Round the Wrekin with Books

I was watching Alan Yentob's programme on the BBC last night about the future of books. Co-incidently, I had been reading some articles a few days previously on the same subject, and these were from 16 years ago. The question that keeps cropping up is, "What is a book?".

On the 5th August 2010, Google Books said, "After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday". Not being an expert in the field, I have no idea as to how such a figure is arrived at. It's similar to the United Nations telling me that when I was born, I was the 75,433,461,990th person to have lived since history began. (By the way, that's the actual figure from their web site).

I would guess that throughout history there has been concern about the future of 'books'. When parchment replaced papyrus as the favourite writing material, I'm sure that there were some who regretted the move. Similarly, when codices took the place of scrolls, I can imagine some wondering where will it all end. With Gutenberg around the middle of the 15th Century originating the idea of the mass-produced book through his printing press, the lovers of beautiful hand written and hand printed materials would be wringing their hands in despair. His process has by and large remained unchanged for 500 years, but today, with the dramatic progress with the computer chip, the same fearful thoughts of where will it all end have come to the fore. Throughout history, people have either embraced change, or complained and worried about it.

But what is a book? Many people seem to have tried to arrive at a definition on which everyone can agree, but it's doubtful that this is ever going to happen. Edward Hutchins, in a posting to the Books Arts List on the 8th April 1995 says, "When I defined books for myself, I chose not to look at what a book is, what it is made out of, or what it looks like. Instead, I chose to consider how a book is used and what purpose it serves. For me, a book is 'a structure for storing and sharing information'". He goes on to discuss the views of Phillip Smith on what gives an object "bookness". Their view is that perhaps instead of saying that a book IS this AND that, we should be saying that bookness CONSISTS of this OR that. So to Hutchins, bookness constitutes "pages, covers, binding, sequence, narration, illustration, table of contents, durability, shape, purpose, meaning, use, acceptance, ISBN number, book-shelve-ability, etc".

If a book is a "structure for storing and sharing information", does it matter what that structure looks like? Has the codex had its day? Of course, for many people, how the information is contained is vitally important, and only the bound codex will do. Many will agree with Edward Hutchins when he says, "I want something visually interesting and stimulating that I can touch and handle.  The electronic age opens new doors, but it's the loss of the tactile feel of a tangible object that I miss. While computer whizzes and forward-thinking visionaries are soaring into flights of virtual reality, I'm happy to remain behind wallowing in the pleasure of cradling a physical object in my hand and savouring the anticipation of turning the next page". 

Alan Yentob, perhaps in humour, suggested that someone could come up with an App that provided the smell of a book that so many say that they enjoy. Now, I love my physical books, and while I don't have as many as I once did, it is still a delight to handle them, to read them, and to see them on the shelf. But the world is changing, and changing very fast. The discussion about digitising books seems to be in two parts. One for the present, and the other for the future. The present seems to cover books that are already in hard copy, and the future is about books that are yet to be written. Millions of books have already been digitised, and millions more are in the pipe-line. The combined might of Google, Microsoft and Apple will ensure that this trend will not be reversed, so there is little point in lamenting it. Probably more people are enthusiastic about this though, than those who are not, as it brings access to works that perhaps would be difficult to find otherwise.

The British Library has teamed up with Google to initially digitise 250,000 publications, and has made 45,000 titles available to iPad owners. Microsoft is also funding the digitising of publications throughout the world. This Tsunami will not abate until every extant publication in the world has been digitised. In addition to the three giants mentioned, countless smaller operations such as the Gutenberg Project in the States are hard at work digitising publications. Cost verses free access to digital publications is for others more competent than I to discuss.

I've been wondering a lot about the future, and where this leaves the ordinary man and woman. Digitising what is already in hard form is one thing, but what about the publications of the future? Will there still be a place for hard copy, or will everything be produced in digital form? What time-span is covered by the future? Is it ten years, twenty years, fifty years? Judging by the speed everything is happening at the moment, I suspect that it won't be at the tail-end of the time period, and the end results will probably be phased in. Being in my middle 60's, I'm nearer the end of life's journey than the beginning, so I have a vested interest in knowing the future.

