Goodbye to All That?: Elegies for the Book
Zipperstein, Steven J.
NEAR THE BEGINNING of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance, an obscure, despondent literary scholar, Roland Mitchell, has a thought that will preoccupy him throughout the remainder of the...
...What do I have, then, after years of indulgence...
...The perky protagonist of the film You've Got Mail made peace, in the end, with the future, and fell, happily, into the waiting arms of a benign, sweet mega-bookstore owner...
...they represent an intriguing, curious manifestation of fin-de-siècle unease...
...Birkerts admits that he is culling the shards of many, many late-night conversations with friends...
...I don't quite know what I think of them...
...Certainly she is aware of new developments— in technology, in the mall, and in the mega-bookstore—that challenge her confidence in a world where bright people will always gravitate toward the printed word...
...For example: "Of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort— God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one which the comfort is the most undersung, at least, publicly...
...Interspersed in a text of well-told, lucid tales of libraries—ancient, medieval, and modern...
...This is, of course, a direct result of the popularity of Web-based book buying and the impact of mega-bookstores...
...For Birkerts, these same changes presage something sinister, something that promises to diELEGIES FOR THE BOOK minish not only language and imagination, but all that a good life can offer...
...Birkerts has made a career as a Luddite-like foe of the new information age...
...Schwartz's doubts about the superiority of a life spent in reading don't surface here...
...For him, Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination is that essential touchstone, the artifact that represents "our culture at a moment of anxious wakefulness...
...Will such prose be just about as obscure, even for the intelligent consumers of culture, as the English of the King James Bible 76 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 seems today...
...Have I ever done it...
...Anne Fadiman, the most explicit in this regard, proposes repeatedly in Ex Libris (1998) that love of books is experienced at a pitch unlike anything except, perhaps, the erotic...
...Our culture feels impoverished...
...He is currently at work on a biography of Isaac Rosenfeld...
...Birkerts looks at their bland, blank faces, and sees a "momentous paradigm shift," the loss of all but the most straightforward, linear, and flat forms of thought...
...What Quindlen knows she seems to know for certain, and among her truisms is the knowledge that books will continue to remain crucial because "too many people love [books] so...
...What sets them apart from other, earlier books on books is an internal tension between lyrical evocation of the pleasures of book reading, collecting, even handling, and a keen uneasiness about the future of those very pleasures...
...Turn on television and you find Oprah is, of course, the devotee of new, sometimes obscure, and sometimes truly worthy, significant books...
...If those of us who live by language become superfluous in years to come, it will not be because of the advance of technology, but the loss of coherent discourse...
...This despite the waning of the more ambitious efforts at mass education launched in Trillings's day: the GI bill, Mortimer Adler's noble efforts to raise middlebrow tastes, and the once-popular phenomenon of commercial DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 81 ELEGIES FOR THE BOOK book clubs...
...Are there, she asks, other sources than reading that can, in fact, impart true knowledge...
...In this unsettling, rather rattled love poem to reading, Schwartz refuses to let herself—or readers like herself—off the hook...
...He recalls, for instance, the very recent origins (late seventeenth century) of libraries, private and public, with now-standard, seemingly timeless, freestanding desks and bookcases flat against the walls...
...She writes about fountain pen nibs, she describes those odd shelves where we place books inessential but ever engrossing (her own shelf contains books on polar exploration...
...These included demands made by the mounting, massive quantity of manuscripts (and eventually books), the desire to illuminate these rooms (before, that is, the invention of electric lighting), the fear of fire, and, at the 8o n DISSENT / Summer 2000 same time, the fear of book deterioration caused by sunlight...
...Her book—it's a pamphlet, really— offers up a collection of nice moments spent with books...
...Are they worth the investment of a life...
...For as long as many of us can remember—if we're serious about reading, that is—we've sat with paper in hand, staring at symbols to which we, more frequently than not, credit far more than mere, abiding pleasure...
...Some of television's patron saints have emerged as unlikely, highly influential hawkers of cultural literacy...
...The clerk looked at me vacuously and asked what that was...
...What, indeed, should we...
