Anyone can appreciate the desire to hold in the hands a book that was written, printed, and read hundreds of years ago. Maybe one’s own absence from the age of the book’s creation increases the sense of wonder. Maybe it’s the sight of fraying bindings, the texture of costly paper, the lingering perfume of dust and extinguished intentions, or the sneaking suspicion that you can (even if it’s just your imagination) feel other hands, now gone, where yours now rest.
My first such experience of anything that old came in college when, in my first year, a professor encouraged my Shakespeare seminar to seek out the first folio in the Williams College rare books collection, the magnificent Chapin Library. I had been to the library to see copies of the four founding documents of the republic. I had not since ventured back. Turned away at first by one of the two rare book librarians, the other fetched the book for me and I paged–perhaps idly–through the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Later, as a graduate student visiting friends in Williamstown, I read Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar in that library, only really understanding the poem upon seeing its original form. I am, therefore, as willing to make a fetish of rare books as the next person. But for all that a recent story about the closing of Heritage Book Shop, a rare books seller in Los Angeles, evoked memories of my own experiences, I finished reading with a sense of ambivalence, not wonder.
It is easier to remember what a luxury and a privilege books are if we remember how expensive books were for those living in centuries past. The wealthy had the lion’s share of books in Renaissance England–poor, even modest households might have been lucky to own a Bible. Even before that, book were precious and expensive–the labor involved in book making prior to the printing press is unimaginable to most. With relative ease, any of us can buy a shocking number of books (good, bad, or indifferent) from any number of venues. The economics of book production and owning, therefore, give me pause. As creatures of capitalism, we know rarity and scarcity ensure skyrocketing prices. And it didn’t take the advent of capitalism for books to be precious not for what they say but for the status they convey.
On the one hand, the loss of a literary landmark (as many think of the Heritage Book Shop) hurts us all. But reading that this landmark for first editions and rare works for the rich and/or famous was to close made me think that rare books should be held by libraries where they might be more broadly available. Perhaps rare books should be consulted rarely if only to slow their inevitable demise. After all, all things perish–not only the writers of books but their tomes as well, the pages devoured by their own acids, a slow and ironic self-immolation. It’s nicer to think that the words were so vibrant as to make the pages burn. In any case, maybe there are some things, like the inheritance of the past, that we all have a right to. Thank goodness, then, for electronic access that helps preserve vulnerable texts. However sad it is to see a wonderful rare books shop close–and with no disrespect to the owners and lovers of Heritage Book Shops–it makes me wonder how much it costs to have access to the past. Naturally, one might say that scholars and book collectors who want such access are themselves rare; the economically exclusive nature of such shops therefore makes sense. For a working class boy like me, shocked not by the academic rigor of college but by the discovery of intense class hierarchy at a need-blind institution, the library was a refuge. Anyone could come and experience the books. Anyone.
Like an education, books (old, new, borrowed or blue) should be most available to those who perhaps don’t know they need them. And before any of us (myself especially included) consent to the desire to own a rare and wondrous thing like an old book, we might wonder whether or not its more pleasing, more edifying, more enlivening to experience books as the touch and sound of what is lost to us, not what we possess to the exclusion of that book’s hungry, possible, and as-yet-unknown readers.