As bath aficionados know, the critical moment comes as one leans over the edge of the tub, adjusting the ratio of cold to hot water prior to actual entry.
Distracted by the delicacy of the task on a recent evening, I accidentally knocked a book into the bathtub. I had, preparatory to a blissful soak, perched a paperback copy of Ron Chernow’s “Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.” on the thin lip of the tub.
One careless elbow led to trouble.
There it lay, stranded in the midst of the rising waters, sporting a handsome photograph of Rockefeller, who appeared, thanks to the graphic designer’s wiles, to be brooding over New York’s Rockefeller Center. And it was sinking into a liquid nest of white bubbles.
Naturally, I plucked “Titan” from the fragrant waves with alacrity. A good half of the pages, however, were gummed together. The lovely cover was curling back as if recoiling from its hapless fate.
Sir Isaac Newton had his apple; I had my bathtub. Just as the fruit facilitated Newton’s musings on gravitation, the water closing over the cover of “Titan” helped me comprehend, as never before, why some people are apprehensive about what tomorrow holds for books.
What I understood, in that awful moment when the book appeared so vulnerable, so violently out of context, was just how powerful a lure is exerted by a book’s physical trappings. That lure helps explain why we endure periodic cultural paroxysms about the book.
The latest occurred last month when novelist Saul Bellow took to the pages of The New York Times to respond to a recent Wall Street Journal essay by Terry Teachout. Teachout’s thesis — hardly novel and largely inarguable — was that the book in its present form is bound to change. Miffed, Bellow delivered a ringing defense of the traditional book.
In the current issue of Harper’s, moreover, the cover story is a love letter to the book from novelist William H. Gass, titled “In Defense of the Book: On the Enduring Pleasures of Paper, Type, Page, and Ink.”
I can’t think of another entity whose inevitable transformation by technology brings about such emotion, such anger, such furious loyalties to its current shape than the book. We readily accept — even look forward to — changes to cars, telephones, TV sets. Explore a change in the technology of the book, however, and wild-eyed bibliophiles attack.
The book is one of the few technologies in which the delivery system is insistently conflated with the meaning and purpose of the contents. If it isn’t squashed between two covers and glued into a spine — if it is, for instance, unspooled on a screen or flashed on a handheld device — it is not, some argue, a book at all.
This is a curious prejudice. Why should it matter if the words of “Moby Dick” come to you on a flat sheet in a bound volume or if they crisscross a computer monitor or if they are carved into the bark of a tree? The words don’t change; all that changes is the method of conveyance. Beyond certain ergonomic considerations (holding a conventional book frankly seems simpler than walking ’round and ’round a silver maple to follow Ahab’s mad adventures), the technology by which words are brought to you is ultimately irrelevant to the words’ value. The experience of reading is not about the physical object called the book, but about the intangible essence of language. The book is simply the middleman.
So why is Bellow in a snit? Why do stories about the Rocket eBook, an electronic volume offered to passengers on some British Airways flights, make literature-lovers livid?
Michael Joyce, a Vassar College professor and prominent theorist of electronic literature, chalked it up to our “wood-pulp fetishism.” The book, he said, “evokes for us the comforts of the beach, the bed, the easy chair.” Loose talk about the book’s transformation from a solid object to a cyberspace ghost makes people yearn for yesterday, the same way they long for the return of the nickel candy bar.
Anxiety over the book’s metamorphosis “stands for something else,” said Diane Greco, an editor at cybertext publisher Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.com). “All industry indicators tell us that digital writing is here to stay, but there’s a nostalgia people still feel. It may be a manifestation of a fear of the future.”
My experience with “Titan” was not the first time I had seen a book afloat. When I was a kid, my sister Cathy accidentally dropped a paperback copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” into the swimming pool. We all stood there, aghast, as the book bobbed on the chlorinated surface. Cathy fetched it and held it aloft between thumb and forefinger: a soggy, pulpy mess.
My glee at the obvious fact that she was in big, big trouble — it was a library book — was tempered by an almost visceral repulsion at the idea of a drowned book. Books were sacred objects to me then.
They are sacred objects to me still, but just as I’ve had the freedom to change and grow, so must they. Valuing the casing over the contents — which is what, ultimately, those who rail against electronic books and hypertext are doing — is like marrying someone for looks alone.
The looks will fade. What lasts is what’s inside.
