Books-The Last Chapter ?.

It is strange sometimes just when you are about say something on a subject someone else will say something on it but not quite what you were going to say.I feel this about best selling author Jonathan Franzen's recent comment denouncing e books and e readers. I like Franzen's work and read his recent magnum opus Freedom over the summer. In Thomas Love Peacocks book Headlong Hall three philosophers are invited by an hospitable squire to a country house party.The philosophers are a Perfectabilian who believes everything is getting better, a Deterionationist who thinks everything is getting worse and a Status Quoite who thinks everything stays the same.When given any set of facts each of the philosophers uses them to prove his own point.I think Jonathon Franzen is definitely a Deterionationist where technology is concerned.E readers are essentially a tool and many bibliophiles will use them as such to increase the number of books they own and to conserve their shelf space for printed books they want to hang on to.As an anology music lovers often possess the same piece of music in different  formats such as vinyl ,CD and download.The increase in the use of e books  may well increase the value of printed books as less of them are printed just as there is a specialist trade in vinyl records.Record decks capable of playing not just vinyl but the old breakable 78s are available and will even turn the music into digital form for you.The invention of the automobile did not lead to the extinction of the horse  in fact there is a global equine industry.This is the upside to the argument on e books to counteract  Jonathan Franzen's more pessimistic view.None the less he obviously sees the e book as a threat and often when someone identifies a threat there may well be something in it.Optimism when there is no grounds for it can be fatal as the present global economic crisis shows.The global boom and bust of the last 20 years coincides pretty neatly with the digital revolution and they are probably  closely linked.

Books-The Last Chapter.?

So now we have the e book and the e reader which look likely to lead to the demise at least of the paperback perhaps sooner than we think. One does not need to elaborate on the advantages of this new method of  purchasing,storing and reading books.The sheer instantaneous nature of the transactions
 with no more ordering and having to wait while the bookshop or library tries to get the book you want.The whole of 19th century literature and much of early 20th century literature which are now out of copyright available free or for a few pounds.I possess a Kindle which I have stacked with nearly 2000 books and it still has space for more.My Kindle is in effect the equivalent of a country house library of the  early 20th century.I can carry around with me the complete works of Shakespeare,The Bible,all the volumes of Gibbons Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, multi  volume works such as Boswell s  Life of Johnson,The Complete Works of Dickens ,Mark Twain,Wilkie Collins,Zola,Kipling.Jules Verne Chesterton and Wells.Truly a marvel.They say you should never look a gift horse in the mouth so why do I have my doubts about this technology ?.

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

In the 1950s,60sand 70s the pocket sized paperback book was fairly ubiquitous.They were relatively cheap and in Britain retailed in the 1960s at between two shillings and four shillings in comparison to nineteen shillings for the latest Beatles LP.Most news agents and tobacconists sold paperbacks and they were sold in automats at rail stations for passengers in search of reading matter.The leading paperback publisher was Penguin which published a vast range from contemporary fiction to the classics.It also had a non-fiction imprint Pelican and published a huge range of childrens books under its Puffin logo .Other paperback companies were Corgi,Pan,New English Library and Panther.All used the pocket book format and generally had brightly illustrated covers by artists who specialized  in that line of work.Sometimes the same artists also produced the art work on  LP covers another key artifact of the time.The art work was often eye catching and helped sell the book.Penguin had originally published its paperbacks in plain colour coded editions ,Orange for Fiction.Green for Detective Fiction and Pale Blue for Non Fiction.By the 1960s even Penguin succumbed to illustrations on the covers.Penguin had originally started publishing its paperbacks in the late 1930s.All these paperbacks are remarkably durable if well looked after.I possess several Penguin Specials from the late 1930s on subjects such as Appeasement and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.They are quite readable with the paper in the pages and cover showing no sign of crumbling.This goes for other paperbacks from the 50s 60s and 70s in my collection.The paperback revolution was even celebrated by the Beatles in their song Paperback Writer.
I was surprised that from the 1980s on-wards the small format paperback began to gradually disappear to be replaced by the king sized format which is harder to carry around and takes up more shelf space and was also more expensive.It seemed that the paperback revolution was over and someone wanted people to read less books.

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

Books have always had their enemies of course.The kings and churches always tried to suppress the books they disapproved of because they were afraid they would undermine their authority.With the invention of the printing press this became harder to do and once it was known that a book had been banned there would naturally be a demand by some to read it.By the 19th century freedom of the press seemed assured in many countries.However in the 20th century the regimes of those such as Hitler and Stalin destroyed countless books and their authors. Nevertheless the printed bound paper book was obviously to most people to be a permanent artifact of civilization.The science fiction story by Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit  451 depicted a world in which books were banned and burned by a special brigade of firemen.This was actually mentioned in the Alan Yentob film which set me writing on this topic and a clip from the 1960s film by Francois Truffaut was shown in it.This prescient work seemed very far fetched and unlikely when people people first read it back in the 1950s and 60s and yet we seem to be living to see some of its predictions come true.The television screens which cover the entire walls of rooms for example.It appears that very thin pliable screens are now being developed which will be able to do just that.     