...These mean well-oiled relations between the common reader in an overstuffed chair, the writer at his or her desk, the eager, erudite publisher at the press, the Grub Street reviewer in a garret, and, finally, the bookseller—kindly, muddled, Dickensian—in a wood-paneled, unkempt shop...
...Her parents' home, too, was bookish, but also stolidly pragmatic...
...Still, the new, drastic shifts in the technology of information—as the book trade used to be called—are stark...
...The unease that they express, no doubt, is a reflection of these natural, temporal shifts...
...He sees it as a dangerously elitist destination for wisdom, with the university's monopoly of high literacy resulting in the erection of an intellectually thin society...
...Modern journalistic practices," Petroski writes, "may seem to be a long way from a scribe copying or a Gutenberg setting lines of type from a manuscript bible, but there is a certain sameness to it all...
...It was best distilled in this century in the United States, as he reconstructs it, by those fierce, uncompromising critics of the Partisan Review and other allied periodicals, in the 1940s...
...82 n DISSENT / Summer 2000...
...What these amount to, in the end, is his insistence that the computer revolution puts at risk "the formerly stable system—the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and reader at the other end...
...This is not because of his complex syntax, but because they have little experience with subtlety, with indirection, with the inwardness that James explores...
...There the foil was the university, not the computer industry...
...NEAR THE BEGINNING of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance, an obscure, despondent literary scholar, Roland Mitchell, has a thought that will preoccupy him throughout the remainder of the book...
...In contrast, Birkerts sees us as basically trapped in an impossibly wired, ridiculously loud, culturally flattened echo chamber that is itself a pretty accurate description of the bookstores of the future...
...Or look at the way in which books are celebrated in the remarkable Harry Potter series, bestsellers throughout the English-speaking world whose impact on American reading habits has been dramatic...
...I looked now at the man with more fascination than loathing as I walked by him, clutching my new books close to my heart...
...Birkerts undoubtedly has a static notion of reading—itself a product of the first few decades of the nineteenth century...
...The convenience of these virtual shops with virtual bookshelves can be enormous, their titles seemingly countless, and their prices attractive . . . .As the poet Marianne Moore knew imaginary gardens with real toads in them, we now can know imaginary shelves with real books on them...
...An entire literary intelligentsia once wrote with eyes fixed on just such readers...
...As Francesca disDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 77 ELEGIES FOR THE BOOK creetly put it in canto V of Dante's Inferno, `That day we read no further.' " I N CONTRAST to Fadiman or Quindlen, Lynne Sharon Schwartz is far more skittish about what it means to spend a life with books...
...It is easy to poke fun at her, but, arguably, this saccharine talkshow host's impact on the reading habits of the English-speaking world of the early twenty-first century rivals that of the conversationalist Samuel Johnson centuries earlier...
...He felt as though he was prying, as though he was being uselessly urged on by some violent emotion of curiosity—not greed, curiosity, more fundamental than even sex, the desire for knowledge...
...Immeasurably more threatening are the machines surrounding her, with their manuals written in monosyllabic tongue—these are packaged as things seemingly benign, but they constitute 78 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 fierce challenges, as she sees it, to the best that life offers...
...Especially since I, too, cannot resist being deeply impressed by the technological discoveries around me, including electronic books the size of paperbacks containing full libraries...
...These have meant that since childhood the authors, much like the young Copperfield, have read "as if for life...
...These tomes—gorgeous, seductive non-books—are mostly oversized, packed with pictures, and the people who crowd into the shop peruse their pages in ways altogether different, it seems, from "true" readers...
...On their faces one sees obvious, casual pleasure, but not learning...
...It seems impossible to say...
...They resemble more the surprisingly large number of recent books about the impact on one's mental health of a year or so of reading only Proust...
...it also gives us perspective on how things are done today—and how they most likely will be done in the future...
...and, only much later, with desks—are accounts of the nexus between human need and technological response...
...What saved him, in the end, were books, and these, too, are now at risk: "Suddenly it feels like everything is poised for change...
...Anna Quindlen quotes this passage from To Kill a Mockingbird, but it could serve as a summation, in one way or another, of the books I've been examining...
...He made his own way, laboriously, into the world of books via the dusty, dank, and nowincreasingly imperiled world of the secondhand bookstores...
...A sound decision, or merely a Quisling-like capitulation...
