Two different and opposing examples of print today, both of which respond to some of my earlier thoughts about the material presence of books and their durability or lack thereof. The first is what I think of as a book with a seriously material presence: Thomas a Kempis’s Works printed in Nuremburg in 1494 and bound in a contemporaneous pigskin binding with beautiful blind tooling, heavy brass corner bosses, clasps, and an iron chain. Now that’s a book! And not one you could take with you on your travels, either. But, of course, that is one of the reasons it has survived: it is heavily armored. (More details in our catalogue.) My other example is its opposite, something that I find amazing it has survived at all: a newspaper from September 1648 called The Moderate (although its user has renamed it as The Immoderate Rogue). It’s just one sheet of…
Tag: technology
almost as good as a book
I’ve now read Virginia Heffernan’s column in today’s New York Times Magazine multiple times, and I am no less confused by it than when I began. Her focus in “Pump Up the Volume” is the Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader. And her basic point seems to be that it is almost as good as a book. This is why I’ve had to read the column multiple times. That’s her point? It’s almost as good as a book? That’s really what her description keeps coming back to. One of the great things about the Kindle, Heffernan insists, is that it is so un-electronic, so unlinked to the internet: Unlike the other devices that clatter in my shoulder bag, the Kindle isn’t a big greedy magnet for the world’s signals. It doesn’t pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands. It’s almost dead, actually. Lifeless. Just a lump…