Blatant Berry: Living with Books
Now that we’re digitizing our library, what will replace the books?
John N. Berry III, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 11/1/2005
It is my birthday (2009), and my favorite gift is one of those new personal digitizers. It is top of the line and came with search software, a web crawler, and a very effective copyright cop alert so I can download at will, confident I won’t be monitored or busted for infringement. I’ve already put all the documentation and manuals for all our home appliances, technology, cars, and equipment in the database, along with manuals for all the software that operates the house.
My plan now is to digitize our books, our home library. First, I’ll put the cookbook collection into the database, then all my history and politics—in fact all of the nonfiction and the other reference books. Finally, I’ll digitize all the fiction: novels and volumes of poetry and movies.
Our toughest problem has been deciding what we’ll buy to replace all our bookcases. We have a pretty eclectic collection now, ranging from the stacked oak sets with the glass doors to the red bricks with the cedar (or maybe it’s redwood) shelves. We even have one made by stacking those empty, square Bombay Gin bottles and putting a pine shelf every five or six bottles.
We may move soon, and I can’t say I’ll miss packing up the infernal books. We have several thousand, some of which date back to our college days. We went down to IKEA and over to our favorite antiques places to see what we could find to put where the bookcases used to be. Nothing leapt off the shelves. Our TV tubes, computers, printers, and all that stuff are already well housed. And we can’t afford any of the new art we’d like to put on those walls, although I suppose we could download at least our favorite pictures and even buy knockoffs of good sculpture, but I’m enough of a purist to want originals.
Like I said, I always hated moving the damned books. Until the other day I was cursing myself for having held on to so many. I couldn’t imagine why we had such a big ­collection.
Of course, we use the cookbooks, but we’ve answered most of our information questions on the web for years. I still occasionally look at the travel and art books, and now and then I dip into the poetry and fiction, although I rarely read an entire book anymore. We download all the new fiction and movies from the public library.
As I begin to digitize our library, though, I realize that I always loved living with books. They decorated our walls in their multicolored and multisized bookcases and their own varieties of size, shape, and color. They entertained, too.
Yes, what I’ll really miss when the books are gone is the heft and shape and feel of them. The way they smell. I’ll miss discovering scraps of paper or marginal notes left by other readers, or rediscovering my own highlights in a text or history book or novel. It is fun, and often surprising, to see what I thought was important enough to mark in the pages of a book, to deface it, two or three decades ago.
That’s it: I’m going to miss living with the books. Living with Books, that was the title of Helen E. Haines fine old work, subtitled The Art of Book Selection (Columbia Univ., 1935; 2d ed., 1950). It is one of the many books about books that was required reading when I went to library school at Simmons.
So as I now begin digitizing our home library, I’ve already begun to miss my books. I can’t seem to find a satisfying replacement for them when the digitization is done.
You know what, to hell with it! Out they go!