...Their sullen, taciturn attitude toward the world meshed nicely with the mess they made of their stores—a mess that promised a glimpse into the confounding brilliance of bohemia...
...Nearly all ELEGIES FOR THE BOOK are built around an exploration of deep, sustained impulses...
...Visual knowledge meant nothing...
...Its basement lunchroom has the most aggressive feel on campus...
...It is the broader, nonacademic audience for serious books that is fast dwindling...
...Petroski traces the evolution of book storage from ancient Alexandria, through the flat chests commonly used by medieval monks for manuscript storage, to the construction of the great libraries of Europe, and elsewhere...
...At times, they seem like little more than brilliant, versatile mechanical tools...
...the Humanities here remain housed mostly in these older, sedate, dusty buildings, with the sciences, the law school, and the business school in far more plush, up-to-date quarters...
...it lacks the kind of animation that regular exposure to ideas and works of imagination supplies...
...Here I sit in a book-lined study, with shelves of wood (and also, admittedly, a new Dell computer), where I spend my days reading, writing, and speaking with students and colleagues...
...Books here are the real, potent sources of magic...
...A feel, a texture, an aura: the fragrance of Shakespeare, the crisp breeze of Tolstoy, the carnal stench of the great Euripides...
...She comes back often to the theme of the interplay between reading and carnal love...
...Books," writes Fadiman, "wrote our life story, and they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), and they became chapters in it themselves...
...It is just this point that is at the center of Sven Birkerts's wild, precocious book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994...
...the slower world that many of us grew up with dwindles in the rearview mirror...
...He doesn't deny that "isolated readers"—no doubt, a good many of them—still exist...
...We like the thing itself...
...True, he appreciates that his own vision of the past— with its ideal readers sitting intently, with long hours of leisure at their disposal, nurtured by the allusive sentences of Henry James or Lionel Trilling—is, in its own way, little less elitist...
...Gone is that "common reader" to whom Trilling—much like Virginia Woolf—addressed his work...
...She recognizes that there is "something in the American character that is even secretly hostile to the act of aimless reading...
...Petroski's universe is one where technology seeks to respond sensibly—and with, perhaps, an uncanny, unlikely, smoothness—to human needs...
...The alternative is, alas, a world full of cant, a world of slogans, an empty place in which democracy itself is threatened...
...He already sees some of this in his college classroom where students can't read ELEGIES FOR THE BOOK Henry James...
...They inhale them with their eyes, they move across their pages without the tense, alert attention demanded by books...
...Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life (1998) is a breezy work built out of assertions that are too bald, even if they are mostly true...
...All this, Birkerts insists, is at risk...
...The most private of all readings," she writes, "are performed by lovers...
...That is what makes the history of technology interesting and relevant...
...Reading, she realizes, has much occupied her life...
...But Birkerts remains conDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 79 ELEGIES FOR THE BOOK vinced that reading—when done best—is the product of a stable, and, as he seems to see it, time-treasured set of exchanges...
...To us," she writes, "a book's words were holy but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated...
...He cites, approvingly, Robert Darnton's observation in The Kiss of Lamourette that "reading has a history...
...It is a life she refuses to renounce, but still she remains aware of how this quest for knowledge or thrills ("more than anything else, readers are thrillseekers") can itself be a form of self-indulgence...
...His sentences were well formed, his thinking reasonably sophisticated: he seemed ironic, bright, and intellectually alive...
...of books stored in piles, with spines visible or invisible...
...comparisons to the epoch of Gutenberg are, arguably, not exaggerated, and these gnawing cultural fault lines are by no means visible only to graying, anxiety-prone baby-boomers...
...He made his way out of all this, but it left its deep imprint on him...
...Their spectacular popularity is all the more striking since the books' young protagonists solve their mysteries in the school library...
...Wrestling, then, with my darker fears regarding computers and their impact on reading, I'm reminded that serious readers are often now, as in Lionel Trilling's day, rather isolated souls: Trilling's Columbia colleague Richard Hofstadter complained bitterly about— and examined brilliantly—the anti-intellectualism surrounding him in the same years that Birkerts insists were the golden age of high literacy...
