BOOKS -- WHAT ABOUT 'EM?

Famous bookstore in Paris

Mike Shatzkin is a book dealer and so was his father before him.  In those days there were “books” which were “published” and “distributed” to “book stores”.  They were reviewed by “book reviewers” and “promoted” according the kind of books they were.  Promoters might be something broad like “Book of the Month Club” which also distributed, or something narrow like a trade group that needed handbooks for best practices.

All these parts of getting books out there were industrial and capital-based, expansions of Gutenberg’s printing press, still using ink and paper just like Benjamin Franklin.  The only advance was power-cranked presses.  If I could insert an audible voice here, it would be the big impressive announcement that begins movies with “In a world where. . .”  Where what?  Everything is X’s and O’s, even hugs and kisses.  We are all molecule synergies supported by the atomic nature of the cosmos, spiraling ever into more complexity.  A hundred people in a hundred locations on the planet can be brought together in one big song, so long as everyone has the sheet music and the techie stuff is compatible. 

Cell phone and t-shirt entrepreneur

This means that terrorists in Africa are about to be undone by moms with cell phones in their apron pockets.  People who had thought they were trapped will look at the images of Times Square and it will be as though we were finally discovering life on Mars.  For them, anyway.  There IS some other life in some other place.  ISIS may end up presiding over a depopulated caliphate.

Most people have not been paying attention to is content.  Where is the content coming from?  We’ve been so impressed by the big clanking machines, from the first frontier hand printers and boxes of fonts to the massive newspaper series printers, we haven’t thought much about how the times and possibilities affect what’s being printed.  Not all of us want to read romances about falling in love and getting married, which fewer people actually do.

In the beginning books were hand-printed, hand-assembled, hand-bound.  This was expensive.  Rich people could afford them.  Church officials.  Special gifts.  Pretty soon there’s a political connection.  Inevitably, whatever is taboo, sinful, prosecutably secret, really dangerous, is ripe for making into a book that can be tucked away.  As an object it can become jeweled, gilded, with a silk and gilt book mark.

One of Norman Rockwell's neighbors

Or the binding might be sentimental.  I have a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” with a binding that looks like woven green grass.  Bob Scriver made presentation copies of “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” which had a slip-case with a shallow box built onto the front and in each box was a stalk of sage he had picked himself.  But his buyers weren’t always educated enough to understand.  Several people who have inherited this book have called me up, puzzled about what it was.  They had thrown the “weed” away.

Which makes the point that any book, no matter how valuable it is, needs a knowledgeable appreciator.  Today Barrus’ handmade erotic poetry books stapled together with wallpaper bindings, are worth hundreds of dollars to collectors.  If you were one of those who bought them from the author on the SF waterfront in the days before HIV, you don’t just have a marker of one person, but a memory of a brief but golden time, a climax culture.  You don’t have to be gay anymore than you have to be tribal to understand what that brief brilliance means.  It was like the Left Bank of Paris, but bigger.  A “hotbed” in several senses.

Um, might be a cold frame.

The real value, of course, is in the contents, but today’s reader is not always capable of seeing the qualities that make thought valuable.  They think real means “actual” and go off on witch hunts, junior G-men journalists, looking for documentation -- which is pretty easy to fake or misinterpret.  

Or they have a state university undergrad’s grasp of French Algerian structuralism and go around talking about Foucault and Derrida as if they understood.  That stream of thought is as hard to figure out as Process Theology.  It IS hard to grasp, an interpretation of Christianity through quantum physics, but it did well enough to kick off “Physics for Poets” and so on.  You can leave these books around for visitors to be impressed.  They don’t change your life.

"Sex" by Madonna

Because books as objects are markers for the arrogant, implying that they have enough money to buy expensive things, that they have enough education to read difficult books, and maybe even that they are “in,” part of the social group that knows what’s important.  Maybe even banned because of being daring.  In some crowds, one could leave a copy of Madonna’s photo book called “Sex” on one’s coffee table.  You might want to put something under it to protect the surface, since it was metal with the title stamped into it.

A whole mystique, derived from the same sources as “Downton Abbey,” (the British class system) has infused books with a dusty romantic security/captivity fantasy esp. appealing to young women.  Over the centuries many middle-class paintings show pretty girls in upscale clothes reading books.  This pleasing image was felt as a loss when the trendier and more snobbish way to get one’s stories was through a tablet.  Of course, the problem of protecting fancy and expensive clothes was eliminated when everyone under thirty was wearing sweats anyway.

The advantage to reading ebooks is that there’s no cover to hide while you read on the commuter train.  But that’s kind of the problem, too.  Books are like dogs and children, conversation starters.  Another convenience is converting print to spoken words, so you can “read” while doing some kinds of work.  Even in a monastery of the Medieval times, a lector read aloud from an improving book while the monks ate.  Audible books are classier than  the radio and you get to pick the story.  On the “iPods” you don’t even have to accommodate a lot of slippery plastic containers.

Enlightenment gets to Denmark

Blah, blah, blah.  The obvious.  But content is not always obvious and some people still buy for content.  Shatzkin and company have not figured this out and bluntly say so.  Ideas are a lot more slippery than media kinds.  My last night’s movie was “A Royal Affair,” Danish: “En kongelig affære”) is a 2012 historical drama film. To the informed, it is a depiction of how sweeping philosophical ideas -- esp those of Rousseau -- affected Denmark in the 18^th century, so that it went from being a church-dominated feudal society to the present tolerant and progressive nation.  The plot is about lovers, who connect through books.  Why were those people (the queen and the king’s physician) ready and hungry for books that had to be kept hidden? 

Shatzkin’s strength is fearless analysis of the actual process that used to work with books.  Take American Indians -- why are there so few books of any sort about their modern lives?  Is it because there is no capital in the hands of people who can finance publishing?  But ebooks don’t cost much to publish.  Is it because books of that sort are still on paper and sold in “book stores” of which there are none on reservations?  But that hasn’t slowed down music.  Why doesn’t literature follow music onto tablets or as audible stories?  Is it lack of promotion?  But word-of-mouth is the tried-and-true means of popularity.

Three Blackfeet Readers in the early days

Why do “Laughing Boy” or “The Way to Rainy Mountain” take off and win major prizes?  One was white-written and the other was Indian-written.  What makes Jim Welch such a favorite?  Why do so many whites want to write about Indians but so few Indians do the same?  Is getting off the “rez” of predictability too dangerous?  

Personally, I think it’s just that American Indians don’t have that British Empire worship of the class status of books.  People who don’t read don’t write.  Now that books aren’t physical anymore and the XO revolution has removed print anyway but added music and image, there may be more American Indian books than we think -- but they’re on YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, and so on.  This is what publishing is today.  Not everyone is “getting” what they are saying.  They are missing the revolution.