I suspect that the days of the codex are numbered, and that sometime in the not too distant future, the only new works that will be available, will be digital through whatever e-reader is available. The current younger generation are already immersed in the digital world, and they and the generation to follow will only accept their reading material in digital form. There was a time not so long ago when I would have regretted this very much, but being pragmatic by nature, I now accept the inevitability of it all; but more than that, I actually think that I embrace it.

What will change in the future if new material is only available in digital form? There'll still be the need for writers, so that won't change. Someone will still have to publish the new material, so I guess that won't change. I suppose that there will still be a place for literary agents, so that won't change. What would change is a role for printers of new material. Bookshops would no longer sell new works, or public libraries lend them, but there would still be many 'not new' publications to go around.

I love reading, and I love reading in bed. Having seen so many people in the street and on public transport with their e-reader's, it all seems so much more comfortable and accessible. After years of balancing heavy books, my body deserves a rest. My critics may disagree, but if there's one thing I've learnt in life, it's that though we may not like something, it doesn't mean that it's not going to happen.

I may well be talking a load of rubbish, and I shall continue to buy the book as we know it for as long as I can. But in addition, I wouldn't be surprised if next year I bought myself an e-reader, to begin phasing myself in for the new dawn. What do the experts think?

Thought and Exploration through Books

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy". - Edward P Morgan

I have enjoyed reading other Blogs when the contributors mention books that have been of interest to them, or have been influential in their lives. I thought that I would indulge myself by mentioning a number of books that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading. They have either been recently read by me, or are currently being read. Be not afraid, my comments will be brief.

The Likes of Us by Michael Collins is a study of the white working class, particularly in and around Southwark, South East London. It was first published in 2004, and though I've had it for a number of years, it was only recently that I decided to read it. I thought that it was going to be one thing, but it turned out to be another.

Collins believes that the white working class have been demonised over the years, and this book seeks to correct what he sees as slurs and caricatures. The book is Collins' journey into his family history in South East London, and he discovers that social researchers and religious missionaries from other classes have always descended to study, influence, patronise and politicise the white working class.

Collins is unsympathetic to those who descended among them and only spent time focusing on squalor, hooliganism and crime. He is supportive of studies such as 'Across the Bridge' by Alexander Paterson in 1911. For Collins, the white working class is about family, work and community, not gang warfare, murder and flute-playing philosophers. He agrees with Paterson that the riches to be found within these districts lie in the natural goodness of most of the inhabitants. It is a controversial book in many ways, but it is quite an original examination of the past, present and future of London's white working class. It is a subject that should not be ignored.

The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming is a novel. It takes its starting point the story of the Cambridge Five; Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross, who while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1930's were all recruited by Moscow Centre as agents of the Soviet NKVD.

To quote from the book's dust jacket, "Hard-up Russia expert Dr Sam Gaddis finally has a lead for a book that could set his career back on track. He has staggering new information about an unknown sixth member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring - a man who has evaded detection for his entire life. But when his source suddenly dies, Gaddis is left with the shreds of his investigation, and no idea that he is already in too deep. He is threatened, betrayed, hunted - and alone. To get his life back, he must scour a continent still laced with lies to find the truth behind the Trinity Six".

Charles Cumming, in 1995 was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and is well placed to be talking about spies and dark secrets. The book is wonderfully enthralling, and had me on the edge of my seat, not wanting to put it down. As someone said, "It is a brilliant re-imagining of events surrounding the notorious Cambridge spy-ring". If you like Le Carre and Deighton, you will love Charles Cumming.

Seamus Heaney selected these poems himself. He was born in 1939 in Bellaghy, Northern Ireland, and has lived in Dublin for many years. The list of awards he has received is truly astounding. To many, he is "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and that he is "the greatest poet of our age".

The critic W.S. Di Piero said, "Whatever the occasion, childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present, Heaney strikes time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and nutriment of spirit. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom".

Heaney's books make up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK. This book of selected poems was first published in 1990, and is a great introduction to the work of Heaney. I love what might be called his raw power, and I'm always impressed by his 'strikes at the taproot of language' as he addresses the issues of Northern Ireland. One of my favourite poems in the book is from his work, "Whatever you say say nothing". (page 78). The final stanza of which reads,

"Is there life before death? That's chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,

We hug our little destiny again".