...I WRITE THESE words in a building on the Stanford campus carved out of limestone, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead at the turn of the century, when he helped John Stanford transform his massive horse farm into a university...
...It's even impossible to know whether to bemoan or celebrate the impact on contemporary reading habits of Barnes and Noble or Borders...
...To imagine these as gone, or truly obscure, to imagine that otherwise intelligent, eager, inquisitive people around us might well feel in ten or twenty years that picking up a book is something quaint is to imagine a postmodern hell...
...We credit them, and justly so, with whatever ability we have to see ourselves with generosity and empathy...
...Seven hundred years earlier, Paolo and his sister-in-law Francesca had run into trouble doing something along the same lines: 'Time and again our eyes were brought together/by the book we read...
...They valorize book learning much more, it seems to me, than they glamorize witchcraft, which remains in the books a distant, dazzling fantasy...
...How could it be otherwise...
...It will inspire his subsequent growth as an intellectual and also as a man...
...But liberalism must, he insists, come to terms with the strenuous demands made by culture, which, taken seriously, requires much quiet contemplation, a degree of isolation, and the slow rumination showcased in Trilling's brilliant criticism...
...She has useful things to say about the ways in which women read, and how literature has tended to encourage in books for girls an interplay between reading and friendship lacking in the best-loved volumes produced for boys...
...Birkerts views himself, too, as an opponent of the sequestering of knowledge in the university...
...Among the latest shops are those on the Internet, of course, and whether new or used these tend to have no shelves that the customer will ever see...
...Both Fadiman and Quindlen sing loudly their praise of books...
...The fundamental question underlying them is, quite simply, whether books—like, say, fountain pens or manual typewriters—are now, or will soon be, the province of the picturesque, remnants of a slower, bygone age...
...She was born into a family of voracious (and distinguished) readers—her father is the well-known editor Clifton Fadiman—and she writes brief, often lovely essays around the celebration of things rarely openly celebrated...
...built and rebuilt...
...Birkerts's is one where technology threatens to supplant them, to remake human needs into something fundamentally inhumane...
...I felt chastened, confounded as to what to think...
...It is true that department stores no longer sell books, and that many of what pass for bookstores seem closer to gift shops . . . . It's a little terrifying, the fact that in many of the mall stores there is an entire long wall classified as Fiction and a small narrow section to one side of it called Literature . . . . [a] section . . . reserved largely for dead people, dead people who represent much of the best the world of words has had to offer...
...These books on books bristle with anxiety or, at least, the sense that theirs is a record of past pleasures that may never be replicated...
...And what is, anyway, this 'living...
...Were books the world, or at least a world...
...Still, books will remain—for her, for others, too, always—"the destination, and the journey...
...At other times, they feel like little less than terrifying Golems, inanimate objects now endowed, more than ever, with an eerie power that promises to flatten, not enhance, a power that could help obscure one of life's greatest, most sustained pleasures...
...He examines the history of the library in the context of a complex interplay of competing demands...
...Now, even when such an intelligentsia exists, it is rootless, cut off from its essential task, consigned, at best, to an ever-young, rarefied, elite university audience who themselves are less and less interested in them...
...They take for granted that ours is a time in which both the production and dispersal of human knowledge is being redefined...
...True, like deadly, relentless armies of ants they've eaten up small, independent stores...
...As Petroski seems to suggest, in contrast, Pepys (whose extraordinary innovations in book storage are described at length in his book) would embrace sagely the technologies of our own age, too...
...The crash pads of Kerouac's novels and also the slums of Henry Miller's were, in Birkerts's mind, the natural backdrop to literature, which made him all the more susceptible to the discrete charms of secondhand bookstores...
...These arguments are familiar enough, and Birkerts echoes many assertions made in Russell Jacoby's well-known screed The Last Intellectuals (1987...
...Her own haphazard, voracious reading was deemed eccentric, an obsession, and she now fears this may have been so...
...Abracing antidote to Birkerts's grim vision can be found in Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf (1999...
...IT'S EVEN impossible to savage television as a prime source of today's onslaught on books...
...Self-important, perhaps, but these are explorations of the prospect of loss almost unthinkable...
...Birkerts is engaged in a concerted, unambiguous defense against the grim illiteracy of the computer age, which he, too, relates in the first person, as his own story...
