When my house in the woods was in danger of being engulfed by a forest fire, it was books I carried out in my arms. The diaries I began to write when I was seven have accompanied me through twenty-six apartments and houses. As cumbersome as they are to haul with me through my life, I’m not sure I could write without the works of Elena Poniatowska, Doris Lessing, and Eduardo Galeano at my back.
INTO THE WOODS
Years ago I read a calculation of the true cost of heating with wood. Considering the hours felling, bucking, splitting, and hauling wood, the cost of chainsaw, tractor, and splitter, the wear and tear on back muscles and knees, it was in the tens of thousands of dollars. The article was tongue-in-cheek, but it makes me wonder about the true cost of paper books, when reforestation, pulp-mill pollution, fossil-fuel extraction for manufacturing presses and inks, and transporting books are factored in. Ebooks aren’t much better. An individual title may be cheap and have a tiny environmental footprint, but we pay the equivalent of a new bookshelf for a device to read it on, a non-biodegradable plastic device that will be obsolete in a couple of years. It’s as if we’re back in Gutenberg’s day, paying for the pages and paying again for the covers to keep them safe.
But cost isn’t the point. The real concern is the longevity of our literature, the worry that we are risking our written culture on something doomed to disappear.
Hugh claims his books will survive 500 years or more, or he’ll give a reader their money back. He says it as a joke, but he means it, too. He likes to think his books will be around long after he has turned to dust, and they likely will be.
In the summer of 2015, a scroll discovered fifty years before among the ruins of Ein Gedi, a Jewish village levelled by fire in 500 CE, was digitally scanned, read, and translated. The charred remains were from a Torah scroll, part of the Book of Leviticus, and were the most ancient of the five books of Moses to be found since the Dead Sea Scrolls. The year before, parchment scrolls the size of a garden snail were discovered inside three phylacteries, small leather boxes with Biblical verses written on them worn during Jewish prayers. No one had thought to look inside the thumb-size leather cases until an archaeologist took them to a hospital and put them through a CT scan.
Literary survival depends on two things: the ability of a book to last through time, and the ability of readers in the future to recognize what they see.
Buried beneath the foundations of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s first and most formidable prison, is a copy of St. Ursula’s Convent, or, The Nun of Canada, Canada’s first novel, written by Julia Catherine Beckwith and published in Kingston in 1824. Books have long been part of time capsules buried under buildings and in backyards—bottled optimism, as Glenn Fleishman refers to them in his 2016 article in the Atlantic. He describes how, in 1999, the New York Times set out to create a new kind of time capsule. The editors met with techies who quickly dissed the notion that digitally encoded information would survive more than a couple of decades. Better to preserve the thing itself, they said, so that whoever finds it in the future can interpret it directly. But the editors persisted until they found a process that could store 10,000 standard letter-sized sheets of text on a 2.2-inch-diameter nickel plate. Several such plates were embedded in the Times Capsule, a two-ton stainless-steel above-ground sculpture. The same plates will be used to store the two million words and 14,000 photographs from the Hi.co website when it ended its service in September 2016. The plates have a lifespan of 10,000 years and can be viewed with a 1,000-power optical microscope.
By comparison, from our vantage point in the early part of the twenty-first century, digital books seem a dangerously fragile technology, dependent on electricity and specific software and hardware that could and probably will be outdated within a matter of years, maybe months. Applications and operating systems are upgraded at an alarming rate. Already, my AppleWorks files from a few years ago are unreadable by my new laptop. My floppy disks from a decade or two ago are good only to level my desk. My hard disks should be in a museum. I still own Apple’s first portable computer, which I jokingly refer to as a “luggable” because it is the size of an airplane carry-on and about as heavy. Given my experience with technological change, it seems unlikely to me that 1500, 500, or even 50 years from now the digital version of The Paradise Project will still exist, let alone be readable on any devices then in use.
But those tiny scrolls and that charred fragment of Leviticus suggest otherwise. A cave preserved the physical objects until an entirely new technology—one that the scribes who wrote those scrolls could never have envisioned—made it possible to read their ancient words. We can’t even imagine what technologies will exist a century or a millennium from now that will keep our digital books alive and readable.
In Norway, a Scottish installation artist named Katie Paterson has begun a project that demonstrates extraordinary—some might say foolhardy—faith in the survival of the book. Every year for the next hundred years, a writer will be invited to prepare a manuscript that will be sealed, as both printed text and on a thumb drive, in a special room in the new Deichman Library in Oslo until the year 2115. Margaret Atwood was the first. She called her text “Scribbler Moon.” It is unlikely that anyone alive today will live long enough to read it. As part of the inauguration of the Future Library project, a forest of one thousand trees was planted; a century from now, the trees will be pulped to supply the paper to print an anthology of the one hundred sealed texts.
