photo credit: Ani Od Chai

We can assay the weight and substance of a given work and argue its merits, but essentially the value of the thing is in its power to move us and hold us and remain in our minds long after the event of our first reading. For example, Tarzan of the Apes is a silly work in almost any critical regard except in the way that matters.

When art and craft are brought to a work that has that power to endure, we have the transcendent experience of stepping beyond our petty concerns into other places, in other times, and living larger lives than what we have managed by ourselves.

Not every great work is a Moby Dick, or should be. Not every reader has the stamina, or the need for the quest of a Frodo, or a picaresque journey by raft on the Mississippi. And often enough, the best of our literature is not fiction but memoir–that assembly of fact from memory that bears truth more than history.

Everyone knows that Melville’s great work was forgotten for several generations. Essentially lost but for a few libraries. That is the latent power of a great library. I imagine the moment when an unsuspecting browser happened upon that work on a shadowed shelf and wondered what the fat volume with the odd name contained—unaware at that moment that their life was about be profoundly changed.

I’ve had the experience myself more than once. As a bookseller, I’ve had that advantage. That blessing. Booksellers live small lives for the most part. We are not soldiers. We are not explorers in the physical sense. We are not often brave, despite the better example of a Henry Knox. Our pleasures are most often restrained by the limits of the octavo, the quarto, and the folio. (Melville played with us on that point, didn’t he?)

And I’ve had that great giddy moment of experience again just this past week!

There is a library in Boston which is unique to the world. It is a private library, supported wholly by its members. One of the oldest libraries in America. It’s internal architecture alone is enough to pay for a visit. But what makes it unique are its books. Every library is different in that way, of course, some more than others. Some by sheer size. Some by the quality of the collection. The Athenaeum is unique on both counts, and then some. They don’t dispose of a good book simply because no fool has stumbled upon it in a misspent lifetime or two, nor throw it away because it has been edge worn by love.

My children gave me a membership to the Boston Athenaeum for Christmas. Snow and troubles followed. The twenty-five miles or so to Boston can be a barrier in more ways than are worth recounting. The petty matters of consequence work against our best wishes. But we finally made our way there into the teeth of a nor’easter last Monday to attend a gathering of new members. Good wine and cheese were not the draw so much as guilt over not managing the visit before.

I spent most of my hours that day climbing the stairwell from floor to floor and revelling in the nooks and crannies and joy of mere proximity. So many books, so little time. You know the joke. It’s played on us.

I checked out a Ross Macdonald mystery I did not remember reading before and another title I did not know at all, just for that fact. I have been a heavy reader and a bookseller all my life and titles I don’t know practically leap from the shelves at me. This was happening repeatedly that evening to the point of making me feel even more stupid than I know I am. Macdonald was a favorite of mine in my youth and most of his titles are long out of print. But this Macdonald was not one of his best, littered with many of his sharp observations, but reduced by over-convenience in plotting and sloppy writing. The other book was worse, and quickly forgotten.

I returned to the Athenaeum on the following Friday for another assault. The quiet aisles permit unlimited skulking. I devoted myself to the third floor this time—Biography. I tried the main concourse there with its alcoves of high shelves and ladders and discovered a wonderful biography of Ambrose Bierce by his friend, Walter Neale. I read three chapters while sitting in a stuffed chair by a window over looking the ancient Granary Burying Ground. As good as it looked, I wasn’t ready for the oddities of Mr. Bierce that day. The ghosts of Sam Adams and Paul Revere lying there in the graveyard below made me think I should go after bigger fish perhaps.

I made my way up a small winding cast-iron stair to the balcony with a vague notion about Mr. Revere’s midnight ride. I have been writing about that very moment in time just recently and it would be an appropriate subject for study. But I was ambushed on my way.

Walking on the thick translucent glass floor that gives all the balconies a vague feeling of transcendence above the vaulted rooms (it’s all in the mind you see) I was struck in the eye by an oddity I could not pass without investigation: the name Norman Maclean. Didn’t he write A River Runs Through it? A nice little book. Not a favorite, for no reason I can remember. But this particular book appeared to me older than anything that Mr. Maclean from Iowa might have written. What was it?

The Former Days was published in England by Hodder and Stoughton in 1945–written by a man who had been bearing that same familiar name, but born on the Isle of Skye in 1868. He had written several novels, histories, biographies, political and religious tracts. And I had never heard of him. The third volume of this memoir, there on the shelf as well, had been published in 1952, shortly after his death. A frontispiece portrait showed a rather severe Reverend Norman Maclean in his doctoral robes. This certainly wasn’t what I was looking for. Was it?

Out of habit I turned to the first page of the first volume.

“It was called the Otter’s cave, and my first recollection of it was being taken there by my father when he set a trap to catch an otter.” Simple enough. I was caught. I stood on the glass floor and read further. By the end of the page I was in a country I have dreamed of visiting since I was a child reading Robert Louis Stevenson, and to an island I have wanted to know since—since when? I took the book down to the stuffed chair and read further. The powerful ghosts of the Granary burying ground were forgotten beside this better world of peat fires and thatched roofs and porridge.

How is a great writer forgotten? I have no clue to this mystery. Many are not given their due, but are at least kept alive by those readers who can love the finely wrought sentence and the artful word. One of my favorites, Patrick Leigh Fermor, gets a new edition every few years as the fire he has kindled with A Time of Gifts is passed from reader to reader. But perhaps this world of peat fires and open hearths is just too remote. Like Maurice O’Sullivan’s Great Blasket Island off the rocky shore of Ireland. But even O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years a’Growing has more often been kept in print.

If you Google the name Norman Maclean you get a lot about the American writer from Iowa, but you have to dig through more than a few pages to find the Scottish reverend who came home from his last posting in India during the Second World War to write down what he knew of The Former Days, a world already vanished in the cold light of new holocausts. Like Fermor, he conjures his memories with an intimacy that brings a close understanding to the reader’s mind. These were people who lived and died with your own dreams on their lips.

“It does not need a high hill to realize the joys of ascending. As you rise, how amazingly does the world grow large. The horizon recedes, and as it recedes, islands hitherto invisible rise out of the sea; new bays and lochs leap into view…In the enlarging world, the scheming of men, their toils and their quarrels, are dwarfed into insignificance. That is why the soul finds its healing in the mountains.”

And there at the top of Ben Lee, the hungry minded boy who has left his sheep to graze, has his world enlarged more than he could have imagined. “There is a cairn of rough stones, just high enough to shelter from the wind that always blows at that height. As a north breeze was blowing, I purposed sitting on the south side of the cairn, but when I got round it, there I found a woman with the wind in her hair and her tam-o’shanter in her lap, gazing at the ramparts of the Coolins. No wonder she gazed with her eyes alit, for, search the world over, you could not find a more entrancing scene. If I were astonished, the stranger was equally astonished. She wasn’t startled, for the appearance of a red-haired, freckled boy of twelve does not startle, even on a hill top.

‘Hullo! Where did you come from?’