...Things fixed permanently in time and space, it would seem (and what appears more fixed in time and space than bookshelves surrounding desks...
...Instead of eating breakfast, she devoured the print on the packages on the table...
...The displacement of the page by the screen is not yet total . . . but the large-scale tendency in that direction has to be obvious to anyone who looks...
...These are personal, self-referential works...
...Would my mind be more free without them...
...On the streets of my morning commute, I pass company after company at the forefront of the technological transformation that so haunts Birkerts...
...We owe these pages whatever ability we have to see the world with clarity...
...Some are angry, others exude despair...
...What would Pepys have thought...
...I remember thinking that right here, in the midst of mountains of books, was proof of a decline so fundamental that it felt, simply, irreversible...
...He traces the construction of the New York Public Library and its sixty-three miles of shelving (already in 1910), and he cites statistics that predict that if Yale continues to expand its library at its current rate, by 2040 it will have to accommodate some two hundred million books...
...Petroski's tone is calm, measured, and reasonable because, as he sees it, we are faced with confusing, but not wholly unprecedented changes in the history of information...
...The stable hierarchies of the printed page—one of the defining norms of that world—are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits...
...She finds his self-restraint intriguing, but also, in the end, bizarre...
...Their electronically circumscribed world completely denies them these experiences...
...Who can fail to be impressed by the prospect of tiny chips the size of one's shirt buttons that claim to hold all human knowledge acquired since Rousseau...
...I remember sharing my college boyfriend's narrow bed one afternoon, lying head-to-toe in order to postpone temptation until the end of the study session, handling a huge maroon edition of The Romantic Poets back and forth while we took turns reading from Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience.' We didn't get far...
...The Gutenberg Elegies is best read as a stark manifesto aimed at the serious, nonspecialist reader of the recent past...
...Instead, I listened to him expound for a while on the popularity of Ricky Martin, what it meant for popular music, for ethnic culture, even sexual politics...
...Birkerts was eventually possessed by Jack Kerouac, not so much by his evocation of the road as by the way Kerouac rendered seemingly mundane, unliterary experiences into literature...
...libraries with lecterns...
...our faces flushed and paled.' They were reading Lancelot du Lac to each other, and when they reached Guinevere's forbidden kiss, their own fate was sealed...
...It was not always and everywhere the same . . . . As our ancestors lived in different mental worlds, they must have read differently, and the history of reading could be as complex as the history of thinking...
...What is, perhaps, most impressive about her Ruined By Reading (1996) is her willingness to ask tough, even awful, questions about what it means to live for reading, and what else in life one simply, even miserably, loses out on as a result...
...Quindlen's is, by far, the cheerier of the two volumes...
...I refuse, on principle, to walk in...
...Birkerts's foe is far more elusive, more canny, and, as he sees it, immeasurably more potent...
...It is much the same routine as has existed for faculty in the better-endowed universities for much of the century...
...How could I 'live' when there was so much to be read that ten lives could not be enough...
...One does not love breathing...
...When my younger daughter translates the manuals into narrative form I too can make the machines work . . . .I feel the familiar comfort of language performing its original task...
...He writes of a life with its ample share of pitfalls, deep depressions, sudden, unforeseen reversals, with valuable time lost in useless pursuits, in empty, listless relationships...
...In The Last Intellectuals, however, there is no index reference for computers or technology or anything having to do with new means of information, which were then just beginning to emerge from the garages of Palo Alto...
...She recalls her first encounter with an apartment (Elizabeth Hardwick's) where the life of the mind seemed exemplified by an actual room: "It was as though my life had somehow come true at the moment I stepped into that room...
...Is Bill Gates—whose name, as I recall, appears in none of these books but whose ubiquitous achievements seem to haunt them all—the Genghis Khan of literacy or Gutenberg's natural heir...
...For Petroski, our bookshops, our libraries, all our sources of information are in a state of creative, if also confounding change...
...This means that the "old act of slowly reading a serious book" is increasingly "an elegiac exercise...
...The analogy feels, at times, all too apt, and I bristle at it...
...There were far, far fewer readers of the Partisan Review than there are today of either the New Republic or the online magazine Salon...