The assumptions embedded in this project are staggering: that someone four generations in the future will know how to make paper from trees; that printing on paper will exist; that the language in which these texts were written will be understood; that a story written today will have resonance with a reader a hundred years from now. The last seems most likely: the human heart doesn’t bullet forward with the same relentless speed as technology.
“We are growing a book over a hundred years,” Katie Paterson says. The point of the exercise is to show how important today’s decisions are for the generations that follow.
I can’t decide if this is an act of faith in the future, or an astonishing example of hanging on to the past.
“It’s very optimistic to do a project that believes there will be people in a hundred years, that those people will still be reading, that they will be interested in opening all of these boxes and seeing what’s inside them, and that we will be able to communicate across time, which is what any book is in any case, it is always a communication across space and time,” Atwood mused for a video camera as she leaned against a tree near the newly planted forest.
What will technology be like a hundred years from now: that’s the million-dollar question. Perhaps printed books will have gone the way of the scroll. Just in case, Katie Paterson has arranged for a printing press to be stored in the library so that future generations can figure out the process for printing a paper book.
“Future Library is hopeful in its essence because it believes there’s going to be a reader in the future,” says Katie.
Atwood smiles her characteristic wry smile. “Nature doesn’t really care whether there are human beings or not.”
Or books, for that matter.
IN PURSUIT OF IMPERFECTION
The paradigm shift that Gutenberg’s invention provoked took hundreds of years to unfold. No one person’s lifetime spanned the entire transition. Technological innovation moves faster now but, even so, digitization is not a moment, it’s an era. We are in a privileged and horrifying position: we see the before and we catch a glimpse of the after, but we will never see it all.
In the course of these many months of thinking about books, I have come to view them as very odd things. Thoughts and stories locked into a form. Inflexible. Inert. I suppose that’s their charm. But it is also their great failing.
In 2015, book lovers pointed to a momentary decline in ebook sales with relief. “See?” they cheered. “The sky i
s not falling!” Maybe ebooks would be the eight-track tapes of literature, after all.
That same year, for the first time since 2007, sales of printed books showed an upturn. News headlines were jubilant. But a closer look showed the increase was only 0.3 percent. Moreover, the uptick was due in large part to the popularity of adult colouring books. There was a slight bump in backlist sales, but sales of newly published print books continued to decline. When the stats were broken down by genre, classics and horror sales jumped thirty-three percent while photography, art, and design book sales rose sixty percent. Adult fiction sales were up marginally at two percent.
It’s true that 2015 ebook sales were down eleven percent. Overall, the big decline was in YA, mostly due to a lack of a big Harry Potter–style mega hit. Adult ebook sales were relatively stable. But that is the story only for ebooks sold by print publishers. Amazon doesn’t share its detailed sales figures, and in 2015, that eretailer listed four million titles, up from 600,000 six years ago. A third of their best-selling ebooks are self-published.
It is safe to say that the horse is out of the barn. The worm has turned, and so has the milk, and there is no turning either one back. Digital and print may well co-exist comfortably for hundreds of years—the resilience of print has surprised almost everyone in the industry—but ebooks are not going away. Chances are good that ebooks or some further refinement of the electronic principle will eventually push printed books to the margins, just as the codex eventually made scrolls obsolete. As publishing critic Jane Friedman notes, we crossed the digital divide in 2008 and are well on the other side. It’s not a question of making peace between print and digital. The digital world is here. Now.
It is curious that we are still so resistant to a cycle that plays out again and again, throughout history and our own lives. In a hundred different ways, ebooks are more convenient and reading them is every bit as pleasurable as reading in print. In just as many ways, paper books are pure delight. Why not embrace both? Maybe scrolls have a place, too. I look at those elegant sculptures rescued from Pompeii, the woman with a scroll draped lightly from one hand to the other, and I think, Yes! Imagine the silky feel of vellum under the finger. Imagine how easy it would be to lay down a scroll and never lose one’s place. Diversity, whether in a forest or in publishing, is essential for survival. Perhaps, if books are to survive, we must have it all.
The book is not dead. Let me be more specific: the print book is not dead. Its demise has been prematurely proclaimed. Paper and ink bound on one side has a lot of life left in it yet, although my bet is that it won’t last forever.
And with apologies to my geeky friends, digital is not forever, either. Something better will come along, and we’ll ditch pixels as gaily as we tossed aside our quill pens. Just wait and see.
What we are experiencing is an interregnum, or perhaps a purgatory. As Paul La Farge puts it in “The Deep Space of Digital Reading,” we’re in the crouch before the leap. The reading brain will adapt to what it reads: the more we skim, the more we will skip lightly across sentences; the more we dive deep, the more we’ll be inclined to explore.