‘The Braes.’

‘Which of the Braes?’

‘Ollach.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Norman.’

‘What else? What is your surname?’

‘Maclean.’

‘You ought to be a MacLeod with the Christian name Norman.’

‘My grandmother is a MacLeod.’

‘That explains it. This is an Island of Macdonalds, Macleods, and Mackinnons. How come you to be here and not in Mull?’

‘My father came from Coigach in Lochbroom.’

‘That is a strange place for a Maclean to be from.’

‘His grandfather escaped from Culloden and fled to the west with a companion. He settled in Coigach, and there are many Macleans there now. So my father says.’

‘Why did your father come to Skye?’

‘He is a schoolmaster.’

‘Do sit down and let us have a comfortable talk.’

I did not however sit down, but lay on a clump of heather and cupping my chin in my hands, looked up at the stranger and thought to myself that never had I seen so beautiful a woman.”

They determined that they were cousins. But he discovered more than the beauty of a woman. She found out his need for books and sent him the forbidden fruit of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides.

Yes! That’s how I first discovered Skye myself. With Boswell and Johnson.

The Isle of Skye is a place on tourist maps now. The social upheavals of the highland clearances and the rote ignorance of most modernization has cleared away the crofts. But you can still visit that place, without a passport if you wish. The Reverend Norman Maclean will take you.

The book is your ship. The library is your port of departure. You may thus become the master of your fate.

There was the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “Turmoil over the book price war took a new turn today when the Justice Department was asked to investigate what a booksellers group called ‘illegal predatory pricing’.”

The New York Times, “(Reuters) The American Booksellers Association has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a recent price war on books sold online between such retail giants as Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Amazon.Com Inc and Target Corp ahead of the holidays.”

The Washington Post noted, “The plot really began to thicken Monday when Target got into the game. It also began selling eight of the books offered by Wal-Mart for $8.99. Not to be outdone by its chief competitor, Wal-Mart on Tuesday beat Target’s price—by a penny.”

And the Wall Street Journal said, “Wal-Mart triggered the online skirmish Thursday when it began selling the 10 most anticipated hardcovers for $10 apiece when pre-ordered on its web site. Amazon matched the offer hours later and Wal-Mart then chopped its price to $9. Friday morning Amazon had matched the price.”

Ha. The good old days. WAR! Civilian casualties to be counted later.

While too many of my fellow booksellers and authors are asking for the government to step in and stop the madness before every one of the last small independent bookshops in the country are bankrupt and only the dinosaurs roam the earth, I would like to point out a couple of things to the contrary.

This is happening just because the government has already stepped into the business arena and made it possible. Any correction the government makes will only serve the interests of the giant retailers—they can afford the lawyers who write the laws. The only thing which can correct and solve this problem, as well as a thousand others in at least as many businesses who suffer under the same onus, is for the government to get out of the protection racket, otherwise known as corporate law, which makes all of this possible.

My own small shop had to endure this sort of thing back in the late 1970’s when the chain stores first moved into Boston in a big way. We lost a major part of our new book business and had to scramble to survive by filling our shelves with lower priced used stock. This is not an option for most inner-city booksellers who must pay exorbitant rents driven by tax codes which squeeze commercial property. Only the stock turnover in sales possible with new hot titles makes paying such rent rational. Take away the hot titles, and you have an unfillable maw.

It is corporate law created by lawyers and politicians to serve their own needs which makes it possible for a company that pays taxes in Delaware to open a store in Boston and run it at a loss for five years in order to drive all local competition into the ground, while covering the losses with the profits from stores in California. This is neither Constitutional nor moral, but it has been done since the lawyers for John D. Rockefeller designed the anti-trust laws that permitted him to control Standard Oil even as it was being broken up among various states in the interests of so-called ‘anti-monopoly’ politics.

This is not ‘free enterprise’. It is state capitalism. It is the bete noire of fascists. It is the way Hitler controlled the industry of Germany. And now I hear my well-meaning friends in the booktrade howling. “Something must be done. The government must help us.”

Haven’t the war machines of the Twentieth Century taught us anything? The answer is not blowin’ in the wind with the smell of burning books.

All of my rants about the death of the book are made moot by the larger context of the political powers which are at play here. Amazon does not care about books–Mr. Bezos’ best intentions aside. It cares about price points and self-preservation. I need not say a thing about the Wal-Mart—Target–Costco mentality that is not already known by anyone who might read this.

I do not expect the best outcome here. Most of the independent new book stores and local chains in Boston died in the eighties. My shop struggled through that by living on the edge for too long and thus we were finally unable to survive the doubling rent increases of the 1990’s.

I do not expect to hear any major voice saying that it is time to tackle the lawyers. They run the show. Corporate law is what it is. And we will be paying the consequences until the war consumes us all.

I was recently asked to contribute to the Powells Books (Powells.com) website as a guest blogger for the week of Monday, October 19 through Friday the 23rd. I was quite pleased to do it. The idea of a new audience of potential readers at this moment when my first novel is just out was a great opportunity.

But then there were choices to make. Should I pick a different subject each day or carry a theme. Should I be light or jump headfirst into those darker thoughts that plague me.

In the end I chose to write on a single theme, the death of the book, but avoid my worst nightmares for the sake of some degree of polite conversation. After it was done, I thought it came out fairly well. No loud ranting. No dead bodies.

Powell’s has kindly given me permission to repost my entries here and I have decided to put them all up at once in consecutive order.

1. The Death of the Book Is Not Exaggerated

Because I write this from Indianapolis, where I have been attending this year’s Bouchercon (the world crime and mystery fiction convention) I will begin with a bit of argument I usually save for later in my general thesis concerning the death of the book…

Sadly, most of the people attending looked like me–old and white…Okay, older, but still white. And though I know many younger readers of the mystery genre, they are the minority, and they are still white. Sitting in the audience and looking over the gray hair toward the podium where many fine authors were expounding on wonderful aspects of a genre which has been special to me since I was a teenager aspiring to be a writer myself, I could not help but be aware of the mortality of so many of these folks so devoted to their field they are willing to spend hundreds of dollars during a recession just to attend a gathering of fellow mystery lovers in this fine city with at least one great eating establishment (the Rock Bottom Brew Pub. I recommend the hickory burger and the house brown ale).

Understand, it is not their fault that they are either old, or older (I’m 62) or white. They were born that way. The problem is this: when they are gone, what then? When a new generation is raised on libraries without books, and instant news gratification, and text which is so fungible it leaks before your eyes, what then? And all this, when many cultures, not only elsewhere on this small earth, but right here in Indianapolis, have not yet even established the traditions of respect for the printed word which propelled Western culture for five centuries.

And this feeds into my greater worry–the cause which made me choose to write this series of mysteries in the first place. The book may not yet be dead, but it is mortally wounded. I have been preaching this line to deaf ears for years. The new technologies, others say, will not replace the book, but will only share the space, and enlarge it for all. Sure. Like the automobile did for the horse-drawn carriage. No. Not like that. More like the Cro-Magnon replaced the Neanderthal.