Bedlam by Catharine Arnold, will not be to everyone's taste. It is a history of London's treatment of its insane through the centuries. It is a fascinating book. I am interested in the subject because I spent 25 years working with people with mental ill-health, some very severely so. I have not worked in Institutions, but I have visited patients in many of them. My involvement in mental health was in the community, following the disastrous policy of Care in the Community in the late 1980's, where Mental Health Institutions were closed down, and patients disgorged onto the streets. As Catharine Arnold says,

"The mad have always been with us. Bethlehem Hospital, or 'Bedlam' as it became in cockney slang, is the world's oldest psychiatric hospital. Founded in 1247 it developed from a ramshackle hovel to the magnificent 'Palace Beautiful', where visitors could pay to gawp at the chained inmates, through to the great Victorian hospital in Lambeth, now the Imperial War Museum".

The hospital was featured in a 1940's horror movie called 'Bedlam', starring Boris Karloff. The book is really well written and documents treatments, horrors and the reforming zeal of many. As Catharine Arnold says to close her introduction, "Mental illness is no respecter of persons; we are all vulnerable, ourselves and those close to us. This is why this book is for all whose lives are touched by madness".

On a much lighter note, Thanks for Nothing by Jack Dee is the story of part of his life. If you don't know, or like Jack Dee, then this book is probably not for you. If like me, you adore his style of comedy, it is an absolute delight.

You get a feel for what's coming by reading the Acknowledgments. For Instance: "No thanks to the following, My editor Susanna Wadeson - God, what a pain she was. The photographer - forgotten his name already. Anyway, he was rubbish. Made me look like I'd put on weight. Pete Sinclair - worse than useless. Next time don't bother. But most of all, I must fail to thank my wife and children for their total lack of patience and understanding while I was writing this. Without them I would have got it done miles quicker".

In the book, Jack answers the question, "So how did you get started in comedy then?" He reveals the highs and lows of his early life and disastrous day jobs.

As the cover to the book says, "You don't just wake up jaundiced and bitter; it's taken years of dedication and commitment to brew his unique cocktail of disillusionment and bile". This is a book that gave me many laughs.

The Man Who Invented The Third Reich by Stan Lauryssens tells a story from a perspective that was new to me. When we think of the Third Reich, we think of Hitler, but we are not always aware of the events that led up to Hitler's rise to infamy.

The man who invented the Third Reich was in fact one Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.  He was a prolific writer, historian, art critic, translator and publisher. In the turbulent years that followed the end of the First World War, he became politically active as the leader of the young conservative revolutionaries in Weimar Germany. He expressed his ideas for a German authoritarian state in his major work Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), which was first published in 1923.

Adolf Hitler was profoundly influenced by the ideas in the book, and regarded himself as the activist who would implement them. As Moeller van den Bruck watched Hitler become the personification of the violent dynamism he had recommended in his book, he anticipated the horrors to come and saw no way out but to commit suicide.

This is a remarkable biography that gives compelling insight into the tragic life of Moeller van den Bruck, and uses personal testimonies from contemporaries such as Kafka, Edvard Munch, Marlene Dietrich, Nietzsche and Hitler himself to explore the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in which they lived.

Beauty & Atrocity by Joshua Levine. I have read many books over the years about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and I can say without hesitation that this is the most interesting, and satisfying of them all.

Joshua Levine had never been to Northern Ireland before he flew into Belfast in the autumn of 2008 to begin a journey. To quote from the first page, "I was in Belfast to try to discover what the Troubles had been about. I wanted to find out the history behind them, and in order to do that I wanted to meet the people who had lived through them, those who had suffered, and those who had caused the suffering.

I wanted to know why people had behaved as they did, how representative they had been, and whether they now try to justify their actions. And I wanted a sense of the future, of whether Northern Ireland is moving beyond the Troubles".

In the following 354 pages we are taken on a journey across both sides of the divide, listening to the stories of many people. It is their stories that make this book so special. There really is Beauty & Atrocity in the story of people, politics and Ireland's fight for peace. There is still a minority who cling to the view that they have to bomb the British out of Ireland and bring in a united Ireland, and the sobering truth is that it only takes one to plant a bomb.

However, what comes over very clearly in the book, is that the vast majority of people, whatever their political aspirations, are determined to make the peace process work, and that there should be no return to the days of violence. This is a gripping and moving book; one which I heartily recommend.

"If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions".

That's enough about books for now. I must get to bed and start reading a biography of Chopin by Adam Zamoyski.