Books -The Last Chapter ?.

The question of the Ancients versus the Moderns is largely forgotten now.The large temporal gap between the Ancient and Modern worlds with its low level of literacy,small literary output and book production seen as an anomaly in the overall story of progress.To me it suggests instead that books and literacy are not a given and in the right circumstances can disappear quite rapidly from a culture. Obviously technology such as the Gutenberg Press or modern digital technology which I will come to later can have an enormous facilitating effect on literacy.However by essentially handicraft methods the ancients were able to achieve a level of literary production which was only eventually surpassed by the invention of printing.The rote learning educational methods of the ancients with their emphasis on memory no doubt helped .Some texts such as Homer would no doubt have been memorized by scribes facilitating  a rapid rate of production.Once the Gutenberg Revolution was in full flight the surviving back catalog from the Ancient World was mass produced and distributed to the scholars of Europe encouraging an educational revolution promoting literacy for people such as the glove makers son William Shakespeare.From the 16th century onward the Moderns started to accumulate their own vast archive which eventually surpassed the Ancients in terms of quantity if not of quality.   

Books -The Last Chapter ?.

Another work this time serious on the subject of the Ancient and Modern literatures was Sir William Temples On Ancient And Modern Learning published in 1690.This book is a precursor to that of Swift and in fact Sir William was a patron of Swift.  Swifts satire was basically a continuation of Temples argument that the  Ancients were the originators of Western thought  with the Moderns basically continuing and developing their work.An example of this is the so called invention of the steam engine.Work began in 17th century England    on steam engines to pump water from mines  long before James Watt(1736 to 1819).It is more than probable that the inspiration for this was Hero of Alexandrias model steam turbine. Hero wrote a book on mechanics which survived and was eventually published by the new printing press. The work contains a clear description of how to construct the model steam turbine along with a variety of other machines including a coin operated slot machine to dispense liquids.Is it not likely that amateur inventors and natural philosophers (the term scientist is a 19th century one) were inspired in  their developments of practical steam engines by Hero?.This would make Hero the actual father of the steam engine rather than as someone who somehow anticipated its actual invention by Newcomen and Watt.

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

The Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century inaugurated a new age of books and literacy.The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to a flight to the West of Byzantine scholars bringing Greek texts such as Plato with them.So by the time the printing presses were running the surviving Latin and Greek texts became the basis for the new publishing industry.Initially books were published in Latin and Greek because there was far more ancient than modern literature in existence at that time.This state of affairs continued for some time and was eventually satirized by Swift in his pamphlet The Battle Of The Books.In this satire the books of an early 18th century library dispute who should come first the Ancient or Modern books. The Ancients claiming to be original in their thoughts with the Moderns often merely commentating on the works of the past..By this time a considerable literature in the modern European languages had arisen.It is interesting to note that Caxtons printing press in England  which started in 1476 published four fifths  of its books in English. 

Books- The Last Chapter ?.

With the Fall of the Roman Empire widespread urban literacy and book production largely ceased.The market for books and the public and private libraries which bought them from the producers all went out of existence during the religious upheavals and barbarian invasions which overwhelmed the Western Empire.Eventually the only large scale body of literate men and women were the priests and nuns of the Christian Church. Surprisingly at this time a technological revolution  occurred which created the format of the physical book we know today. The volumen or scroll of the Greeks and Romans was replaced with the bound leaf book with its pages.This is obviously a lot easier to navigate around with new inventions such as numbered pages,chapters and the index.Unfortunately the production of such books was small by Roman standards limited by the small number of literate scribes within the population and also the fact that the books were produced on parchment and vellum.Parchment and vellum are produced from costly animal skins unlike the cheaper mass produced papyrus scrolls of the Roman Empire.Book production of Latin texts took place  in the scriptoriums of monasteries in Western Europe.In the Byzantine Empire the heir to the Eastern Roman Empire copies of Greek texts continued to be produced.A massive amount of the literature the ancient world simply disappeared during these centuries. To quote just one example Sophocles one of the fathers of Western theater wrote 123 plays of which only 7 survive.Imagine if we only had half a dozen of Shakespeare's 30 odd plays.It seems works often survived merely by chance.As well as the monasteries of Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire another repository for ancient texts was the Islamic world which often translated them into Arabic.The truly erudite medieval scholar as well as learning Latin ,Greek and Hebrew(for the scriptures) would also learn Arabic.The literature of the ancient world was in many cases a buried treasure accessible to only a tiny minority.Medieval European scholars knew Aristotle because they had Latin translations of him but Plato and Homer they knew only by reputation because the original Greek texts  had been lost.Some books such as those by Vitruvius on architecture survived because of their practical use,medieval architects were able to use them to build the towns,ecclesiastical buildings and palaces which were required.Eventually the medieval world produced its own literature,Petrarch ,Dante Chaucer and Malory are names that come to mind.This was small compared to the legacy of the ancient world.C S Lewis has pointed  out that there was  a prejudice of the medieval mind against literary innovation..Why invent new stories when the old ones are so much better. All this would seem to be an unpromising setting for the revolution in communication which eventually occurred.