My thesis is that any such comparison does not apply. Before Gutenberg’s book, only a small elite could read–was permitted to read–and text was so expensive only the wealthy could afford the pleasure. A scare-house Halloween mirror version of this is what I fear most. After the book is gone, everyone will be able to read, but what they read and how they read will be determined by a few. A faceless few. An anonymous bureaucratic few.

I chose to write a mystery not to write a polemic about the death of the book (all part of the death of the bookshop, and the newspaper, etc), but to make a point of the mortality of this love I have for something mankind has done right amidst all the things we have gotten wrong. The book is a holy thing to me, and reading a pleasure and a gift I wish on everyone.

I have been a publisher and an editor of books and magazines. I once participated in the actual printing of a small school journal from movable type on a letterpress. I have designed pages and pasted them up. I have developed the advertising and marketing of publications. I have been a book rep traveling from city to city. And I have been a bookseller–this is the way I have earned my living for over thirty years. Now, I am a writer of a book, with others written and waiting their turn.

Not coincidentally, I chose as protagonist a ‘book hound’ whose devotion to books has afforded him a refuge and a living, whose comfort is shattered by the murder of woman–a friend and a former lover, but someone he is not sure he loved. This doubt, and the fact that he himself is both a suspect and a witness, compels him to find the cause of her death. Once shaken, he is awakened and can no longer sleep. Not to make too much of the metaphor, this is in kind with the death of the book itself. We take it for granted and assume that its blessings can be moved to a digital being. It won’t be. This wonderful device on which I write now and the magic software that makes it possible, is more fragile than any but a few are willing to recognize.

I don’t fear the Kindle or the Sony Reader, or the iPod, or any new device. They are wonderful in their own right. But we cannot let them replace the book.

There are many other worries attached to this, of course. I have been talking about this for long enough to make a few books out of it, at the very least. I will touch on a few over the next few days as I recover from my first ever convention.

2. A Practical Matter

Exaggeration is not necessary.

It was in a letter of 1897 about his cousin James Ross Clemens, that Mark Twain famously noted “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” He managed to hang on, despite his critics, for another thirteen years. Times were slower then. I suspect that the death of the book will occur more rapidly, though the small corpses will be with us for a bit longer.

What is poorly understood here is actually a very practical matter. We have lost the steel industry in America, once the largest such in the world by far, in less than forty years. That took place for very practical reasons. But if you had said such a thing was possible in 1960, you would have been looked at as a fool. And General Motors is too big to fail…right? It may not be as visible from 30,000 feet but a car trip through Detroit, or Buffalo, or any of a hundred great American industrial cities will tell you how quickly things can change.

The printing industry is just that, an industry, though miniscule by comparison to the making of steel. And this goes for publishing as well. Is there any reason for the center of publishing to remain in New York—one of the most expensive places a poor author must visit? Not now. Not in the age of the internet.

Even with a still small and captured market, the downloading of books onto Kindles and the like is already a half-priced convenience. But what will it be like in a few years. Even the machine that is a ‘reader’ will be made somewhere far far away from New York.

In an age of digital ease and the reduced ‘cost’ of those ephemeral 0’s and 1’s, can you think of a compelling reason why ‘publishers’ will promote the work of ‘authors’ who ask for too much? The need will be for product. The publicity and marketing departments have long ago assumed control of the editorial reasoning for what will be acceptable at the larger publishing houses.

Those same publishers who dominate what you can find at Walmart and Costco, (or any of the other ‘convenience’ stores that make the existence of independent book stores a daily struggle) are not in business to lose money. And like the pulp authors of the 1920’s and thirties, working in a medium which had then used technology to reduce the cost of publishing to a bare minimum, the price per word will fall even for the most popular authors. Can you tell me why those same publishers will want to keep alive a ‘format’ which they consider too expensive and too difficult to distribute relative to a nearly instant electronic impulse?

I cannot.

But I know this. That what happens to the reader engaged by the artful nuance of typography on a paper page while exploring the imagination of a single writer is not the same as the collision of visual information offered by the illusions on a digital screen.

I know this, that reading a book is an experience of human scale, not only proportioned to the hand but to the mind. It was made that way by the genius of Aldus Manutius and Wynkyn de Worde and tens of thousands of artisans and artists, writers and even editors (yes, even editors) who came after them.

And I know this. That if I find the original edition of a book, that it is at least what the author meant it to be, or nearly so in that contest between an author’s accepting payment and the need to pay for a meal or a bed. What you find on the screen is only what is convenient.

And this: those 3 ½ inch floppies you kept all that poetry on which you wrote in college won’t work on that lap top you bought last week. And what you have on that flash drive you carry on a string around your neck will be an artifact as useful as the tooth your ancestor once wore the same way.

You must understand this: everything we know as a civilization, good and bad, will soon be an ‘Aleph’ that even Borges could not imagine. And it can and will be lost in an instant.

It will be a practical matter.

3. Omnium Gatherum

In the October 17th issue of the Wall Street Journal there was a provocative piece concerning the new Kindle 2, by Stephen Marche who often writes for Esquire. In essence he accepts the revolutionary potential of the Kindle and proposes a new word, the ‘transbook,’ to describe the device and its cousins. I find the more humorous intonations of an ‘Omnium Gatherum’ to be appropriate. I suspect his optimism and suggest he has his historical facts out of order and incomplete.

Mr. Marche happily describes the moment in history when the ‘Kindle’ of another age was introduced: the codex. This wonderful device replaced the scroll–a single roll of paper–with what was essentially a bound volume of scrolls and was in fact the first true book, bringing to an end the tattered isolation of specific and shorter hand-written texts. This was revolutionary, indeed. What he fails to mention is that this was the very device which was used by authority to do away with the anarchy of the individual scroll, which might be produced by just any apostate who could write, and created the opportunity for organized sanction and approval (as well as improvement) of texts. The books of the Bible were thus codified by imprimatur. Heresy could thus be stamped out. It made the Pelagians among us very unhappy.

This was, in fact, the great and profound change that brought about the ‘dark ages.’ The authority of the Catholic Church was supreme and all dissent had to take place within the confines of its rule.

Mr. Marche recalls the monk Johannes Trithemius as a Benedictine scholar of the sixteenth century who opposed the printing press. He even compares him to our contemporary Nicholson Baker and that author’s recent rants against the Kindle and its kin. But Mr. Baker’s argument is more than just ‘the feel of the paper.’ Mr. Baker is a free man in a relatively open society who is worried over the further diminishment of his world, not its enlargement. And Trithemius was an occultist who recognized in the printing press the end of a more secretive society. His proto-Hogwarts School was an effort not only to garner knowledge but also to control it.

Mr. Marche then bemoans the heavy personal burden of accumulating individual volumes and the convenience of having 1500 titles in one relatively small device. He suggests a future where the ‘transbook’ will provide access to “all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in and out of ‘print’” He says, “its about what the book wants to be.” It seems to me that this is the language of the true occultist, giving anthropomorphic power to a machine.