...He moves deftly from past to present, from a detailed depiction of the innovative design of the library of St...
...Outside my window, just across the street, is the business school, which now prepares its students primarily for work in high-tech jobs...
...Was I living, I wondered when I first read .. . or simply reading...
...He also shows, repeatedly, how comparable predictions have proven lame, how they simply can't take into account the contingency, the sheer messiness at the heart of the relationship between human needs and technological response...
...What does this mean, they ask, about the future of knowledge and literacy, and, perhaps more pertinently, about the future of a subtle, supple take on the world that so many have credited to extensive, expansive reading...
...Fadiman is more elegiac, and also more interesting...
...life beyond books was of marginal interest, at best...
...Books on books today have become so personal and so intimate because, written amid these unsettling transformations, their subject is the fate of perhaps the most abiding loves of our lives...
...STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Stanford University...
...Later, I passed by that same clerk, and I strained to hear him talking...
...It's worth noting that these are all books written by authors just at the cusp of middle age—writers aware now, no doubt more acutely than a few years earlier in their lives, of the impermanence of things, of how easily one's cultural influence or stature or centrality can just melt in the air...
...But these books on books are preoccupied by something more basic: the question of whether any serious book— whether by Proust or Graham Greene—will retain in the near future, and in the wake of the cultural changes in technology all around us, little more than a cult-like, minuscule following...
...Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read...
...Fadiman, too, subtitles her book Confessions of a Common Reader...
...To chart the cultural trajectory of America from this book's publication, in 1950, to the 1990s is to trace a "downward curve...
...Typical of Petroski's essentially intuitive approach to everyday things, their surprising origins and their uncertain futures, are his observations about the fluid relationship between bookstores, old and new: Not all studies or bookshops need even present the prospect of their bookshelves being painted or stained...
...Hard use was a sign not of disrespect, but of intimacy...
...His most recent book is Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity...
...Schwartz cites a Buddhist named Cha, who claims that his beliefs have "curbed his appetite for books...
...But their stores are packed with good books and avid readers...
...Mine was among the first buildings...
...Am I a Luddite smarting in the wake of inescapable change...
...Once this is undermined, our spiritual values, even subjectivity, might well disappear...
...Here he met those rueful, isolated figures that so dominated the secondhand book trade when he came of age...
...In fact, it provided him with a reason to live: "Basically, I was rescued by books...
...I assumed, of course, he would sound utterly stupid...
...are rendered unstable in this exasperating, sedate, but also often stunning book...
...When I consider their impact, I conflate it with the fact that both my favorite bookstores here—one for new books and the other for used books—shut down in the last three months...
...There is considerable evidence of widespread, very serious, innovative reading today...
...It is not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it, carry it with us, feel the heft of it under our arm...
...They are home...
...Edgy, and often infused with an air of resignation, these books little resemble Robert Alter's The Pleasures of Reading (1989) or Andrew Delbanco's Required Reading (1997), both products of the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s...
...John's College, Cambridge, to his own library carrel at Duke...
...Pepys, for one, would faint at the mere sight of such places, and would set off immediately (in Birkerts's view, I suspect) to the familiar comforts of the brothel...
...A few blocks from the now-closed secondhand bookstore, a sleek, very, very fashionable shop with wide aisles displaying, it seems, fabulously expensive design books and magazines has opened, and is doing brisk business...
...it not only teaches us about the way things used to be done...
...Informal, associative book clubs are flourishing where, as often as not, writers' writers (Paul Auster, for example) are showcased...
...A spate of books—discursive volumes built mostly out of personal essays—has appeared in recent years that seeks to explore just this: the incomparable pull of words on the page...
...I recall standing a few months ago at the information booth at our local Borders and asking where to find the latest issue of the New York Review of Books...
...This is the source in every one of the books in the series of great, deep wisdom...
...This author, a distinguished engineer at Duke best known for histories of pencils and bridges, aims to provide a gentle reminder of the potential beneficence of technology...
...All reading (even of Kafka) was put to good, practical use...
...Perhaps the best chapter, entitled "Never Do That to a Book," divides all readers between those whose adoration of books is "platonic" and those like herself for whom reading more resembles "carnal love...
Vol. 47 • July 2000 • No. 3
