Rare books director bemoans experiences lost with digitalization of books
Source: The Daily Progress By Bryan McKenzie
Two people sitting on the beach reading Harold Robbins’ “The Betsy,” one on an electronic reader and the other with a paperback, may be reading the same book, but they are having totally different experiences.
“The physical part of the reading experience — the paper, the cover, the reviews, the suntan lotion that spills on the pages — are all part of the reading experience,” said Michael F. Suarez, director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. “A week, a month, a year from now, if you see that paperback on the bookshelf, all of the memories are going to come back to you. It becomes an artifact and part of your humanistic experience.”
Suarez told a Virginia Festival of the Book audience on Wednesday that digitalizing books may preserve linguistic codes, but that other aspects of a book disappear.
“We spend so much time talking about the gain from digitalization that we don’t talk about the loss,” he said. “We think of books as linguistic code, language, but it’s more than that. Digitalization preserves linguistic code but it does nothing to preserve the humanistic aspects of a book.”
Suarez made his comments at the University of Virginia’s Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections auditorium as part of the weeklong Festival of the Book. Events at the festival run through Sunday afternoon and feature dozens of events as different venues. A complete schedule is available at www.vabook.org.
Suarez noted that universities have made an effort to reproduce rare books in digital format and offer them online. He said studies have shown that students often prefer the electronic version to actual inspection of the book itself, even when the book is nearby.
“If you look at a digitalization of a painting, you really don’t know what you’re missing unless you have seen that painting in person,” Suarez said. “That is the same case with a book.”
Books represent a community effort to produce a cultural artifact, Suarez said. An author creates a manuscript and the publishing process — the interaction between proofreaders, editors, and designers — creates a book’s final form. Choices of paper, type size, binding and hardback or paperback, reflect the intended market for the book.
“If you see a man who has lost his shirt and is wearing trousers and he’s sort of brawny and he’s holding a woman who seems to be about to fall out of her ball gown and behind them is a plantation burning, you have a good idea of what that book is about and who it’s intended for,” Suarez told the festival audience. “You
Suarez said he is not opposed to digital books. He is, however, opposed to marginalization of the real thing.
“If you’re on an airplane, a Kindle is convenient because you can take hundreds of manuscripts with you to read. Digitalization makes the text available to more people, but it cannot provide the full experience of a book,” he said. “A digital book is not a book at all.”
Manuscripts bring history home to us... The Roy Davids Collection
Roy Davids exceptional collection will go up for auction at Bonhams in London on March 29, 2011.
Sale 19386 - Papers & Portraits: The Roy Davids Collection Part II
London, New Bond Street, 29 Mar 2011 at 10:30
Online bidding will be available for this auction. To participate, or for more information, contact them at: Bonhams Online Bidding!
An Introduction to 'Papers & Portraits: The Roy Davids Collection Part II' by Roy Davids
Source: Paul Frazier Collectibles
"The passionate collector's hoard Includes extraordinary writings by Keats, Gandhi, Blake and Churchill
Roy Davids, whose collection is now being offered at Bonhams, is the consummate collector, who has gathered fascinating items that bring the holder to a richer idea of persons and circumstances than the content of the pieces alone.
Davids studied history at London University, and his working life from then on revolved around history and historical manuscripts. He worked at the History of Parliament Trust writing biographies of 16th century MPs, and also for scholarly booksellers Hofmann and Freeman.
He joined Sotheby's in 1970 as a cataloguer of post-medieval manuscripts and worked there for well over two decades, rising to run the department he began work in, and then later the Books Department as well.
Keats love letter
My dearest Fanny… Keats’s tragic love letter
Later he started his own company, Roy Davids Ltd, to trade in manuscripts and portraits of writers, artists and musicians, and has been involved in the sale of papers and archives of Sir Winston Churchill, John Osborne, Edna O'Brien, George MacBeth, John Linnell, Peter Redgrove, Siegfired Sassoon, Douglas Dunn, John Wyndham, Tom Paulin, Julian Barnes, Alan Sillitoe, Sylvia Plath and especially Ted Hughes - including a series of letters.
Davids's own collection has likewise been composed mostly of manuscripts and portraits. Although many of those from whom he collects have published works, he explains that being a manuscript collector appeals to him more than collecting printed material for two reasons:
Firstly, that "…they range over virtually every field of human endeavour -- literature, art, music, exploration, science, medicine, finance, magic, cricket, hunting, cooking, yachting, cricket, religion, economics, space, architecture, aviation. The choice is almost limitless."
But also, as every autograph and memorabilia collector would agree, the original handwritten text holds much more interest than the content alone. He enthuses that handwriting is 'as individual as a fingerprint' and likens it to 'an abstract portrait', and speaks for many collectors when he adds:
"The paper, the age, the shape, the size, the colour, the ink, the bloom, the stains, the wear, the dust, the nibblings of rodents, the folds, the tears, the creases, the seals, the smell, the ties, the postal markings, the endorsements, the dockets, the spelling, the corrections, the revisions, the deletions, the writer, the recipient, the provenance, the handwriting, the style, the imagination, the thoughts expressed.
"All of these contribute to our senses of reality and contact. We respond emotionally, psychologically and intellectually. Manuscripts bring history home to us."
Davids's collection certainly covers an impressive range of intriguing pieces, as we've noted in recent weeks.
These include: a very rare love letter from the dying John Keats, a William Blake letter detailing his watercolour, The Last Judgement, and a remarkable letter from Edward Lear in his own form of nonsense writing, which has be found to include a tiny drawing of a dog.
Two very different, though equally celebrated, figures from politics are also represented in an unused speech by Winston Churchill (referring to 'glimpses of a better world') and a letter written by Gandhi in December 1919 - a crucial time in his changing political views.
Other types of collectibles are on offer too, some unique, such as a set of some of the very earliest X-ray photographs made in the UK.
Davids is not parting with his collection because he has shrugged off the collecting bug, nor is he close to death. However, he came very close to death a few years back and was saved only by very delicate surgery.
The auction at Bonhams then is not an end, but a beginning. How better to use a new lease of life than with a fresh collection?"
'Papers & Portraits: The Roy Davids Collection Part II' by Roy Davids take place at Bonhams in London on March 29th.
[Top]Book Surgeon Creates Art From Books
Source: My Modern Met
Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.
Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.
"My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception," he says.
"The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge."
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Video of the Week... The Frank M Robinson collection of pulps and books
Source: Paul Frazier Collectibles
Video of the Week... The Frank M Robinson collection of pulps and books
In months to come, auctioneer Adventure House will be offering the Frank M Robinson Collection on their website.
Frank M Robinson is an author and editor who has worked for magazines such as Science Digest and Playboy. He's written a number of books including the thriller The Power, made into the movie of the same name.
More recently he's authored The Dark Beyond the Stars and Waiting... both science-fiction novels.
He is an avid collector in the world of Pulp and the book Pulp Culture, which he co-wrote with Lawrence Davidson, won the Pop Culture Book of the Year 1999 (Independent Publishers Association).
Robinson's collection includes nearly 10,000 pulps, digests, books and artwork all of which will be offered. The collection includes the highest grade run of Weird Tales, ever assembled.
Pulp can be big business. Hugh Joseph Ward's The Evil Flame, Spicy Mystery Stories pulp cover from 1936 sold at Heritage in the summer of 2010 for staggering $143,400.
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