The reality is that the ‘transbook’ will be the tool of particular interests, and with particular interests. The industry that currently produces the book will fade away, at first slowly, but then at a quickening pace, as its economic underpinning are kicked away. The cost of a single printed book will rise. The convenience of downloading text will overcome reservations. Copyrights will be re-written to serve the new paradigm. And texts which do not meet the approved standards of language, or political purpose, will be neglected and unavailable.

This condition already exists to a lesser degree. First amendment protections are already being restricted for literature not in ‘book’ form. ‘Hate speech’ is proscribed and defined by standards which suit the political interest of the moment. Criticism of certain religious faiths is outlawed as ‘bigotry’. Specific words are forbidden and removed from texts. For those who agree with a given prejudice being exorcised, all is well. But the open society suffers. The great Nat Hentoff has been warning us about this for decades.

How is it that we are to avoid this bowdlerizing castration of our literature when all text is under the immediate electronic thumb of ‘authority.’

In How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman the marvelous reach of the law of unintended consequences was described. The poorest country in Europe in the Seventeenth Century was torn by the Presbyterian reformation of John Knox. In the fervor of their beliefs, the Kirk fathers wanted every man, woman, and child to learn to read and thus have direct access to the word of God. Overlooked was a related consequence, having learned to read, every man, woman, and child would be able to read anything they chose. Within a hundred years Scotland was the richest country in Europe, and the home of thinkers who had spawned a revolution in America and were creating the industrial revolution in Britain. Could this great awakening work now in reverse as all books are contained in a single dispenser?

Never mind the impermanence of costly devices which will be outmoded within a few years, or the restrictions of software intended to meet restrictive purposes. I would have far more confidence in the future of the e-book if it were guaranteed the same freedom of the press as the printed book. Sadly, political forces are already active on the behalf of special interests. The new money is on the Kindle, and this too leaves me in doubt.

4. Apple picking

And then we have the op-ed by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, in the October 9th New York Times, which praised and defended the concept of Google Books—essentially the planned digital access to all the world’s literature. I recommend anyone interested in the subject of books, copyrights, and the integrity of text to read it.

I read his comments with horror and began immediately to write an essay on the subject for my own website. Sadly, I would wager that at the very least, nine out of ten people who read Mr. Brin’s editorial will think that his efforts are for the good and offer a whole new future for the written word.

A few weeks ago I stood in a grassy field where I had been picking apples while a major book illustrator paged through his portfolio of dozens of successfully published covers and hundreds of projects. His portfolio was in his hand on a device made by Apple. He also had the text of the books he had illustrated there as well, and numerous reference works he had made use of.

How could I not be impressed by this wizardry held in the palm of a hand? Well, let’s see…Perhaps I should highlight a few things Mr. Brin said in his article.

After mentioning Cornelius Walford’s account of the destruction of great libraries through the centuries, he said, “I hope such destruction never happens again.” Ironically, and I believe unintentionally, Mr. Brin’s previous and current efforts are part of the actual destruction of millions of books right now. Today. This minute. Libraries from coast to coast are ridding themselves of their troublesome books and replacing them with machines and software. The good intentions aside, all of that machinery and software will be obsolete within ten years. I know that as an historical fact. I cannot now access things I wrote on my Mac ten years ago.

Additionally, one might ask, what is the software platform which will be mandated to access Google’s efforts? But that would be picky and perhaps offensive to the software engineers at Microsoft.

And, given the rights to the world’s literature, will Google be writing off the enormous cost of their effort and giving equal access to all other search engines? Not likely. Mr. Brin even says as much while suggesting that by leading the way, Google will be making it easier for others to follow. I suppose,.. if you have a spare billion to spend.

Mr. Brin refers to “a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores” as a ‘black hole.’

Funny, I never noticed I was in a black hole all those years of my life spent at Avenue Victor Hugo Books, my small shop.

Mr. Brin does not even attempt to touch on the greater issues. Who will choose the works to be available? China, for instance, has already made it clear they will not permit access to what they do not like. Access is limited in all Arabic speaking countries. Who will oversee the texts? How will you know what you see is what the author wrote? Where will you go to check the text?

And something more, as alluded to here in a previous posting: is reading a Kindle the same as reading a book? Does the mind approach the electronic page with the same sensibilities? I can answer that by way of a personal note. I have arthritis in two fingers (having been a two-finger typist from childhood). I can no longer use a mechanical typewriter, despite my fondness for the machines themselves. More importantly though, I can say without doubt the way I write has been dramatically altered. I even think differently about the way I construct a sentence. Simply put, the ease of choice made in the instant as one writes has altered the way a writer crafts his work.

I don’t wish to be totally negative at this moment of small triumph for myself. I have beside me my own first book! But these larger matters have already affected my life, and they will be with us for all the years of my children, and their children.

Every age encompasses the end of another and the seeds of the next. That is exactly what my novel HOUND is about. It is most importantly about a final moment in human history, but it is also asking what is to come after. The old world, in all its aspects, has been my life. But Henry Sullivan, my protagonist, is younger than I am and thus is straddling that cusp. This story and those which follow are about a book hound, a man who finds good books–as I see him in my mind, a sort of knight errant and this series of mysteries as his sallying forth to do battle on behalf of the things he loves.

I am not Henry Sullivan. He is far smarter and braver than I have ever been. His worse limitation is that he only knows what I know. Thus he has quite a task ahead. He must first come to understand the threat his world faces. Then he must find out why. And then he must do something about it.

Understanding the threat that Mr. Brin poses to the life of the book is obvious. What can be done about it is not. Certainly technology will move in the direction of demand. The usefulness of the Apple iPod is just as obvious, and the demand is terrific. Finding a viable place for the book in a world of instant amusement will be difficult. But that is my purpose.

Now I have a book of my own. And if I can entertain a few more readers for a little while longer and thereby keep my world alive, I will be very pleased with what I’ve done. But I will not be satisfied with that.

5. Truth and Consequences

The challenge of making my case in these five short blogs is magnified for me because I am both a slow talker and thinker. I tend to work toward my thoughts in an ‘organic’ manner. That’s probably why I chose the form of the novel for expression. I am not easily seduced by sound bites.

The first line of my novel, HOUND was hidden until my editor pointed out the old newspaper adage that I was burying my lead. Yet it was that first line that had spawned the whole book and had always been the nucleus of the way I was going to approach my larger subject.

Books are, after all, the way I make my living.

It is a matter of our age that most of us refuse to deal with unpleasantness until we are forced to. There are so many alternatives. Buy a new one. Eat out. Watch TV. Download it…A significant number of my fellow citizen live their lives between a pair of headphones. It’s damn hard to hear the screaming that way.

We have thrown off the clothes of tradition and taken up the amusements of our age. Neal Postman warned about the consequences of this in Amusing Ourselves to Death, many years ago.

