On Libraries

I imagine that Zenodotus must be spinning in his grave. Don't remember who Zenodotus was? Let me give you a hint: had he married a modern girl, her name very likely would have been Marian.* Still don't know? Zenodotus was the first head of the great library at Alexandria. He was also the first to employ alphabetical order as a means of organizing materials.

According to this CNN article, the future of libraries as we know them is changing, and fast. The article describes moves by some libraries to become digital centers of information exchange. Books not required.

I am getting tired of making the same statements everywhere I go, but here I am saying the same ol' same ol'. I am not a luddite. I use the Internet, word processing, spreadsheets, blogs, Twitter, the whole nine yards. But I agree with Maryanne Wolf in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, that something different happens neuronally, cognitively, and emotionally when we read a book than when we read the same text digitized. There is a depth of processing that tends to occur in the former method that does not take place in the latter. Mark Bauerlein in his amply researched and annotated book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future concurs.

Of course, in an age and culture that recognizes not the value of the specific and the particular, assuming as they do that content in one format is the same in another, could not possibly appreciate the aesthetic value of holding a book in one's hand, inhaling the fragrance of the newly printed page or the page grown musty with age, annotating in the margins. Then again, neither our present age nor our culture seem capable of acknowledging such a thing as aesthetic value to begin with.

A friend recently gave me a beautiful leather-bound volume of Pope's translation of the Iliad. It sits proudly beside its companion volume, the Odyssey. I would prefer to read my favorite poet's version of one of my favorite stories from those volumes than from any of the innumerable websites on which they exist. I can only hope that they will remain on more bookshelves than just my own.



*For those who did not get the clue, this is a reference to the song "Marian the Librarian" from the musical Music Man.