by Ian Sansom
Since paper books seem so clearly to embody knowledge it’s hardly surprising that we have come to believe that the possessing of books is in itself sufficient to possess knowledge. In one of his great little intellectual jeux d’esprit Flann O’Brien imagines the range of services that might be provided by a professional book handler: “De Luxe Handling—Each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation point or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten bookmark.” This is funny because it’s true. Nowhere is the disease of vanity more evident than in books and our possession of books. Nowhere is the paper disease more virulent. Nowhere has paper asserted its power and prestige more clearly and aggressively than in books. Like ancient people we have come to believe in the magic power of a talismanic object: books are our little household gods. The literary historian James Carey, going against the critical grain, has suggested that “the book was the culminating event in medieval culture,” and “an agent of the continuity of medieval culture rather than its rupture.” If so, we are living in the Middle Ages still.
Of course, I may be exaggerating. Writers, after all, are perhaps more in thrall to paper than others; like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, we are endlessly and hopelessly Morocco-bound. From a young age, writers become connoisseurs of the many fine and distinguishing features of books, from all those inviting covers to all those suggestively folded corners; so much so that many of us come to identify strongly and physically with books, perhaps more so than with humans:
My bones are made of leather and cardboard, my parchment-skinned flesh smells of glue and mushrooms . . . Hands take me down, open me, spread me flat on the table, smooth me, and sometimes make me creak . . . No one can forget or ignore me: I am a great fetish, tractable and terrible.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, The Words (1963),
trans. Bernard Frechtman, 1964
Sartre of course had a significant head start in that he already looked like an actual fetish, but many if not most other writers have willingly assumed roles as high priests and totems in the great cult of the codex.
Take, for example, William Morris. The fifty-three books produced by Morris in his “little typographical adventure,” the Kelmscott Press, were all printed on exactly the same paper, produced by the family firm of Batchelor and Sons, of Little Chart, near Ashford in Kent. On his first trip to meet Mr. Batchelor and his sons, on October 22, 1890, Morris took with him a fifteenth-century Italian book (Speechio di coscienja by Antonius Florentinus) to show them the kind of paper he was looking for: in paper, as in all things, Morris knew exactly what he wanted. “It was a matter of course that I should consider it necessary that the paper should be hand-made, both for the sake of durability and appearance. It would be a very false economy to stint in the quality of the paper as to price: so I had only to think about the kind of hand-made paper” (“A Note on the Founding of the Kelmscott Press”). False economies were Morris’s bugbear: “It is a waste of time,” he announced in a lecture to a group of working men in London in 1884, “to try to express in words due contempt of the productions of the much-praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be enough to say that this cheapness is necessary to the system of exploiting on which modern manufacture rests.” Scholars have estimated that the paper produced by Mr. Batchelor and his sons cost Morris five or six times as much as machine-made paper of similar quality, a cost that when passed down to his own customers rather precluded the poor working men from actually buying Morris’s books. But that wasn’t the point. The books weren’t merely printed on paper: they were made of paper.
As books have become precious objects and storehouses of knowledge, with an associated monetary and moral value, so too have we become increasingly obliged to protect, store and preserve them. In his brilliantly unlikely book The Book on the Bookshelf (1999), Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering who specializes in brilliantly unlikely books, chronicles the long history of the storage of books—from horizontal stacking to vertical, from the chained book to the unchained, from spines shelved inward to spines shelved outward—and demonstrates exactly how inventive and versatile humans have been in devising storage systems for what are, essentially, huge piles of paper. And no human more inventive and versatile than William Ewart Gladstone.
Four times British prime minister, and a man who might very properly be described as a bibliomaniac—he was said to have arrived once at a bookstore and bought the entire stock—Gladstone wrote an article in 1890, “On Books and the Housing of Them,” in which he claimed to have solved the book collector’s perennial problem. Gladstone set about the book question with the same gusto and enthusiasm with which he dealt with the Irish Question and the rescue of fallen women. “Let us suppose,” he writes, “a room 28 feet by 10, and a little over 9 feet high. Divide this longitudinally for a passage 4 feet wide. Let the passage project 12 to 18 inches at each end beyond the line of the wall. Let the passage ends be entirely given to either window or glass door. Twenty-four pairs of trams run across the room. On them are placed 56 bookcases, divided by the passage, reaching to the ceiling, each 3 feet broad, 12 inches deep, and separated from its neighbours by an interval of 2 inches, and set on small wheels, pulleys, or rollers, to work along the trams.” According to Gladstone, the adoption of this system in a room of the dimensions outlined—about the size of a large front sitting room—would enable the amateur book collector to accommodate about twenty-five thousand volumes. Unfortunately, there would be no room for your sofa, your coffee table, your lamps, your wide-screen TV, your knickknacks, or indeed for you. (For everyday practical purposes, Petroski usefully notes in The Book on the Bookshelf, the home shelf builder need only remember to keep shelves either short or deep, in order to prevent what engineers call “deflection” and what us laypeople know more familiarly as sag.)