I was not surprised in the 1990’s to discover that my worries over the death of the book were dismissed out of hand by most people. What occurred to me then was that the whole process of recognition would be either organic or catastrophic. Nothing in-between. Now that the dying has begun, what I hear is denial. It won’t be so bad. You won’t feel a thing.

Telling people over and again that the levees are inadequate, that money to fix them is being misspent on other things, and that history has predicted a direct hit by another hurricane in the foreseeable future, is not enough, though homes and lives and the life’s work of hundreds of thousands are at risk. Afterward there will be many to blame. But there will be very few who admit, “I knew, but I did nothing.”

It is your right to go in a candy shop and spend all your pay on sweets. It is your right to put the work of your life on a flash drive. I am not asking for or wanting any government to tell you or me how to live our lives. What I am wanting is for as many people as possible to take responsibility for themselves and what they do. I don’t want my children to bear the consequences of a society which has lost its head. Go ahead, buy the candy if that’s important to you. But please don’t turn then to your government to correct your health problems because that cost will then fall on me and mine and I do not deserve the burden. I am certain I have made enough mistakes all my own to bear.

Dependency on the convenience of the internet is not a good thing. Yes, it will be a wondrous good to have all of the world’s fine literature (and the trash too) at your fingertips as Google wishes. But if you stop making choices—if you stop buying the actual book which represents your own judgment about what is fine, there will be no true arbiter of taste. There will be no true arbiter of value to separate the fine from the trash.

The book must share space in the rooms of our lives. We must make that judgment in numbers sufficient to keep the book alive and viable as an art form, and a business, with all the craft and industry behind it. What I fear at first is neglect. No one wants to do harm. But later, when the cost of the book has risen too far above the expense of the simple download, all that will be left is the kind of ‘print-on-demand’ that will homogenize and pasteurize every nuance of the arts and crafts of publishing. And with them will inevitably go content.

Already typography and binding have suffered.

I haven’t the scientific background to instruct others on the fragile nature of the internet, but I fully comprehend the consequences of what I have read and been told by those who do. For instance, the effect of a single electromagnetic pulse weapon above New York would end most modern communication in America.

I could ask, “How are your letter writing skills? Penmanship anyone? And is the Post Office up to the challenge of physically carrying all that love texting today.”

But that is not the point. Doomsday is not the real matter at hand. Such warnings will be ignored, just as we have ignored them so many times in the past. The truth is that whether or not any catastrophe ever befalls us, we will have lost a great tool of civilization.

The book is the record of what we are. And this medium does not occur in nature. It is just as artificial as the iPod. It is a product of the human imagination. And just as the iPod is the end product of a thousand smaller technologies without which it could not exist, the book too will go away if the infrastructure that makes it possible is neglected.

The record of what we are should not be left in the hands of a few. Just as the codex took the place of the ancient scroll and thus permitted authority to assume control over what we should know, the internet and its offspring are liable to central management. They will have their own purposes in mind, whether their hearts are good or bad.

We must take care.

Back in March of 2009, Terry Teachout wrote an excellent appraisal of one of my favorite authors, Flannery O’Connor, for the journal Commentary. This article was in turn written upon the publication of Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery: a Life of Flannery O’Connor. As it happens, I only read Mr. Teachout’s critique this morning when I stumbled across it in the course of another attempt to come to terms with my disdain for so much of twentieth century literature within the confines of essaying here.

No. Disdain is too mild a term.

When a body of literature so wholly beggars an art form of such importance, disdain does not quite sum up my feeling. The reputations of such luminaries as Styron, Bellow, Ellison, Mailer, Salinger, and Capote fade quickly before our eyes as the new century roars. A command of style alone does not reach beyond the page. In the end, they are dated not so much by their subjects as by their lack of courage in addressing the heart of the matters they chose. Their fearful crouch into the ambiguities of that time of troubles makes their voices weak to the ears of a new century faced with the stark-naked circumstance of proliferating nuclear devices. The few who did stand up against the cultural nihilism and physical slaughter of the Marxists and Fascists were obviously insufficient to carry the weight of an entire culture on their shoulders. Western Civilization lost the greater war. The materialism and greed of petty socialism abounds, and the natural bigotry of political faith triumphs.

This is not to suggest Mr. Teachout would necessarily agree with my own more radical attitude, but that I agree with him in his assessment of O’Connor and see it as a string to a larger question. Will the authors of the Twenty-first century fair better?

We are less than a century away from most of what are academically chosen as the ‘major’ works of the twentieth century, and more than a century removed from those of the nineteenth. The average public school student has been exposed to some of each, but by far more of the most recent work. Yet the best of the nineteenth remains with us culturally in ways that twentieth century literature does not. And though late twentieth century writers permeate the reading lists of schools nationally, there is little sense that what is being read is ‘great’ literature in the same way that Dickens, Trollop, Twain, Eliot, Kipling, Scott, and so many others were considered in 1909. Only that they are ‘relevant.’ Relevant to what, is a matter of passing conjecture.

One author who faced her moment was Flannery O’Connor. For years I have been in awe of her willing combat with issues of faith and morality. Unlike her excellent and prolific contemporary Frederick Beuchner, she did not hide in the safe allegory of historical circumstance, but addressed the human comedy as she found it. Far from the safe precincts of academic noblesse oblige, she wandered into the mud-chinked shacks and beneath the shade of the Chinaberry trees of her native Georgia and asked aloud ‘what’ and ‘why’ mankind believed.

Mr. Teachout quotes O’Connor as saying, “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

It is much the same case with any writer of the twentieth century who attempted to loudly address issues of the soul. They are usually approached by the academic as qrotesques. Only when they make their subject matter truly absurd are they praised for their faithful rendering off reality. Yet in this century, no longer haunted by Christ, the secular religions of science and politics must confront the fervor of those who believe equally in the omnipotence of a God with no good use for either.

I cannot stand outside of this confrontation with the excuse of my own atheism or a spiritual draft deferment based on my dislike for either side. My own faith is in a humanism which will only survive by active engagement.

O’Connor approached her subject not subtly, but with a keen eye for its truths and appearance. She did not impose her personal faith on her characters but attempted to understand them on their own terms. Thus she was called a purveyor of the ‘Southern Gothic.’ You see, no one would put out their own eyes in order to better see. Truly. Just as no one would strap explosives to their daughters and send them to meet the enemy. O’Connor’s hard look into the faces of her fellow human beings is too often dismissed as comic picaresque. What then would an equally stringent appraisal of an urban gangsta be called?

The beauty of O’Connor’s use of language stands easily on its own. Simply read a random paragraph. But her approach to the great combat between faith and the loss of faith (not between faiths) which was at the center of the horrors in her own time is what makes her work great and indispensible to our survival now.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/believing-in-flannery-o-connor-15085

Like a paving stone on a walk at night–no, more like a book left down on the floor where you were reading it while trying to stretch the pain from your back so you could sleep–I stumbled upon a book shop in Derbyshire the other day. I have never much been to Derbyshire, having missed those roads as I drove through England back in 1978. This particular bookshop was there at that time but in no better shape than my own little effort in Boston, right down to trying to survive by selling textbooks on the side. No, I stumbled upon Scarthin books in Cromford because I spend too much time on the internet these days. I was researching what others considered to be the best bookshops.

