hit, spawning a flow of further editions (soon known simply as The Wizard of Oz), stage adaptations, and of course the classic 1939 live-action film. It had sold three million copies by the time it entered the public domain in 1956.
“In literature, as in Life, one is often astonished by what is chosen by others”*…
Why a classic is missing from the New York Public Library’s list of the 10 most-checked-out books of all time…
… the New York Public Library, celebrating its 125th anniversary, released a list of the 10 most-checked-out books in the library’s history. The list is headed by a children’s book—Ezra Jack Keats’ masterpiece The Snowy Day—and includes five other kids’ books. The list also includes a surprising addendum: One of the most beloved children’s books of all time didn’t make the list because for 25 years it was essentially banned from the New York Public Library. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, would have made the Top 10 list and might have topped it, the library notes, but for the fact that “influential New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the Library didn’t carry it … until 1972.” Who was Anne Carroll Moore, and what was her problem with the great Goodnight Moon?…
[There follows a fascinating story of self-assured curator who, even as she resisted a new wave in children’s literature, was a powerful force in making literature available to all of the kids of New York.]
… As [Betsy] Bird notes in a fascinating blog post, the legacy of Anne Carroll Moore is one that many children’s librarians struggle with. “She is the quintessential bun-in-the-hair shushing librarian,” says Bird. “She’s such an easy villain.” Her discriminating book recommendations delivered from on high represent the exact opposite of the credo pledged by most children’s librarians today: that the library’s role is to provide the widest possible array of titles and allow children to find the books they love. Yet Moore did more than anyone else in the first half of the 20th century to encourage children of all races and incomes to read. To adopt a 21st century rallying cry, Bird notes, Anne Carroll Moore “was all about diverse books waaaaaay before anyone else was.”…
“How One Librarian Tried to Squash Goodnight Moon,” from Dan Kois (@dankois) in @Slate.
* André Malraux
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As we head to bed, we might recall that it was on this date in 1934 that a female black bear named Winnie at the London Zoo passed away at the age of 20. A favorite of A.A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, Winnie was the namesake of Christopher Robin’s his own stuffed bear- and the inspiration for his father’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories.
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