The next step up from personal book-storage solutions is the institutional book-storage solutions—those great museums and mausoleums of folded documents, rolls or codices that we have come to know as libraries. Wealthy rulers, noblemen, churches, governments and various other institutions and organizations—from the Assyrians and the Pharaohs to the early Church fathers, Muslim scholars and billionaire philanthropists—have been engaged for millennia in building these veritable palaces in which to store books. (The gods arguably got in on the act even earlier: Brahma’s library was the Vedas; Odin had his jars of knowledge; and according to Jewish tradition, God keeps a Book of Life, a kind of library in one volume, which he opens on Rosh Hashanah and records the names of those who are destined for heaven.) Once having stored these precious documents, these same individuals and institutions have developed complex taxonomies in order to classify and study them, and technologies to protect them, so that this ever-growing physical record of collective memory can be saved for the next generation.
This extraordinary, never-ending process of producing, collecting and curating printed paper has become, one might argue, almost a form of madness, or a mania, like die Lesewut, the reading craze that swept through Germany in the eighteenth century. It has certainly often been undertaken in a spirit of religious and moral fervor. The Carnegie libraries, with which many of us will have been familiar from our earliest youth, funded by the philanthropic American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, were designed as temples of knowledge, with their noble, basilicalike designs and holy trinity of adult library, reading room and children’s library, attended by priestly librarians with privileged access to codes and catalogues. Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries
remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers—so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year—and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Ideas Stores.”
But there is of course another obvious solution to the book-storage problem. The problem of proliferating paper. The problem of where and how to store ideas. We could just get rid of it all. Sweep it away. Books are easy to destroy—and writers, interestingly, are among the keenest of the destroyers. (Writers who have burned or destroyed, or instructed others to destroy, their works include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kafka, Freud and Elias Canetti’s fictional hero Peter Kien, in his 1935 novel Auto da Fé.) The habit or custom of book burning goes back to pagan antiquity—the legend goes that Protagoras’s work was publicly burned sometime in the fifth century BC—but undoubtedly the world’s most famous book burning took place within living memory, on May 10, 1933, a warm-up by the architects of the Final Solution.
The Nazi book burnings were organized not by the Nazi hierarchy, but by ordinary German student bodies, assisted, as it happens, by librarians—not that they had much choice. Lists of books suitable for burning had been published in newspapers in the preceding weeks. Announcements of collection points had been advertised. Goebbels had agreed to give a speech in Berlin. And then, on the fateful night, the bonfires were lit, from Frankfurt to Munich, to Bonn, to Cologne, to Dresden, Hamburg, Hanover and Heidelberg. Songs were sung, speeches were made, and the heavens opened (like a church fête, the ceremony in Freiburg was canceled due to inclement weather). Books burned included works by Freud, Kafka, Marx, Heine, Lenin, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig—a list so impressive, in fact, that you wouldn’t have wanted your books not to be among those burned. Bertolt Brecht—in exile—wrote a poem, “Die Bücherverbrennung,” in which he expressed his wish for his work to join the inferno: “Verbrennt mich!,” Burn me!
And this, of course, is the problem. Books are so closely associated with their authors—paper so close to skin—that it’s only a short step from burning books to burning people. In Heinrich Heine’s play Almansor (1820–22), set in Spain in the 1500s, one of the characters expresses disgust at the public burning of the Koran: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort, wo man Bücher Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” (“That was only a prelude. Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too”). Heine was correct, both before and after. Confucius’s Analects was burned c. 200 BC, and hundreds of his disciples buried alive. Martin Luther was burned in effigy, along with his books. And Salman Rushdie had a lucky escape. In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) it’s the job of the firefighter Guy Montag to burn books, in the hope that if books are put to death, the ideas they contain will also be put to death. (In The Tempest, when Caliban is plotting the overthrow of Prospero he counsels his coconspirators, “Remember/First to possess his books; for without them/He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not/One spirit to command: they all do hate him/As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.”) Of course, it has the opposite effect: the burning of books fans the flames of ideas. Ironically, it is only by the burning of books that we are reminded that books themselves are unimportant.
Books aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. They’re worth more.
5
ORNAMENTING THE FAÇADE OF HELL
A descriptive analysis of bank notes is needed. The unlimited satirical force of such a book would be equalled only by its objectivity. For nowhere more naively than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest. The innocent cupids frolicking about numbers, the goddesses holding tablets of the law, the stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units, are a world of their own: ornamenting the façade of hell.