It’s all very disappointing to a glass-half-empty sort like myself. So many people who love books and want to work for themselves try to start book shops and fail most often by losing sight of what it is they love. I did, and I know the impulses. I failed repeatedly. But I am a stubborn guy. And then I had more success than most and I loved 90% of every minute of it and wish I were still in that war, but I am not and that is that. But, as I recall the many hundreds of bookshops I have physically explored over the years, and now consider the pale presence on the internet of those who remain as I dawdle through the ether, I am struck more severely by my own failure to accomplish in the end what was in my mind at the time.

This is all for a creative purpose. I do succumb to self-pity now and again, but I keep busy enough to avoid it generally and I have just been re-writing the third book in the HOUND series and there is a development in the plot which I don’t want to go into just now which makes me reconsider my own deeds and re-judge the values I placed or misplaced on things. And thus I found Sean Dodson’s article on the ten best bookshops in the world (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jan/11/bestukbookshops). And there I found Scarthin Books.

Now, you understand that I am judging this place from afar. But that is part of the point.

What I found amidst a list of profligate booksellers who seem to be rapt by there own appearances or terribly over-financed, or perhaps just extremely lucky in the lottery of life, is a bookseller who appears to have had and still has much the same motivation as myself. This is something of a shock. I like to think I am so unique. After all, it is one of the identification points of my generation. I disparage others who think they are special, but secretly (or not so secretly) think that way of myself.

Of all the book joints in all the towns in all the world, I think I would like to walk into the Scarthin. How do I know? Well, I’ve spent a couple of hours on their web site. I see the kind of books they sell. I have read what they have to say. There’s a swell piece on ‘the ecology of books.’ Another on the British weather. Another on ‘Cistercian Cricket.’ These are all under the heading ‘Whimseys’ along with a ballad I love. There’s more under ‘Conceits.’ By the time I got to ‘Dave’s Diatribes’ I was thinking I might have lost a brother in some parallel universe. I don’t have to agree with every nick or nonce (there is a bit on ‘health and healing’ and another on ‘shamanism’ that gave me pause…but then I have many lovely relatives who are Catholics and worse) and I can say that I feel like I could have comfortably spent my thirty years there instead of the old Avenue Victor Hugo. And this makes me re-think what I have rethought time and again, but with a keener edge.

Bookselling is a profession, like doctoring and lawyering. You don’t have to agree with the law to understand the necessity of it and the need of good counsel. A doctor needn’t make a living off of botox and sugar pills. A bookseller can be catholic without being Catholic. What is important to making a profession worthwhile is the investment of your own being in the effort. If you do it for the money you’re both a fool and an idiot. You live such a brief time, how could you waste it shuffling paper on a desk to fill the maw of some bureaucracy instead of kicking at the leaves on a walk in the woods?

If you’d been in as many of the homes of the wealthy as I have you’d appreciate the judgment. Most of them are as stupid as the rest of us and they live in constant fear of being discovered. They are very defensive about their money because they haven’t a clue how it came to be in their pockets. Trust funds and tax breaks do not give them confidence in their worth. (Thinking of Britain now—that is the great trick of the class system there. They have fashioned a duty out of their position which saves them the angst.)

When you buy a library from someone who has had the means and the time to enjoy the best literature our culture has to offer, and you find leather bound tomes which have never been read and Danielle Steel paperbacks with their spines curled you know where you are, just as you know when a bookseller is a biz-niz person or a professional by what they purvey. (I re-spell business to keep it apart from what can be an honorable craft).

As I have said elsewhere, booksellers are as responsible for the demise of bookselling as anyone. You cannot treat books as accounting tricks and keep your principles anymore than you can handle crap without getting the stink on your fingers. You cannot lose a little integrity on every sale but make it up in volume. It’s fine to sell a bestseller, but if that’s what you are in business for, you’ve made a mistake. The margins are terrible and the third rung of hell is just ahead.

I want to believe that this place is what I have taken it to be, sight unseen. Like an internet love affair. There is something invigorating about wishful thinking. It’s so easy not to do. Why be disappointed? Accept your lot. It’s more convenient to accept what you have or are told you must have instead of what you want. It’s one of the few graces of my self-centered generation that we want so much. It moves us. Often to extremes or poor choices, but it moves us. What won me to the Scarthin from the first was the sub-head to the home page: “Britain’s most enjoyable Bookshop.” My god, these folk are nearly American! Who else places joy (re happiness) in the casus belli of their founding document.

I imagine the good people of the Scarthin might be unhappy with this last assessment. They must forgive me my own prejudices.

I am now saving my pennies and have set my sights across my compass to the east. I will find a bed at the Town Head Farmhouse or some such in Cromford some day sooner than later and visit a bookshop in that neighborhood.

In his curiously bloodless memoir Books, Larry McMurtry says, “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely the information in them.” This explains as much as the author wanted if taken alone, but seen in the context of a life, it reveals a great deal more.

I say curiously bloodless because I have no doubt of McMurtry’s love, nor his ability to explain it. He is both an accomplished author and a successful bookman. His experience at those vocations is prodigious. Yet, he seems reluctant to bare his soul now in either calling. As if he is speaking to an unfriendly audience.

A few years ago I read McMurtry’s quest, Roads, with even less satisfaction. I love to drive. I was blessed with children who enjoy the journey, and my youthful joy at being on the road to somewhere was carried on through the more problematic years of being a father with the pleasure of my family. McMurtry writes of his own journeys as if he was cataloguing and even doing that in the manner of an old librarian long bored with his task.

Ah! I said to myself. Perhaps an answer to the puzzle!

I once knew a librarian–an ancient woman, perhaps forty or forty-five years old–when I was nine. She was my nemesis at the small Larchmont Public library at the time I was first discovering books. Her interest in books seemed entirely focused on preserving them in order, and my entertainment at the time was easily found in ways to create disorder. Certainly, in retrospect, I have enlarged my role in her life. I suspect she never even knew I existed beyond a dirty face that she banned from the premises on several occasions and frequently told to be quiet. But that’s the meat of it, is it not? The truth does not lie in the mere fact of my petty tricks and her ire, but in the very human chemistry I felt, and in the role I took for myself as a sort of nine-year-old juvenile delinquent cum Robin Hood.

I could never remember to bring the books I took out back again on time and was perpetually in debt to that small institution. It was necessary for me to liberate books in a way that allowed me the freedom to read them in my own good time. I became a thief. Among other things. I was also a liar. Thieves must always turn to lying in order to preserve their deeds. True, I always returned the books–all but one. And this, in itself was a larger challenge at times. Years later I discovered I had a small library-bound copy of a Mentor history series called The Age of Reason which had been overlooked on a darkened lower shelf. It caused me a great deal of angst and then again, a fine amount of remembrance.

