ORDAINED FOR OBSOLESCENCE?

When the tape player became popular in the seventies, many missed the familiar graininess that was characteristic of record players, but the convenience of tapes was enough to allay their pining. The invention of the compact disc may have left a few audiophiles feeling nostalgic for the tape deck days, but the superior technology of the CD quickly helped them to forget. Today CDs are all but a memory, with music stripped of its physical vessel and distributed electronically as fluid content.

Whether books are bound to the same fate is unclear. On the other hand, decades into the information age, physical books still hold a central role in people’s reading habits. Walking across Harvard Yard, students can be seen carrying books and papers, but tape players and walkmans—even MP3 players—are a rare sight.

Why have records, tapes, and CD’s perished, while books remain prominent? One reason lies in the rich history of the book. While recorded music and film are still relatively young inventions, the book has been a significant part of modern history: Johannes Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press in the 15th century. Two centuries later, the Harvard Library—the oldest library system in the United States and the largest university library in the world—was established in 1638. Countless new technologies replace less sophisticated predecessors each year, the hot new product quickly erasing the old and obsolete from memory. When a technology has influenced a way of life for thousands of years, however, that erasure is less simple. Books are wrapped up in a sentimental familiarity that is difficult to betray.

While members of the Harvard community admit that electronic texts have many advantages over physical books, the act of reading—of turning a page, of holding a book in one’s hands—has kept the physical book at the center of the reading experience at Harvard and elsewhere. The book community at Harvard maintains that the book transcends its primary role as a vessel for letters and images and becomes more than a medium, an act of expression in itself.

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COLLECTED WORKS

At the top of the central staircase in Lamont Library, in a display case overlooking the café, sit eight books. Students cannot check these books out of the library. Locked inside the glass case, the books remain unread, and out of reach.

The books are part of an exhibit on the Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting. Established in 1977, the prize is awarded to undergraduates who compete by writing an annotated bibliography of the books in their collection and an essay that describes the collection’s central theme. Whereas many Harvard prizes award academic writing, the book collecting prize puts students’ possessions at the fore. Initially, it may seem odd to award “[We ask students] what piqued their interest in starting to collect books…. Sometimes it was a gift, sometimes it was a book they saw in a store that they bought, sometimes it was a book that somebody had lent them and it struck them in some way, and then they began collecting books. And then it became a real concerted interest, a hobby,” Fliss says. “Sometimes [the collections] are built in very planned ways, and sometimes they sort of happen. They evolve, and gaps are filled.”

The physical book is at the center of the collections. Fliss emphasizes the intimate collection entrants had to their books, saying the physical collection is important because it is around people. She adds, “You have it in a set location in your house, in your room. People will talk about ‘Well, on my shelf I have these books together.’ And so I think it’s a reflection of you because you own them…. You’ve made that extra effort to acquire [the book], and it fits into that plan you have for the collection.”

The physical connection the collectors have to their books is perhaps most apparent in the exhibit on the third floor of Lamont, where some of the books of the second and third place winners are displayed. In one collector’s exhibit, a book is opened to its title page, where a circular embossed stamp displays the initials of the collector. “Her parents gave her the stamp,” Fliss says. “So there’s an extra physical, visual mark that this is part of her collection.”

In a book from another winner’s collection, small blue post-it flags peek out from between the pages. Another reader might have underlined sections she cared about. She might have highlighted. But this one chose blue post-it flags, announcing to all the unique, personal importance of those words, of that paper.

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FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

Just a few minutes’ walk from the exhibits at Lamont, the printed word lives and thrives in a different way. Through the large wooden doors of Adams’ A entryway is The Bow & Arrow Press, home to a large letterpress printer. The Press was established in 1977 by a group of Harvard undergraduates who found a dusty letterpress while they were exploring the basement of Adams House.

Today, the press is available for use by Harvard affiliates through various open press nights and crash courses offered by a group of resident and non-resident tutors who oversee the press. L. Theodore Ollier, the non-resident tutor who leads the open press nights, emphasizes that the students’ work with the press is about more than just simple nostalgia. “We do want to preserve the craft of letterpress, but…I want people to create things here. It’s nice to have museum pieces, but you can’t do anything on museum pieces. You actually have to get them dirty,” Ollier says.

The printings that students create have a significance that is lost with automated printing. “The main draw for letterpress—the main joy—is that it’s hand-done…. You have to actually physically typeset,” Ollier says.

According to Ollier, it’s this intimacy with the printed word that keeps students coming back to the open press nights and crash courses. “What [students] start to realize, is that when they look at a book that was written in 1850 that was done in letterpress, someone actually had to come in and sit there and do that,” Ollier says.

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HOW TO READ A BOOK

This fascination with the printed book as a physical object extends into the Harvard curriculum as well. Each Tuesday in the Robinson Hall Lower Library, another group of students sits down to better understand how readers have historically related to their books and how they continue to interact with books today. Their class is English 90ht/History 84e: “How to Read a Book,”  jointly offered through the History and English departments by David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History and Harvard College Professor, Jill Lepore, and Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English, Leah Price.

