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LITERATURE and POLITICS5
The history of libraries is also the story of their destruction
LIKE powdered wigs and penny-farthings, books are becoming things of the past, still hanging around but superseded. We continue to read, but books make up a diminishing proportion of the material we run our eyes over. Two months ago Amazon launched Kindle 2, a hand-held reading device at a more or less affordable price of $US359 ($510), and it has convinced enough doubters that the electronic book is here to stay. Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg was unequivocal: "It tells us that printed books, the most important artefacts of human civilisation, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence."
Look around you. Turns out everyone you think of as a custodian of the book sometimes isn't. Publishers have bookshop staff tear the covers off books and send them back divorced from the text block as part of their sale or return policy. Antiquarian dealers razor plates and maps from old books to sell as individual pages for higher margins. And librarians, obsessed with the two Ds -- digitising and deaccessioning -- spend their time taking books off shelves, to convert them into electronic content or ship them to pulp mills and landfill. Walk into any library and chances are you'll spot a computer workstation before you do a bookshelf. The library is becoming a digital environment. Repositories are increasingly databases or open access resources.
"The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost," G. K. Chesterton once said. Little wonder, then, that there has been a glut of books published about libraries lately, many of them displaying a tendency that may be described as nostalgic-fetishistic. These books express a sentimental and sensuous attitude to things bibliothecarian, and often embody this sensitivity to the past and the touch in their own production values.
Two examples will stand for the whole. First, Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (2008), a handsome volume, with creamy paper, copious illustrations and, sign of any seriously well-designed book, a colophon. The book is a wistful and wilful celebration of the library as a living, breathing thing. It waxes lyrical about libraries as "pleasantly mad places" full of the "musky perfume"...