And there we are with my critique of Mr. McMurtry again. His memoir lacks remembrance. This is a man who recreated the angst of his youth in The Last Picture Show. He could even famously recapture the west of his grandfathers and the great cattle-drives with Lonesome Dove. What then is his problem with Books?

I have known hundreds of bookmen in my life. Of course, I see them through my own lens. I am uninterested here in the majority who sell books because they haven’t the talent to deal with anything that is not uniformly square and alphabetically identifiable. Most of those are as bored of their work as the typical librarian, and just as sensitive to their weakness. They know in their cold hearts that they do not love books. Becoming a book dealer happened to them on their way to other dreams–as it did to almost all of us–but they never accepted their fate like a good lover does when they realize there is no escape.

I am interested in bookmen who love books, if for no other reason than to gain some footing on the ledges of my own psyche. Mr. McMurtry loves books. Why can’t he transfer that to his own memoir of that love affair?

I can only speculate.

His, at its core, is an unhappy relationship. He tells us it was begun in a gift of nineteen books at a time when his home was otherwise barren of even a Bible. Yet he is unsure of what titles were in that nineteen. I am positive that Mr. McMurtry could correct me on a thousand points of issue when it came to one title or another. How is it that the content of those nineteen had so little impact? I can and do forget my own phone number, but I can tell you within a very high degree of precision–say 75%–all of the books I read on my own from the age of nine to twelve. At twelve I begin to lose accuracy because I was swallowing more than two books a week.

I have always been intrigued with style. I am greatly impressed with the conjuring of an author. When I encounter a good trick I will often stop and reread the passage to see the sleight of hand again. It makes me happy.

I like detail. Patrick O’Brian books can get soggy with it, but that’s fine. Some people like detail more than others. I love the description of the whaling industry in Moby Dick and the building of the cathedral in Hugo’s Notre Dame or the battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables. But I can understand why people might skip those parts.

I am awed by the capturing of character in a few words. I was never as impressed by Fitzgerald as my teachers were because Gatsby is an empty figure despite all the trappings, Daisy is at best ‘objectified’ to use a currently popular term, and Nick is a cypher. The best characters in that too slim volume are secondary. Fitzgerald should have studied Trollope, Jane Austen, or Conrad.

What I am saying is that I enjoy content. I suppose it is alright to enjoy a book for its reputation among other readers. That’s certainly why most people read a given title to begin with. God forbid anyone should criticize F. Scott. Or Salinger. Or Roth. But I do because I’m an atheist, so God does not talk to me. He yells. And I take great joy in that as well. I don’t presume that my opinion is truth, much less fact. I am more likely to be wrong than right, in that my ignorance is profound. But I have my opinion and it is based on an experience with books which has shaped my life. It is as visceral as the love I have for my family. I don’t check it at the door with my hat because someone has told me to.

Mr. McMurtry should sit at his typewriter again, and insert a new ribbon, however difficult that is for him. He should sit down once more and tell us about his love for books. I want to know. I want details. I want slabber and stink. I want to know the kind of thing that will make me understand myself. Otherwise, what’s a book for?

A short but excellent article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson does the service of touching on a few of the key elements in the ongoing murder of the book. They would be called clues were the crime not committed in plain sight and to the indifference of those very witnesses whose lives and fortunes will be most devastated by the loss.

I imagine the death will be mourned much like that of a rich uncle whose testament has yet to be read. The gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts will not occur until later, when it is discovered that Uncle Octavo has squandered his fortune in recent years and there is nothing left for his various relatives or wives, much less his children, legitimate or not.

Let us look at the evidence.

There have been many articles of late on the coming of the electronic book. Mr. Johnson very wisely proffers some more subtle forensics, but most of the others have the gosh-wow of a kid in the 1920’s who has built his first crystal-radio. Oh, how the world will change! And I would hasten to add, the world did not change enough to keep that kid off the beaches at Normandy in 1944.

The first new new internet was the system of canals that enlarged our lives starting around the 1820’s. By that time, mankind had traveled on roads by foot, wagon, and coach for many thousands of years–roughly at the speed of conversation from ear to ear. One terrific change caused by the canal was the rise of New York City publishing at the hub of a new age. Railroads came along shortly after–much like wi-fi has followed cable–and increased the importance of New York as the intellectual center of the universe.

Electricity brought with it the genius of the telegraph, the teletype, then the telephone. The radio was quickly overshadowed by the television. Through all of this, the book maundered the results. Gatsby played his phonograph, the literati danced, while in the alcove by the potted palm, Prufrock, martini in hand, warned of the hollowing of mankind. And, nearby, the butler could be seen with a candlestick entering the library.

The threads which held the bindings through the centuries have been pulled in favor of a cheaper glue. The sturdy cloth covers that replaced the extravagance of leather have now become mere cardboard. The paper of the text itself is re-cycled–acid free and ready to be recycled again. All of it is disposable now. Books warp and buckle on the shelf without being read or even handled.

And what of the contents in the library safe? The jewelry is paste–mostly post-modern costume artifacts. Words are now adjusted to suit the occasion. If a word bothers you, it can be banned. If an author does not stay on topic, he won’t get a slot on the talk show.

It is time for the e-book.

It’s time that the author be dethroned in any case. Who are they, after all? Just products of their time. Their words might well have been spoken by any other. Their ideas are borrowed, are they not? They are just the latest product of an imperfect educational system. Where they differ, it is only a matter of prejudice.

It is time for the e-book.

Truth is only relative. Offending passages can be digitally removed. ‘Facts’ can be enhanced to suit the moment. And who will be the judge of that? Or is it just that–the truth has no relatives.

Who will save the Earth from these troublesome books? Recycle them!

It is time for the e-book. Have you got one yet? It can be read on the subway, or at the park. All the books in the world are in your hand. All the intellectual power of Rome! No need for libraries. No need for bookshops. No need, in fact, for books.

Technology has triumphed. No longer is the screen bleached by the brilliance of the sun…But neither is it graced by the glimmer of quiet revelation as the eye meets the word in ink on a page.

Mr. Steven Johnson refers to the book as “dark matter.” Yes! Precisely. The tens of millions of books that have shaped our culture will now be burned into pixels of light.

Mr. Johnson is clearly smitten with his toy, but importantly he has paused to ask some questions. His wariness is perhaps caused by a glance at the toys of yesteryear filling the back of his closet shelves.

As the great Google digitalizes text and makes each passage of Moby Dick available sentence by sentence, and word by word, what place will be left for Ishmael? Will Isaac be the only survivor instead? Choose your own text, and Melville be damned.

Mr. Johnson notes: “Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article–sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.”

Willy Loman might have warned, “Attention must be paid.” But with attention spans being reduced to a mere click, is it necessary to read the part about the whaling industry? Can’t I just go right to the good parts? Are you bored yet?

Will writers write so that readers can play tag with the gems and ignore the settings? The heroin of one climax after another will make the marijuana of Proust rather passe, don’t you think? Or is there time to think when there are so many links to follow? The great Google will lead us to an answer.