WALTER BENJAMIN, “One-Way Street” (1928)
Adhesive postage stamp perforation
The machine was operated by two women—one to load, one to unload. Powered by a small motor, it consisted of a tank about three feet wide, four feet deep, nine feet long, and was divided into two compartments. The first compartment was filled with laundry soap and bleach, the second with water for rinsing. Both were fitted with brass rollers, and between the rollers ran a mechanized belt, which then passed over a gas-heated iron roller. Designed and constructed during 1911, this ingenious piece of equipment was first installed in the Office of the Treasurer of the United States in 1912. It was—literally—a money-laundering machine.
The trouble with money, apart from the obvious fact that it’s often literally as well as metaphorically dirty, “filthy lucre,” is that demand always tends to outstrip supply, which means that if you can’t produce and distribute enough of it, and quickly enough, sometimes you just have to give it a rinse and make do. Money can take many forms: shells, tobacco, nails, gold and silver coins, wampum. The trouble with all these forms of commodity money is that they are relatively scarce, and if you’re a government, say, and you want to pay for a war, or an economic boom, you can’t just magic up wampum from nowhere: you have to go and collect your shells from the beach and string them into beads, before exchanging them for rifles, or economic boom boxes (the little-known Cardboard Box Index is used by investors to gauge levels of production and consumption of consumer goods). But you can print more paper, quickly and inexpensively, or at least give it a quick wash and go. Paper can be created by fiat. And so, in summary and in very, very short—see Joseph Schumpeter’s gold-standard History of Economic Analysis (1954), J. K. Galbraith’s silvery Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975) and Niall Ferguson’s cash-registering The Ascent of Money (2008) for every red cent and penny-pinching detail—modern economies and modern economics are basically built on paper. Postmodern economies are also built on paper, or at least on electronic money, which is basically paper money without the paper. In the words of Ben Bernanke, the Princeton economics professor who went on to become chairman of the United States Federal Reserve under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost . . . We conclude that under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.” So, it’s all good. Until the printing press breaks down, that is, or goes into overdrive. Cheap to produce, easy to store, carry and exchange, replaceable, reproducible, and easy to fold into origami animals: paper money, as it turns out, is its own worst enemy.
Nineteenth-century shares and certificates
The Chinese were the first to use paper currency, as long ago as the ninth century, during the reign of Emperor Hien Tsung, when, as usual, necessity became the mother of invention. There was a copper shortage. Chinese coins were made of copper. And so, lo, came there paper currency. The Chinese eventually abandoned paper money in the fifteenth century, however, having discovered that the more of it you print, the less it tends to be worth, but by then the damage had been done. Word had got out about the extraordinary power of paper money: the cash was out of the bag. Marco Polo, in his famous thirteenth-century book of travels, described the process of turning paper into money under the reign of Kublai Khan:
When ready for use, he has it cut into pieces of money of different sizes, nearly square, but somewhat longer than they are wide. Of these, the smallest pass for a half tournois . . . the next size for a Venetian silver groat; others for two, five, and ten groats; others for one, two, three, and as far as ten bezants of gold. The coinage of this paper money is au
thenticated with as much form and ceremony as if it were actually of pure gold or silver; for to each note a number of officers, specially appointed, not only subscribe their names, but affix their seals also. When this has been regularly done by the whole of them, the principal officer, appointed by his Majesty, having dipped into vermillion the royal seal committed to his custody, stamps with it the piece of paper, so that the form of the seal tinged with vermillion remains impressed upon it. In this way it receives full authenticity as current money . . .
Our ceremonial complications are obviously now more advanced and highly mechanized—with watermarks and metal threads, and reflective foils and coatings—but in essence, Kublai Khan’s paper money is exactly the same as our own. Coleridge’s famous poem “Kubla Khan,” which was inspired by a book quoting Marco Polo, ends with a warning:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
That bankers might read more poems.
The earliest European paper money was produced in Sweden in the seventeenth century, but it was a Scotsman, John Law, a gambler, murderer and mathematical genius, whose ideas and experiments with paper money influenced, for better and for worse, the future of Western finance. “I have discovered the secret of the philosopher’s stone,” Law claimed: “it is to make gold out of paper.” (Making gold out of paper is traditionally what writers do, of course, or try to do—the old Johnsonian “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”—and nothing wrong with that. The problem usually arises when writers try to make paper out of gold. The history of literature is full of examples of writers styling themselves as gurus, but some alas also set themselves up as financial advisers, perhaps most famously the poet and anti-Semite Ezra Pound. According to one biographer, Pound only “maintained an interest in such figures as Homer, Dante and Shakespeare . . . by convincing himself that they were really poet-economists.” Pound was particularly interested in what are called “scrip” currencies, the term used to describe any form of nonlegal tender used as money, such as, say, meal vouchers, or babysitting co-op coupons, and although most of his ideas about economics, and most other things, are entirely discredited, scrip remains rather intriguing; it has certainly intrigued Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, who often uses scrip as an example to illustrate his ideas about economic depressions and government intervention. Literary history itself, one might add, is really just a vast system of scrip, of IOUs, gift certificates and locally valid currencies. Anyway.)