Here, students interact with the printed word in a number of unusual ways. For example, students’ notebooks and laptops are confiscated at the door. Each class throughout the semester brings a new note taking technique for which supplies are provided by Lepore and Price. For the first meeting of the course, students took notes on clay tablets. “There’s maybe [a] slightly hokey aspect of historical reenactment to it,” Price says.

The professors’ creativity also carries into the course projects. One such project is an oral reading of “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne, a book which Lepore described as self-conscious of its materiality. The work contains aspects that go beyond simple words on a page. One page, for example, is entirely black. Lepore and Price were unsure of what the students would produce when they were given the assignment. “What do you do with a black page?” Lepore asked. The results, however, were impressive. “It was so provocative and fascinating seeing how the students turned the text into voice,” Lepore says.

In order for students to appreciate the importance of the book’s format, Price utilized rather unconventional methods. During the first meeting of the course, one student agreed to partake in an exercise where she was blindfolded and asked to walk to a bookshelf and pull a book at random. “It turned out that by holding the book, by feeling the book, by smelling the book, by listening to the sound of the pages as they were flipped through, the blindfolded student actually figured out an enormous amount about the genre of the book,” Price says.

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ELECTRIC FEEL

Harvard's curricular and academic emphasis on the value of physical books comes amid the rise of electronic readers and other technology. Certainly, the practical advantages that e-books offer cannot be ignored. With an e-reader, an entire library can easily be slipped into a large pocket. New books can be downloaded in seconds, and as a result, a world of books lays in the reader’s hands.

According to Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s Senior Vice President for Kindle Content, customers choose digital books for quick access to a variety of books, portability, and features only available on electronic reading devices such as instant dictionary tools. As older books continue to be scanned electronically, e-readers become increasingly useful. “Today, many great books, especially out of print books, are now available only in digital,” Grandinetti writes in an email.

“Print and digital are not better or worse than the other—they do different things, and it’s great that people get to choose which best meets their needs,” Grandinetti emphasizes. For example, the cherished experience that many associate with browsing a bookstore is not available to everyone. “It’s also important to keep in mind that not everyone lives close to a bookstore, and even then those can only carry a limited selection,” Grandinetti says.

However, a book historian with no link to e-book interests—Price—argues that, while more traditional readers often point to the materiality of the book, e-readers, too are physical objects. For her, the differences between print and digital books lie in the experiences that they offer. “The electronic devices have their own materiality. They also have a feel, and a smell, and become landfill, and have a manufacturing process. They seem very immaterial but they are objects just as much as books are,” Price says. “If you dig deep enough, there’s always going to be some sort of dirty, messy, material thing at the bottom.”

Price and Grandinetti both seem confident that physical books and electronic books will be able to reach an equilibrium that allows for both formats. The dawn of e-readers is not something to be feared but to be celebrated, argues Grandinetti. “The expansion of digital means it’s a great time to be a reader—there is more to read than ever before, with different formats to choose from, whether digital or physical.”

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THE CASE FOR BOOKS

It should come as no surprise that the walls of University Professor Robert Darnton’s office are lined with books. Darnton is the director of the Harvard University Library, Positioned across his desk, the bookshelves to the left contain modern volumes on a range of topics. The books to the right are much older. Mostly in French, these 18th century books each contain two stories: one on the pages, and one of the book itself. One shelf’s books, made from flaky pale blue paper and bound with deteriorating string, were the era’s equivalent of comic books.

Darnton moves past the shelf and begins to look for another book. “I always have trouble finding this one,” he says as his eyes scan the shelves. Eventually he pulls a small leather-bound book from one of the shelves. “You can open it,” he says. “But be careful, the cover is coming loose.” The book is small, like a prayer book, but inside, its secret is revealed. The book has been hollowed out and contains another, smaller book—only slightly larger than a box of tic-tacs. “[The larger book] is sort of a prayer book. It’s a devotional book. So you could go to church, and you’d be maybe bored. So you open your prayer book, and then you read this tiny little novel with pictures inside it,” Darnton explains.

In 2010, Darnton published an essay collection titled “The Case for Books.” In the introduction, he writes, “[This collection is] a book about books, an unashamed apology for the printed word.” For an unashamed apology, the book presents a very balanced argument on the state of the publishing industry and its likely future. Like Grandinetti, Darnton argues that e-books and physical books each carry their own sets of benefits and challenges, and the future of publishing will incorporate a healthy balance of each format.

Darnton admits that e-readers have improved since he published his book. “In general, I think that we will have more user-friendly electronic devices, and users will feel more friendly toward them,” Darnton says. And yet, he is dubious that e-books and physical books provide an equal experience. “I don’t think anyone understands how readers read yet…. We still don’t know what reading is. I think it’s still valid to argue that the sensory and sensual experience of reading a book, holding it in your hands, is extremely important.”

Like many readers, Darnton’s heart seems to be captured by the physical print book. The structure of Darnton’s book is telling. While his book’s subtitle is “Past, Present, and Future,” it is organized from future to past. The final images Darnton leaves with the reader emphasize the importance of the relationship between the reader and the printed book—images of frayed leather covers worn by use, pen meeting page, and hastily scrawled notes swirling in margins.

—Staff writer Andrew J. Wilcox can be reached at andrewwilcox@college.harvard.edu.