And when the electricity fails and the lights go out, what? Was the candlestick to hold a candle, or to bludgeon?

The theft of time has always been a primary fascination and pursuit. Beyond my own conceit, the subject is more commonly known as history. But I have always seen the subject both more broadly and more personally than would be accepted by, say, the typical academic.

Usually, pedagogic prejudice does not openly admit its failings and weakness. Needing fortification against the untaught masses who might otherwise question the tattered cloak, the academic will often throw up a screen of minutia and assumed fact and bellow its affected knowledge loudly. ‘Do not look behind the curtain.’ Information is buried in the labyrinth of libraries and ‘off-site’ storage facilities. Few professors are true scholars and anyone who approaches the citadel without first accepting the self-perpetuating rules of academic engagement will be denied entry to the sanctuary of the academy.

Some of this is understandable. The entry fee to those precincts cannot be had cheaply. But when it becomes commonplace for appointments to be made for purely political purpose, the foundations of the university are threatened. Something akin to a King who admits only the sycophant to his castle. Under siege, there are no tried and true defenders. No men of the long-bow. We have passed that stage today. Yet few disciplines are left which hold to the veracity of acquired knowledge as dearly as the small number of historians of integrity.

Certainly we have whole disciplines in various colleges which have been overwhelmed by political correctness and the conjecture of motivations completely outside of scholarship. The Lysenkos have even reached into the hard inner keep of the science departments. But there is still a corps of historians—a Swiss Guard—which holds its ranks.

In our midst we are blessed to have two fine historians working simultaneously over much of the same historical ground, addressing many like concerns, yet going about their task in very different ways. Such a divergence of method focused on the same subject is exactly what often makes for great science. Here we have great history as a result.

One historian I know from frequent visits to my now lost bookshop. The other has been in the same vicinity, and may have even come by, but was never introduced to me personally. I imagine David Hackett Fischer as a shy man, despite being a professor who has taught thousands in classrooms for forty years. I think of him as quiet and determined. There is something inexorable in his approach to a subject which is comforting to the reader. He will get there and you will know it. Because he works by day within the protective walls of Brandeis University, it was a long time before I gave him my attention. I have that much distrust toward the modern academic. I regret the delay. I have read something of his every year since my discovery of his wonderful Paul Revere’s Ride. What academic would even think of a scholarly study of such a prosaic subject? I had to read it! I was hooked from that moment.

David McCullough is a horse with a difference. His passion is to find the story in things. And for that, he searches for character. His accumulation of fact and detail is no less imposing than Fischer’s, but he weaves his threads with more splendid colors. Being from New York City and having lived close by that wonderful object, I read The Great Bridge when it was new in the early 1970’s. I think I swallowed the whole of it in a couple of days, and I have looked back at it many times since.

Mr. McCullough is a warm and friendly fellow, happy to talk to anyone about his passions, even a lowly bookseller. He works outside the academy, and thus without that protective armour, and is often dismissed by ‘authorities.’ Not that they can easily fault his scholarship, which they seldom do, but that they will not witness it without being dragged into the court of public opinion. Ye gads, he writes bestsellers! McCullough has simply worked ahead and done the unlikely, overwhelming his academic critics.

Lately I have just read David Hackett Fischer’s splendid new account Champlain’s Dream. As usual, it is terrific in every respect, opening pathways in the deep forest of my own ignorance. Did you know that the Indian tribes of the Northeast fought their frequent battles among themselves in much the same way as the ancient Greeks? It was the introduction of the European blunderbuss which forced them out of their fortresses and into the guerilla tactics which we commonly think of as theirs from the start. Did you know anything at all about Champlain other than the very cold waters that separate Vermont from New York? I did not.

Worse, my little assumed knowledge of Champlain was taken from a Catholic parochial school education which stressed the faith, religious mission, and saintly suffering of the Jesuits and Recollets who imposed their zeal on a native culture already under the physical siege of newly transported disease, rats, and Europeans. I had no idea of the deep faith of the man who brought those priests into the mix, nor of his courage, his seamanship, and most importantly, his vision. I could not have imagined that after eighty voyages in fragile ships across a treacherous Northern ocean of frequent fog, ice flows and unknown reefs, he could not even swim. Nor did he ever lose a boat under his command. Such details are the kind of hooks that keeps me on the line when I am reading.

McCullough has previously captured that elusive and difficult quality, courage, in the person of the under appreciated John Stevens, the greatest of several heroes in Path Between the Seas. The epic accomplishment of building the Panama Canal was better seen as an act of imperial hubris by some scholars. Heroes are not an accepted commodity in academic circles. Some men who hide behind ivy covered walls are reluctant to draw comparison with themselves.

In a feat that defied those who so often dwelt on the larger than life (and self created) image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, McCullough rescued a President, Harry Truman, from the obscurity of innuendo and unexamined fact. Yes, he proved, a common man might become uncommon by his own determination.

Fischer approached more iconic presumptions with Washington’s Crossing. Has anyone bothered to step beyond the painting of the Great Man standing in the small boat amidst the icy river? The wealth of detail uncovered by his research and laid before the reader is breathtaking. More than one future President stood his ground on that cold night in Trenton. Providence must have played its part as the bullets missed the largest rider on the largest horse as he rode a stone’s throw from his enemy so that he might be seen before his tired and weary men, and turn the tide of battle at Princeton. And the ‘forage war’. In all my reading on the American Revolution I had never even heard of this key victory.

Reading about Champlain’s quests, I was much reminded of McCullough’s inspiring biography John Adams. What, you might wonder, did these two men, two hundred years and two very different cultures apart, have in common? One was essentially celibate, and the other deeply in love. One believed in the liberty of the individual, and the other accepted his place in a royal hierarchy. The answer is integrity. And courage. And faith. And something else, more idiosyncratic to my own purposes here.

Both men, despite their incredible accomplishments, have been much neglected by the professional historian and for similar reasons. Neither fits easily into the pre-conceived molds of our own politically correct age, nor the parochial interests of the recent past.

And for me, their resurrections are the masterwork and cunning of artful thieves. Veritable Robin Hoods. Fischer and McCullough are thieves of times which would have otherwise been lost to the flood of intellectual neglect and the pillage of those who want their facts packaged for neat distribution. From the drawers and shelves of moldering paper and unsorted historical debris they rescued the valuable. Thieves are usually cast in a negative light. I would guess that neither of these authors would want to be seen under such a label. But this is my own personal attachment. I have always admired Robin Hood. I have read the great historian J.C. Holt’s recreation of that forest shadow. I am casting Mr. McCullough and Mr. Fischer in the role. They steal facts from the troves hidden in the Royal academies of academic authority and give them to those who are intellectually hungry.

Time is the great valuable here. These are thieves of the best sort. They bring us the most precious of gifts. Time is so easily lost and so difficult to find. Both of these authors capture a past in their pages and bring it forward to the present. I simply like the image of it. In the ‘nick’ of time, so to speak.