Technologies come and go. What is eternal, it seems, is the human craving for story. In 2012, there were 300,000 new publisher-produced books and 391,000 self-published books in the United States alone, as well as ten million reissues and reprints. Clay tablets, parchment scrolls, vellum codices, paper books, bytes on screens—it hardly matters how we get our fix so long as there is a way to read what we want to know of the world.
The awful, wonderful truth is, we humans are deeply flawed. We are all Stupid Merilyns and Stupid Hughs. This is why we so desperately need stories: to escape our fate, to cope, to learn, to remember. And it is why every technology we invent to share our stories is bound to fail eventually, to prove inadequate to the task, each defect paving the way for the next best thing.
Any blemish, any glitch or slip-up, any smudgy fingerprint on pristine paper may become tomorrow’s treasure, the answer to some unimagined, unimaginable question. The thrill that keeps us going is we never know which weakness will save us, or which strength. We have to be discerning, vigilant, savvy. We have to remember to have fun. To play. If the making of The Paradise Project has taught me anything, it’s that our humanity doesn’t dwell in one in technology or another. It rests in our ability to create, to see the world from more points of view than just our own. We need stories. How we read them doesn’t matter one single whit.
At ten o’clock on the night before the launch, I receive an email from Hugh. He’s finished. One hundred and twenty-five books are printed, bound inside their covers, and each slipped into its handmade sleeve fitted with a paper knife and instructions for cutting open the pages and releasing my stories. I read on, expecting to bask with him in what we have accomplished. But no.
“I have an exciting new project,” he writes. “Mother never said it’s going to be easy, but don’t you worry, I’ll figure it out.”
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
PAPER
Basbanes, Nicholas A. On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History by a Self-Confessed Bibliophiliac. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
Hunter, Dard. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. London: Dover Publications, 2011. Originally published in 1943.
TYPE
Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 1992.
Dair, Carl. Design with Type. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.
Goudy, Frederick. The Alphabet, and Elements of Lettering. New York: Dorset, 1989. Originally published in 1918.
Lawson, Alexander. Anatomy of a Typeface. Boston: David R. Godine Publishers, 1990.
Sacks, David. Language Visible: Unravelling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
INK
Bishop, Ted. The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word. Toronto: Penguin Viking, 2014.
Book printed with the author’s blood: underware.nl/publications/the_book_of_war_mortification_and_love/general.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Thomas Common. Originally published between 1883 and 1891. Available on Kindle or for free download at holybooks.com/thus-spoke-zarathustra-friedrich-nietzsche.
PRESS
Man, John. The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed the World. London: Review, 2002.
BOOK
Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.
Calasso, Roberto. The Art of the Publisher. Translated by Richard Dixon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Carrière, Jean-Claude, and Umberto Eco. This Is Not the End of the Book: Two Great Men Discuss Our Digital Future. A conversation curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac. Translated by Polly McLean. London: Harvill Secker, 2009.
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.
Coady, Lynn. Who Needs Books? Reading in the Digital Age. CLC Kreisel Lecture Series. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016.
Fadiman, Anne. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Ferris, Jabr. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens,” Scientific American, April 11, 2013.
Harris, Michael. The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014.
Helprin, Mark. Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. New York: Harper, 2009.
Lyons, Martyn. Books: A Living History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011.
Manguel, Alberto. A History
of Reading. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996.
Manguel, Alberto. City of Words. CBC Massey Lectures Series. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2007.
Parks, Tim. Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books. New York: New York Review Books, 2015.
Socken, Paul, ed. The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.
Suarez, Michael F., S. J. Woudhoysen, and H. R. Woudhoysen, eds. The Book: A Global History. London: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
The Future Library: KatiePaterson.org.
The History of Bookbinding: lib.msu.edu/exhibits/historyofbinding/index.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without Hugh Barclay, this book would still be a rattling of random thoughts in my brain. He not only published The Paradise Project as an exquisite handmade letterpress book, he welcomed me into his personal paradise, where an honest, inquiring mind and an unfettered spirit are valued above anything, where joy is the objective. Hugh has changed my life, and I thank him for that.
My sons have changed my life, too, in more ways than I can count. What a pleasure it has been to work with Erik to produce the digital version of The Paradise Project and with Karl to produce the audio versions of my stories. And what a delight to follow the paper/ink/book trail back through our lives together. My two sons mean more to me than anything in this world.
Thank you to all the creative folks involved in the making of The Paradise Project, both print and digital, especially Emily Cook, Mico Mazza, Richard Kohar, Faye Batchelor, and Laura Elston.
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